Jesse Katz admits that attacking journalist Gary Webb's CIA-cocaine expose ruined Webb's life
By Nick Schou Thursday, May 30 2013

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, "Dark Alliance," in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.'s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua...

No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. But on May 22, Katz, who has penned a Los Angeles magazine story hitting newsstands now that resurfaces the Gary Webb episode, essentially apologized, on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk With Larry Mantle.

Katz was discussing "Freeway Rick Is Dreaming" in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine, in which he profiles Ricky Ross, the notorious crack-cocaine dealer with whom Katz has a long, tortured relationship. In 1994, shortly after Ross got out of prison for coke trafficking, Katz wrote that Ross was the mastermind of America's crack-cocaine epidemic, at his peak pushing half a million rocks a day.

"If there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick," Katz's 1994 L.A. Times article claimed. "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived."

But Webb's 1996 Mercury News series exposed a startling fact: Ross' mentor and chief supplier, who helped him climb to the top of the crack trade, was Nicaraguan exile Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes. Blandón belonged to one of Nicaragua's most prominent political families and was a major backer of the "contras" — a rebel movement secretly created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista rebels...

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/news/gary-webb-jess-katz-crack/

@SanhoTree · Under New Management. Honduras to experiment w/private cities. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/01/under_new_management_amapala_honduras_charter_cities … Cuz sovereignty is for those who can afford it.

In 2009, far from Honduras, respected economist Paul Romer, then of Stanford University, appeared at a TED conference in the United Kingdom to unveil a big idea. Against the backdrop of a satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night, Romer compared the North's blackness with the South, which glowed with electricity and economic activity. Causing the stark contrast, Romer argued, were the Hermit Kingdom's bad or impractical regulations. Similar problems existed throughout the developing world. Romer's plan? Sign over a large tract of "uninhabited" land in a struggling country to a developed guarantor nation, which would create and oversee an investment zone free from the host country's fickle politics and troublesome rules. Enter the charter city.

Romer's idea captured headlines in the Atlantic and the New York Times. Many international development advocates criticized it for its blatantly neocolonialist features, but it found supporters too. Proponents invariably pointed to Hong Kong, China's "special administrative region" that operates under different rules than the mainland, as a shining example of the results that autonomy can yield. And charter cities almost got off the ground in Madagascar, where Romer found a receptive partner in President Marc Ravalomanana. Malagasy charter cities went down the drain, however, when Ravalomanana was forced to resign, partly because of fierce opposition to his willingness to hand over land to foreigners. (He had negotiated a plan to lease more than 1.2 million hectares to South Korea's Daewoo, to grow corn and palm-oil exports.)

Around the same time, in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup and replaced by the more conservative Porfirio Lobo Sosa. The new president faced a dire national situation: 60 percent of Honduras's citizens lived in poverty, its murder rate was climbing (from 50 homicides per 100,000 people in 2007, to 70.7 in 2009), and immigration to the United States was rising so fast that a domestic manufacturing association launched a campaign beseeching workers, "Stay With Us." While looking for ways to kick-start investment in the country, a Lobo aide named Octavio Sánchez discovered Romer's TED talk. It echoed similar ideas being proposed by Mark Klugmann, an American political consultant and former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan who had worked on Lobo's campaign. Romer and Sánchez set up a meeting and began working on a plan to build charter cities in Honduras. "My sense was that it was worth putting some of my time and effort into doing something that might help," says Romer, now a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.

In early 2011, the Honduran National Congress passed a constitutional amendment allowing for special development regions (REDs), which were like charter cities but without Romer's guarantor nation. They would have investors and be overseen by a government-appointed Transparency Commission -- Romer says he was to be a part of it -- which would select a Honduran governor for each RED. The regions would set their own regulations and jurisdictions; only when it had been determined that they had developed the necessary institutions and populations to hold their own elections would regions transition to democratic control...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/01/under_new_management_amapala_honduras_charter_cities

The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown

This weekend, The New York Times revealed how the Koch Brothers and [font color=red]Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese[/font] engineered this here shutdown we’re dealing with right now, and how they’d been planning it ever since Obama was reelected. I wasn’t especially shocked by it, myself. Hell, half of the Tea Party people in the House actually campaigned on it. Which is why I have been annoyed as hell with the whole “Oh, well, it’s really both parties at fault here!” line of reasoning that some people have been trying to take...

