FAREWELL GARY WEBB

A couple of essays about the late reporter who in 1996 broke the story about the 1980s connection between the CIA and crack cocaine dealers, which retroactively rendered the entire "war on drugs" problematic, at best.

First, from ZNet, the lowdown on Webb's biggest story:

R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter

Webb's explosive San Jose Mercury News series documented that funders of the Contras included drug traffickers who played a role in the crack epidemic that hit Los Angeles and other cities. Webb's series focused heavily on Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine importer and federal informant, who once testified in federal court that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution." Blandon further testified that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a CIA asset who led the Contra army against Nicaragua's leftwing Sandinista government, knew the funds were from drug running. (Bermudez was a colonel during the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.)

Webb reported that U.S. law enforcement agents complained that the CIA had squelched drug probes of Blandon and his partner Norwin Meneses in the name of "national security." Blandon's drugs flowed into L.A. and elsewhere thanks to the legendary "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross, a supplier of crack to the Crips and Bloods gangs.

While Webb's series could be faulted for some overstatement in presenting its powerful new evidence (a controversial graphic on the Mercury News website superimposed a person smoking crack over the CIA seal), the fresh documentation mightily moved forward the CIA-Contra-cocaine story that national media had been trying to bury for years. Any exaggeration in the Mercury News presentation was dwarfed by a mendacious, triple-barreled attack on Webb that came from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

Click here for the rest.

Next, from CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe, an essay on what the perseverance of somebody like Webb means to the progressive community at large:

"I Knew It Was the Truth and
That's What Kept Me Going"

"You get one chance in a lifetime to do the right thing," he said. "If you don't do it, you surrender, and then they win."

The passion for truth and justice is not a sprint. It's a long-distance run that requires a different kind of training, a different degree of commitment. Our eye must be on a goal that we know we will never reach in our lifetimes. Faith is the name of believing in the transcendent, often despite all evidence to the contrary.

But what are the options?

Webb knew what he was up against. He said of the CIA, "Richard, these are the worst people on earth that you're dealing with - they lie, plant stories, discredit and worse for a living and have the resources and the experience.

But somebody's got to do it [tell the truth]. Otherwise they win.

The choice is to do the work - or surrender."

Click here for the rest.

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