Gary Webb and the Media's Rush to the Barricades

Every so often the mainstream media's pack response to a story throws a powerful light on their deep collective biases. Such was the case following the publication of Gary Webb's series in the San Jose Mercury News on the CIA's connection to the drug epidemic in Los Angeles. Characteristically, the media failed to reproduce or give a reasonable summary of the contents of the series, although it had a great deal of interesting detail on a very important subject. Offering that content, however, was incompatible with the knocking-down-a-straw-person approach that the media found more to their liking.

Webb never claimed that the CIA was directly involved in drug sales by Contra-related individuals, or that they planned a hit on the black community of Los Angeles. He found them indirectly involved only in two aspects: the CIA surely knew about the Contra involvement and did nothing to end it, and Webb gives compelling evidence that the CIA and other official forces protected the Contra-related drug dealers who lived in this country and traveled around freely. Much easier to deal with Webb by saying that he never proves the CIA were out on the street selling.

On December 12, a program on Britain's ITV, "The Big Story," made claims about the CIA-Contra-drug connection that went beyond those of Gary Webb. It was contended there that the CIA "actively encouraged drug-trafficking in order to fund right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua during the 1980s, and a CIA agent in Nicaragua was employed to ensure the money went to the Contras and not into the pockets of drug barons,..." (Christopher Bellamy, in the Independent [London], December 12, 1996). A main source of the story was Carlos Cabezas, a former smuggler who had shipped cocaine from Central America to San Francisco and then taken the proceeds to the Miami headquarters of Contra leader Adolf Calero and to Contra groups in Costa Rica. The ITV program also interviewed Celerino Castillo, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officer working in El Salvador, who displayed flight plans for drug (and money) shipments from CIA hangars in El Salvador into and out of the United States. The New York Times had an article reporting Calero's denial of any knowledge of a drug link (Nov. 27), but it hasn't yet gotten around to Cabezas or Castillo.

The Contra-Drug-Reagan Connection Context

Honest news reporting of the Webb story would have put it into the context of the earlier massive evidence that the Contras were deeply involved in the drug business, that much of their sales came into the United States in planes used to bring supplies to those "freedom fighters" (i.e., our terrorists), and that this was known to the Reagan administration and was aggressively protected. The Colombian drug barons also made large gifts to their Contra friends. A number of entries in Oliver North's diary make it clear that he and his fellow felons and sponsors of terrorism knew, accepted, and facilitated Contra drug dealing. In a conversation with Richard Secord dated July 12, 1985, for example, North noted "14 M [million dollars] to finance [arms stored in a Honduran warehouse] came from drugs." The evidence of knowledge, protection, and support was overwhelming, although it came out in a back page trickle, in the alternative media, and in the Kerry committee hearings and report. (For further evidence, see Norman Solomon's excellent "Snow Job," in the Jan.-Feb. 1997 EXTRA!)

But at the time (1983-1990) the Reagan-Bush administrations not only aggressively aided, abetted and protected Contra drug dealing, they engaged in a major and dishonest campaign to make the Sandinistas the drug trade villains. Reagan asserted repeatedly before national audiences that "top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking," and in one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. media history, the mainstream media allowed this dual effort at suppression and transference to succeed. As an important part of the suppression effort, the media marginalized the Kerry committee hearings and report of 1989, even deriding Kerry as an extremist and a kook for pursuing this matter so unrelentingly (a "randy conspiracy buff" in Newsweek's putdown). (For more details, Robert Parry, "Lost History: Contra- Crack Story Assailed," The Consortium, Oct. 28, 1996.)

Old and Stale History

In fending off the Webb story the mainstream media have had the chutzpah to declare the underlying facts about Contra-drug-CIA involvement an "old story." But as the mainstream media downplayed the "old story" when it was new, not allowing it to become a big story that could move the public, this line of countering Webb is completely dishonest. They protected Contra drug dealing back in the 1980s, permitted Reaganite disinformation on Sandinista drug trading to more than offset facts on Contra dealing, and now in retrospect they protect it and the CIA by claiming the story stale, falsely implying that they had once given it proper attention. There are other hypocrisies related to this "old story" gambit: for example, Oliver North and John Poindexter tried to enlist Panama political boss, long time drug dealer and CIA asset, Manuel Noriega in the war against Nicaragua. When Noriega refused to cooperate, the Reagan administration "began to promote drug allegations against him," and the compliant media found his drug trading newsworthy (Robert Parry, Fooling America). When Noriega was put on trial here, the administration trotted out drug dealers who had testified before the Kerry committee, but their testimony for Kerry had been discounted by the mainstream media because they were untrustworthy drug dealers. Keith Schneider of the New York Times cited "law enforcement officials" to the effect that Contra-drug links by Kerry "have come from a small group of convicted drug traffickers...who never mentioned contras or the White House until the Iran-Contra affair broke in November [1986]." This was a lie; Kerry's initial witnesses made such claims many months before November. Furthermore, when these same individuals testified against Noriega, with evidence really seriously compromised by deals offered by their prison controllers, the Times and other media treated their claims "objectively" and offered no reflections on their earlier more dubious discounting of the evidence of "convicted drug traffickers."

