Gary Webb allegedly committed suicide with 2 shots to his head. The coroner stated it was unusual, but it did happen some times.

Thanks.

two shots eh? not surprising at all.

Apology won’t help Gary Webb though. There are other instances of that kind of thing, and one reporter who got subjected to the treatment wrote a book about it

“Into the Buzzsaw”

quite shocking actually… that book is.

According to Webb’s book, ( amazing book to read) as I recall, crack cocaine was introduced to the USA by the drug dealers working for the contras.

That it was unknown prior to that.

I’m trying to remember, it’s been a while, but Also, that at least one high level drug dealer was caught, arrested, and charged, in California, and then mysteriously allowed to go free, without trial. connected to someone important.

The research in the book is astonishing, and no doubt in my mind, he was risking his life, in writing it. I guess, based on two shots, he lost his life for writing it.

The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.

All the GOP talking heads who claim liberal media bias should read this and realize they are hacks. I hope Lisa does a post on the film. Plus will the film get widespread distribution? Will it be shown on PBS or do I have to wait until the library gets a copy before I see it?

Oliver North still got a radio show?

Gary Webb’s alleged “suicide” by two shots to the head is similar to Karen Silkwoods’ car “accident” which resulted in her death.

The “system” doesn’t like whistleblowers, as we all know. Some pay a heavier price than others for blowing the whistle.

RIP, Gary Webb. What he did was courageous. Maxine Walters stood by Gary Webb and spoke out against the CIA/Contras selling drugs to the gangs in LA. Walters has been hounded by various “investigations” and allegations ever since.

The “system” doesn’t like whistleblowers.

Oliver North is considered a “true American patriot” and was “rewarded” with his tv show. Gary Webb is dead. Go figure.

I would like the CIA brought up on a RICO charge of war crimes. Maybe after the revolution.

Part of the motivation seemed to be annoyance at being scooped by a lower tier paper like the San Jose Mercury News along with an instinctual defense of the establishment itself. The Washingon Post’s former ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, would later claim that the Post had displayed a “misdirected zeal” in attacking Webb.

and

In the wake of the experience Webb conceded that many of the progressive critiques of the corporate media were correct, saying:

……. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?

Instinctual defense of the establishment and misdirected zeal to defend the establishment against someone who was attacking it, like Webb.

Yeah, sure, that’s it. That’s the ticket.

Not that the mainstream media, too, is part of the system “steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and exist[s] to protect the power elite.”

Nope, Just instinct and misdirection. That’s all.

So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?

Funny thing I just read a series of interviews with Chomskey this weekend.
I understand something about how the corporations think and how they want things to go, the people who REALLY know are the lobbyists.

What is interesting me about the Webb story is the parallel with how the MSM have not supported WikiLeaks. As Glenngreenwald has made clear, the establishment media very much wanted to stay on Uncle Sam’s good side rather than on the side of we the people.
So was Jesse Katz’s motivation because he wanted to be on the government’s good side or because he, like some big papers, jealous because someone did what he didn’t?

CIA running drugs and enabling the selling crack on American streets to buy guns and fund “Contra Death Squads,” which killed nuns and priests? No say it ain’t so!!!

You mean the discredited reporter really shot himself, twice in the head?
You know Mr. James Steele, or one of his associates must have been in the area? Should pop Ollie North the question?

As for the LA Times and Mr. Webb! A little, to little, a little, to late?

Go out of business…

Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno who was burned at the stake for heresy, proposing the earth was not in the center of the solar system, Mr. Webb’s was correct and exposed crimes. For this he was ridiculed, destroyed and killed, in USAco. So much for a free press!

RIP Mr. Webb. Your “sacrifices” did not go without notice back then nor now. Thank You. BTW…. Fuck the corrupt CIA, and LA Times, then as now. John Kerry??? ROTFLMFAO……..

The first shot went through his jaw and didn’t hit any brain matter. It took the second one to do the job.

A guy in the UK actually used a power drill to do himself in. It took several drill holes before he succeeded.

Jesse Katz is trying to gather himself up a little integrity. Meh.

I hope the film can connect the dots about Right Wing newspapers and advertisers making Gary un hirable.
Maybe if the WH records ever get declassified from the Reagan – Bush years we can see a film called crack heads the real story of Reagan/Bush’s war for Drugs.

Remember the movie Michael Clayton? Have you watched the last season of the TV show Dexter? They have ways of making things look like a suicide.

I’m reading a SF book right now that talks about the elaborate ways that people in power go to destroy people who are releasing information or finding information that they don’t like.

Might be guilt might be more to come about why feeling guilty if its revealed right before the movie comes out it could help publicity.
This just might be a teaser for the big story. I can smell PR handling on stories and this might be PR.
But I am ok with it.

They have ways of making things look like a suicide.

I think the first shot was an attempt to make it look like a suicide the second shot was to kill him because the first shot failed.
I guess 2 shots to the head are possible in a suicide but lets face it very very unlikely. The CIA fucked this one up.