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/207311/the-5-creepiest-things-about-how-the-koch-brothers-engineered-the-shutdown/

...When he introduces Garrison's investigation it is essentially more of the same. For instance, about the arrest of Clay Shaw, Talbot writes, "But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessman. . .."

Today, there can be no "buts" about it. Shaw was not just "linked" to the CIA, he worked for them. We have this not just from the declassified files, but from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who said, in referring to Shaw's association with Permindex, that Shaw was a CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in Italy. (Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy, p. 100)

To further downplay the importance of what Garrison uncovered, Talbot quotes former RFK aide, Ed Guthman. Guthman was working as an editor for the Los Angeles Times in early 1967. He tells Talbot that he sent his ace reporters to New Orleans and they discovered that Garrison had no evidence for his charges. Guthman calls them "great reporters". If Talbot would have dug a little deeper he would have found out a couple of interesting things these "great reporters" had done.

One of the "great" reporters was Jack Nelson. Nelson's source for Garrison not having any evidence was former FBI agent and Hoover informer Aaron Kohn. Kohn was, among other things, an unofficial assistant to Shaw's defense team. Another of Guthman's "great" reporters was Jerry Cohen. Cohen cooperated with FBI informant Larry Schiller in keeping Garrison from extraditing Loran Hall. This cooperation extended up to flying with Hall to Sacramento to speak to [font color=red]Edwin Meese[/font]. Further, Cohen kept up a correspondence with Shaw's lawyers and even Shaw himself. This is great reporting? ...

http://www.ctka.net/brothers.html

@MichiganHist: Senator Robert Kennedy touring 12th st area affected by riot - 5/1968 Detroit News pic (WSU Lib) #DetroitHistory

Andrew Kaczynski @BuzzFeedAndrew · This NYT front page from August 14, 1965.

...McCloy asked President Carter to allow the Shah to live in the United States. Carter refused because he had told by his diplomats in Iran that such a decision might encourage the embassy being stormed by mobs. As a result McCloy made preparations for the Shah to stay in the Bahamas. David Rockefeller arranged for his personal assistant at Chase Manhattan, Joseph V. Reed, to manage the Shah's finances.

Rockefeller also established the highly secret, Project Alpha. The main objective was to persuade Carter to provide a safe haven for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (code-named "Eagle&quot . McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger were referred to as the "Triumvirate". Rockefeller used money from Chase Manhattan Bank to pay employees of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who worked on the project. Some of this money was used to persuade academics to write articles defending the record of Pahlavi. For example, George Lenczowski, professor emeritus at the University of California, was paid $40,000 to write a book with the "intention to answer the shah's critics".

Kissinger telephoned Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Carter, on 7th April, 1979, and berated the president for his emphasis on human rights, which he considered to be "amateurish" and "naive". Brzezinski suggested he talked directly to Jimmy Carter. Kissinger called Carter and arranged for him to meet David Rockefeller, two days later. Gerald Ford also contacted Carter and urged him to "stand by our friends".

McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger arranged for conservative journalists to mount an attack on Carter over this issue. [font color=darkred]On 19th April, George F. Will wrote about Carter and the Shah and said;[/font] [font color=blue]"It is sad that an Administration that knows so much about morality has so little dignity."[/font]

On 19th April, Rosalynn Carter wrote in her diary: "We can't get away from Iran. Many people - Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Howard Baker, John McCloy, Gerald Ford - all are after Jimmy to bring the shah to the United States, but Jimmy says it's been too long, and anti-American and anti-shah sentiments have escalated so that he doesn't want to. Jimmy said he explained to all of them that the Iranians might kidnap our Americans who are still there." ...

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccloyJ.htm

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10025293372#post58

Jimmy Hoffa and the Church Committee

A little off topic here but it was interesting last night that PBS' History Detectives investigation concluded that Hoffa was killed to prevent him from testifying to the Church Committee.

Ostensibly to keep him from spilling the beans any further about Russell Bufalino's (Philly/NY mob boss) ties to the CIA. Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were silenced in the Summer of 75 too (apparently for the same reason).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025277060#post33