Kill The Messenger; The Gary Webb Story

The real Gary Webb and the actor Jeremy Renner playing him in Kill the Messenger

By DD for Borderland Beat

In the 1990’s Gary Webb was a Pulitzer Prize  investigative journalist working for a regional newspaper in northern California.  In the summer of 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Gary’s investigative series called Dark Alliance about CIA/cocaine trafficking resulting in a crack cocaine epidemic on he streets of LA .  (full text Dark Alliance at link below)

By the end of 2004 Gary had been attacked and discredited as a journalist by the MSM, and was considered unemployable after his applications for employment had been turned down by over 20 newspapers.  He reportedly committed suicide on Dec. 10, 2004.

.MOVIE The Story of Gary Webb

Gary’s story and his message has been resurrected in a movie released last week (Oct.10), KILL THE MESSENGER.

Kill the Messenger  hit the cinemas on October 10 and tells the true story of Gary Webb’s saga that others tried so hard to make disappear. There is Oscar buzz over Jeremy Renner’s portrayal of Webb (Renner, 43, has twice been nominated by the Academy: best supporting actor for Our Town in 2010, and best actor for The Hurt Locker in 2008; and through the Avengers, Mission Impossible and Bourne franchises, Renner is one of the world’s biggest box office draws.)  

Kill the Messenger is based on the book by the same name by Nicholas Schou and on Webb’s own book, Dark Alliance. Michael Cuesta (Homeland, Dexter) is the director. Investigative journalist Peter Landesman is the screenwriter. 

This is no boring documentary. It’s an action-packed full-scale Hollywood epic with a star-studded supporting cast: Michael Sheen, Paz Vega, Andy Garcia, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ray Liotta, Oliver Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, among others, join Renner in the ensemble.

  Gary Webb - the messenger - will not be with us to see this movie about him.  Gary’s message, however, is here to stay.

BACK GROUND

The CIA involvement in drug trafficking was not a new story.  Ten years prior, first-term US Senator John Kerry had held hearings and issued a 1,100-page report that had reached the same conclusion. The nation’s major news outlets gave the Kerry Committee Report scant attention, but the record had been established. It was an airtight case.

The Central Intelligence Agency had broken US law by brokering planeloads of cocaine into the United States, and millions of dollars in those drug profits were used to fund the Contra army seeking the violent overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. The CIA did so to get around the US Congress, which had voted to ban US funds going to that terrorist organization. 

The Reagan administration, even as it ramped up the “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign at home, entered the cocaine business through private contractors coordinated by the CIA.

Webb"s investigation  came across from the other end of that officially-sanctioned cocaine trail while reporting on a drug case in California, and followed the trail in reverse: from the crack-plagued neighborhoods of Los Angeles to the federal courtroom where lower level traffickers were prosecuted, to a Nicaraguan prison to interview the Contra army’s banker, to the real drug kingpins behind it all: decision makers in Washington DC. Webb documented what had happened to that cocaine when it entered California. 

Cocaine had previously been the hundred-dollars-a-gram drug of choice of yuppie bankers and lawyers. But when dealers figured out how to convert it to crack, teenagers, poor and working folks could afford it at five or ten bucks a pop. Then the problems compounded when they kept  needing more of an addictive and prohibited substance.

Gary Webb in his own words.

IT WAS OUTRAGOUS BUT IT WAS TRUE (Gary talking to a class at the School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico which he co-founded)


Gary Webb "People Realized They Had Been Lied to"
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Gary Webb "You Could Read this Story Anywhere in the World" 

 

  The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country  took agency's word for it. Gary Webb was ruined. Which is a shame, because — as Charles Bowden revealed in this 1998 Esquire story — he was right. Borderland Beat reprinted the Esquire article by Charles Bowden, titled “The Pariah” in a thread posted by SiskiyouKid on Dec/ 30, 2013 (link below).

The Internet’s First “Viral” News Story

To understand the motives of the MSM in their efforts to destroy Gary Webb as a professional journalist, you have to understand that the San Jose Mercury News was only a regional paper and only those in the immediate area could read the shocking story.  If you were in LA, or San Diego you would have hard time finding a copy of the Mercury News.  If you were in NY, D.C., Denver, Dallas, or Miami, it would be impossible.

