"Fog Watch"

Gary Webb and the Media's Rush to the Barricades
By Edward S. Herman

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 knockingdowna
strawperson approach that the media found more to their liking.

Webb never claimed that the CIA was directly involved in drug
sales by Contrarelated 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 Contrarelated 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 was out on the
street selling.

On December 12, a program on Britain's ITV, "The Big
Story," made claims about the CIAContradrug connection that went
beyond those of Gary Webb. It was contended there that the CIA
"actively encouraged drugtrafficking in order to fund rightwing 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 Bellarny, 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 (November 27), but it hasn't yet gotten
around to Cabezas or Castillo.

The ContraDrugReagan Connection

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 "Snow Job," in the Jan.Feb. 1997 EXTRA!)

But at the time (19831990) the ReaganBush 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: ContraCrack Story Assailed," The Consortium, October 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 ContradrugCIA
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
Contradrug links by Kerry "have come from a small group of convicted
drug traffickers...who never mentioned contras or the White House
until the IranContra affair broke in November [1986]." This was a lie;
Kerry's initial witnesses made such claims many months before.
Furthermore, when these same individuals testified against Noriega,
with evidence 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, 5 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 backpage
notice of the episode). When it was disclosed in 1990 that the CIA
had helped organize and arm secret rightwing 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 HeraldJournal 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 Contradrug connection in 1986 and
1987 (Parry, "Lost History: The KerryWeld 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 CIAPentagon 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 lawenforcement 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 hardhitting 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 standardcredibility as regards official statements
and skepticism toward challenges to official truthcan 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."

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 Contradrug connection, explained that the
Contradrug story "can shatter a republic," so that "to run the story, it
had better be based on the most solid evidence we can amass." 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 Contradrug
connection, but they were told back in New York that the story
couldn't run until "we obtain an ontherecord 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
SovietBulgarian plot to kill the Pope in 1981the Pope was shot by a
rightwing 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 KGBBulgarian 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 conspiracytacit or otherwiseor
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. Also amusing, was the
media all getting on the same bandwagon of black conspiracy
tendenciesthe Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the
liberals one after the nextMichael Kazin, Mary McGrory, Howard
Kurtz, and Richard Cohenall 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 Contrarelated 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 Nicaraguawe 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 poohpoohed 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. Z