The "old story" gambit is a standard media trick, and can best be seen in its true propaganda role when we compare their use of "sweet and old" stories (that allow them to trash an enemy) with stories that are "stale and old," that are hurtful to the "national interest." The Katyn Forest massacre in Poland back in World War II, carried out by an enemy state, is sweet and old; between Jan. 1, 1988 and June 1, 1990, the New York Times had 20 news articles, five on the front page, and 2 editorials on that massacre. Much of this material, on a half century old story, was repetitive. On the other hand, when it was disclosed in 1990 that the CIA had actually bragged about helping South Africa arrest Nelson Mandela back in 1962, the Bush administration declared this an "old story," and the mainstream media obligingly played it down (the Times had one short back page notice of the episode). When it was disclosed in 1990 that the CIA had helped organize and arm secret right-wing armies throughout Europe after World War II, under the code name Operation Gladio, and that some of them became terrorist operations, all three articles in the Times featured the antiquity of the story as a main reason for giving it slight attention.

The Operation Gladio story was of course extremely awkward, suggesting a sinister role of the CIA and U.S. foreign policy in western Europe, including support of rightwing terror. Equally inconvenient was Kathy Kadane's study showing that the CIA and State Department had cooperated enthusiastically in the Indonesian mass murders of 1965, including providing the killers with "comprehensive lists of Communist operatives...down to village cadres." First appearing in the Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, South Carolina in May 1990, several of the majors ran the study, reluctantly and with a time lag. But not the New York Times, which produced instead one of its classics of damage control, by Michael Wines ("CIA Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge," July 12, 1990). Note the use of the word "purge" as description of the massacre of perhaps a million Indonesians, mainly landless peasants. But the piece does what the Times did later with Webb: minimal quotations from Kadane, repetitive denials by CIA and other officials that Kadane had interpreted their quite clear statements correctly. Kadane's story questioned U.S. official decency and reminded the world of the base on which the "moderate" Suharto had built his corrupt empire. For this, it is to the barricades for the newspaper of official record.

The CIA As A Source

With the Webb story we see the mainstream media retreating once again to the CIA, as well as various police forces, as the source of truth. The CIA had denied the Contra-drug connection in 1986 and 1987 (Parry, "Lost History: The Kerry-Weld Cocaine War," The Consortium, November 11, 1996), and the mainstream media in countering Webb in 1996 were implicitly acknowledging that the CIA had lied on the very matter at hand. The Webb story broke at a time when the CIA, Pentagon, and police were being exposed almost daily as prevaricators. The CIA-Pentagon suppression of evidence on the risk of chemicals in the Gulf War was drawing headlines in the same time frame as the debate over the Webb story, but this didn't bother the mainstream media at all. It also didn't bother the media that they were asking confirmation and disconfirmation of the parties being accused of crimes or connivance in crimes.

The New York Times drew its conclusions of "an assortment of connections but no devastating picture" on the basis of interviews with "current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials, former rebel leaders and Contra supporters," who "uniformly gave very different descriptions of the Nicaraguan's role" (Tim Golden, October 21, 1996). As Joel Kovel says, "Now there's hard-hitting impartial journalism for you. The Times runs the case by the accused, who deny the charges. Imagine conducting the Nuremberg trials by asking the Nazi high command whether the Third Reich had ever engaged in crimes against humanity, and then resting the case." ("The Big Pusher," Anderson Valley Advertiser, November 27, 1996). The media would never ask ordinary accused persons if they were guilty of an alleged crime and take their answer as compelling evidence.

This double standard--credibility as regards official statements and skepticism toward challenges to official truth--can be reinforced by a determined administration that aggressively attacks dissent and penalizes journalists and media that step out of line. The Reaganites did this in the 1980s through the Office of Public Diplomacy and other instruments of disinformation and bullying. Jack Blum, the former special counsel to the Kerry committee back in the 1980s, noted recently that "we were subject to a systematic campaign to discredit everything we did. Every night after there was a public hearing, administration people would get on the phone [and] call the press and say the witnesses were all liars, they were talking to us to get a better deal. That we were on a political vendetta, that none of it was to be believed, and please don't cover it." (His October 23 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is reproduced in CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1996).