The young staff of the new electronic media unit at the Mercury News convinced the Editor to all them to post it on the Internet, complete with the supporting documents and dossiers on the major figures in the cocaine pipeline from the Contra Army to the streets of South Central Los Angeles, 

The editor, knowing that the story directly implicating the CIA in drug trafficking was going to be hard for readers to believe, agreed to publish it on the internet because in that way all the supporting documents, interviews, and reporters notes could be included which was not possible in the printed version.

It may be hard for the Millennia generation to believe but the internet was just beginning to develop in the 90’s and was not a primary source for news.  Gary’s story was authentic journalism: tough, gritty, scrupulously documented and sourced at a time when the news industry was running away from that practice.

POWER GREED AND JEALOUSY

For the first few months after its publication the main stream media (print and broadcast) tried to ignore the story.  Then talk radio and alternative news weeklies spread the word about the website, and suddenly the gatekeepers of the national media could not control the story in the same way they had the previous decade when ignoring the Kerry Committee Report.

It doesn’t take many to control the thinking of millions of Americans.

6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America

In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium; ]n 1987, the fifty companies
 had shrunk to twenty-nine;  In 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19
billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever.

Michael Eisner, CEO of Walt Disney Co. said in an internal memo:

    “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

That was not the kind of journalism that Gary Webb lived and breathed for

. 

After the MSM realized that they could not ignore the story because it had gone viral on the internet it went on the attack, going after Gary both personally and professionally. 

The leaders of the attack on Webb were the LA Times, New York Times, and the Washington Post.  Their motives were probably all different, but the goal was the same – Kill the Messenger.

The Washington was the first out of the gate which is not surprising.  The Post has many “friends in high places in DC, including the CIA and DEA. 

The LA Times was probably motivated by embarrassment and jealousy.  They couldn’t allow a little regional newspaper to scoop them on a story involving the CIA and drug trafficking that was happening in their own back yard.  Maybe a story that was heading for a Pulitzer Prize.  Rather than put a team out there that would investigate the allegations Gary had made, the fielded a team of 20 reporters to discredit the story and the reporter that wrote it.

The NY Times was probably jealous and merely acting in their usual arrogant manner that “if it is not in the Times, it is not print.”

Even the Mercury News backed off of the story even though it had the documentation to back it up.  It simply didn’t want to stand up to seemingly the whole national press.  While it did not write an apology for the article, it published a statement that there may have been errors in the story and the gathering of information during the investigation. 

It deleted Dark Alliances from its website and banished Webb to a small town bureau that might as well have been Siberia.  He was assigned to the city desk and given such assignments as doing a story on a police dept. horse that had mysteriously passed away.  Being the journalist that he was he did an investigation    His investigation and the resulting story won some local journalism awards even though he concluded in the article that the horse died of constipation.  He was full of shit. 

Gary had lost his reputation, his house, and the opportunity to do the only thing to him - investigative journalism.  He sank into a deep depression

The story of an investigative journalist with powerful enemies found alone in a small cheap motel room with 2 gunshot wounds to the head would be a story that Gary Webb would have jumped at.  The irony is that Webb was the deceased.  Though many question the ruling, the Sacramento coroner ruled it a suicide.  December 10, 2004 

Some words from the late Charles Bowden might best sum up this story.  Bowden had asked a former senior DEA  agent friend that he was fishing with about some of the revelations in Gary Webbs story about CIA involvement  drug trafficking;

“He tells me I've got to understand about when the big dog gets off the porch, and I'm getting confused here. He is talking to me from a fishing camp up near the Canadian border, and as he tries to tell me about the Big Dog, I can only imagine a wall of green and deep blue lakes with northern pike. But he is very patient with me. Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by Big Dog rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission.”

It was not, however, the agency's ties to drug traffickers that Bowden found most disturbing. It was that a man can lose his livelihood, his calling, his reputation, for telling the truth.  (this statement was made prior to Gary's death).

Links
Dark Alliance Returns To The Internet
http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/

Borderland Beat link to Bowden story in Esquire;
http://borderland-beat-forum.924382.n3.nabble.com/Charles-Bowden-on-Gary-Webb-tp4061809.html

LA Times Obit:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/GaryWebbLATimes.pdf

Sources;
Narco News