Great article on Gary Webb in UK Independent

[kma3346]

The Independent has a really good article about Gary Webb in today's paper. I wish that we had some reporters with his courage and investigative skills today. We are in dire need of them. Other than Seymour Hersh, I can't think of any that even come close.

Susan Bell: a shameful secret history

When the big story arrives, Susan Bell recalls her late husband saying, "it will be like a bullet with your name on it. You won't even hear it coming." It was a remark that Gary Webb overheard early in his career, from an older reporter, and would repeat, ironically, to the point that the phrase "It's the Big One" became a standing joke on his news desk. And yet for Webb, the idea that a journalist could be killed by his own story turned out to be no laughing matter. The only difference in Gary Webb's case was that his life was ended not by one bullet, but two.

Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation, was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. Webb's pieces were not dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles...

See the rest of the story at:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article317908.ece

[texpatriot2004]

1. Webb was suicided wasn't he? n/t

[kma3346]

2. Some people think so...

But his wife states in the article that she believes that he did commit suicide. It is strange, though, how many journalists have committed suicide in recent years.