These attacks were effective; it became hazardous to report facts hurtful to the terrorism effort. Many reporters supported the U.S. intervention anyway and didn't need pressure to conform. Many others, under discipline from above, as well as harrassment from the administration and rightwing pundits, caved in. Keith Schneider of the New York Times, who did a fine job of helping the administration discredit those claiming a Contra-drug connection, explained that the Contra-drug story "can shatter a republic," so that "to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we can amass" (In These Times, August 5, 1987, cited in EXTRA! Update, October 1996). But with the administration assailing all hostile witnesses as unreliable, it turns out that there can never be enough "solid evidence."

Government propaganda can effectively control media operations when official confirmation is made the ultimate definition of truth. The limiting, revealing case was Robert Parry's and Brian Barger's experience with Associated Press back in 1985. These reporters got numerous solid interviews in Costa Rica pointing to a Contra-drug connection, but they were told back in New York that the story couldn't run until "we obtain an on-the-record confirmation from a government officialThat would be "solid evidence."

Mainstream Media vs Black Community Gullibility

Sometimes the CIA withholds important facts because they would disturb a convenient propaganda story. The classic case is the alleged Soviet-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope in 1981--the Pope was shot by a right-wing Turkish fanatic, and the propaganda machine urged that the KGB was behind it (and eventually the gunman was persuaded in an Italian prison to finger the KGB). During the Gates confirmation hearings in 1991, however, former CIA professional Melvin Goodman disclosed that the CIA had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services and knew very well that the propaganda line was false, but the leaders of the CIA and Reagan administration kept them quiet, and the gullible media were gulled. In reporting the Gates hearings in some detail, the New York Times suppressed this Goodman testimony, which showed so conclusively that the paper had served as an agency of disinforming propaganda.

They were gulled easily, and are regularly gulled easily when a propaganda claim fits their biases and is convenient to establishment policy. In the Bulgarian Connection case they got on a gullibility bandwagon, failed to ask hard questions, and displayed pack journalism at its most contemptible.

It is therefore funny to see the mainstreamers now accusing the black community of gullibility, conspiratorial thinking, and "paranoia" in accepting Gary Webb's case for CIA involvement in the LA drug trade. If the mainstream media get on propaganda bandwagons that serve elite interests, like the KGB-Bulgarian Connection, or the alleged "political correctness" movement sweeping the American universities with a new wave of "McCarthyism," or currently the threat of welfare dependency and the imminent bankruptcy of Social Security, this is just democratic newsmaking, not a conspiracy--tacit or otherwise--or remarkable gullibility, let alone systematic propaganda service. When black people believe Gary Webb is on to something important, the media sneer at their lack of sophistication. And amusingly, the media all get on the same bandwagon of black conspiracy tendencies--the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the liberals one after the next--Michael Kazin, Mary McGrory, Howard Kurtz, and Richard Cohen--all chimed in with their patronizing regrets at black irrationality.

The Honest Framing That Didn't Happen

The drug problem is alleged to be very important in this country, leader after leader declares "war" on it, and billions are being spent to fight it. If this were a serious war, any evidence that the government was encouraging the drug trade in any way should be sensational news and a top story. If, on the other hand, this war is phoney, and takes a back seat to many other matters, like say overthrowing the government of Nicaragua by terrorism, so that the integrity of the drug war is of small importance, we can understand the mainstream media's performance.

Webb assembled a great many compelling facts pointing to Contra funding through the sale of drugs in Los Angeles, and CIA and FBI involvement at least to the degree that the Contra-related funders were protected and left alone. The mainstream media could have framed the story around the compromising of the drug war by U.S. officials, as Webb did, and as ITV did in Great Britain on December 12. Instead they framed it around Webb's alleged (and occasionally real) exaggerations, denials by those charged, and black conspiracy tendencies. They rushed to the barricades to defend the national security apparatus and to keep intact the memory of the now entrenched mythical history of the war against Nicaragua--we fought for and helped bring "democracy" to that lucky country, ultimately through a free and fair election.

The Threat of the Internet

One interesting positive feature of the Webb tale is that his original articles in a local newspaper, though initially ignored by the national media, were quickly and widely disseminated in the black community and activists throughout the country via the Internet. The mainstream media of course pooh-poohed this as a dangerous outbreak of conspiracy pathology, but it was in fact a form of democratic communication that was able to bypass the solid phalanx of media Swiss Guards. The Internet gets an A for democratic service in this case.