I accept that Webb died by suicide. I lived in the Bay Area at the time and remember how big a deal this was. I remember thinking at the time that he was being thrown under the bus. Despite the fact that his editors pushed him for a bigger story and the fact his reporting was substantially accurate, they sandbagged him once the onslaught from the Village hacks came. Another thing that gets ignored is that the rush to discredit Webb was not just a result of the ego of competing news outlets (that was surely a part of it), but also the fact that CIA sources to MSM outlets were upset by the story and urged their stenographers in the press to torpedo Webb. Of course, rather than question or verify their sources, they simply did as the government wished.

Another thing that gets ignored is that the rush to discredit Webb was not just a result of the ego of competing news outlets (that was surely a part of it), but also the fact that CIA sources to MSM outlets were upset by the story and urged their stenographers in the press to torpedo Webb. Of course, rather than question or verify their sources, they simply did as the government wished.

Yes. Very important to keep in mind.

Shots to the head aren’t always instantly fatal. Think of how long Trotsky lingered, fully conscious and conversing with his associates, after he’d been axed ice-picked in the head. (The blow didn’t go deep enough — it needed to go about another 1/4 inch to be instantly fatal. As it was, he took over a day to die.)

Think of Ricky Ray Rector, cornered by the cops in Arkansas after he’d shot one of them. He tried to take his own life — though in his case he did take out enough of his frontal lobe to not realize why he was shooting himself in the head, so he stopped shooting and it was left to the state to finish the job.

Sometimes a cigar is really a cigar.

If that is what you believe, why did you write:

Part of the motivation seemed to be annoyance at being scooped by a lower tier paper like the San Jose Mercury News along with an instinctual defense of the establishment itself. The Washingon Post’s former ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, would later claim that the Post had displayed a “misdirected zeal” in attacking Webb.

Oh. it is quite possible that the suicide is real. Think about why he committed suicide. You are at the top of your game and things are going well and then a group of people actively work to discredit you for telling an inconvenient truth.

It’s hard when you take on a big organization that is doing bad things to people, it’s even harder when people who should be supporting you aren’t.

Not having support (both financial and professional) is very very hard. To the point where you say, ‘What’s the fucking point? I did this amazing work, it was proved correct and nobody got punished and the abuses are still happening.

Chomsky’s book on power struggles talks about the price people pay for going up against power. This is one of those cases. He started paying the price the moment the established press started sandbagging him.

I’m thinking about Dan Rather and the people who were at the top of that enterprise. The used errors in a report and turned it into a way to dismiss the entire report.

Actually, surviving a suicide shot is quite likely if one doesn’t do it right. The main question is whether you have enough brain left after the first attempt to try again.

Sometimes a cigar is really a cigar.

Yes, but sometimes it is not.

Who is to say for certain which was the case in this instance?

I think several factors were at play, including all the ones mentioned, and the author has referenced them already.

I think it’s a fair point that people in the CIA pushed back via intermediaries but what we know (and what I think is more noteworthy) is the professional jealousy and self-appointed establishment police aspect by the corporate press.

I’m sure CIA sources, as demonstrated in the video, hated the accusation. But they weren’t the ones who brought Webb down.

The coroner, for one, and unlike Michael Berkland the coroner in Webb’s case is not known to be a total sleazebag.

But really: If the CIA wanted to fake his suicide, why use a .38 that would risk making it necessary to shoot him twice? Why not just use the old drug dealer’s standby, the sawed-off shotgun with a barrel shoved in the mouth? Pretty hard to come back from that.

The used errors in a report and turned it into a way to dismiss the entire report.

I am not sure there were any errors in the content of the document.

Wasn’t the supposedly damning thing in the Rather story that the margins were justified, something that no typewriter did at the time in question?

Some lawyer blogger claimed that he was on his way to work when he read the story and noticed the justified margins, whereupon, it immediately occurred to him that the document could not possibly be a copy of anything typed in the 1960s.

Rather or his staff actually dug up the secretary who had originally typed the thing and she verified on air that the facts in the report were as as she typed them during the Vietnam Era.

But, by then, it was irrelevant whether the facts were correct or not. Rather and his staff were damned simply for representing that something with justified margins was a copy of a document from the 1960s. Bush’s allegedly dodging military service became an untouchable topic. And Rather, the last of the old school news reporters still on TV, was fired. All very convenient.

Not that this is worth anything, but I always thought that the version with justified margins was deliberately given to Rather so that this citizen blogger would “immediately” figure out all the above. Pure speculation, of course. I just heard him describing the incident on TV and did not find him credible.

We all know what the author said about Webb’s having been hounded, etc.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that none of us can possibly know whether Webb actually committed suicide or not.

I never said that Webb committed suicide or that he did not. I am just saying none of us knows or can possibly know. All any of us can do is speculate.

The government probably did push back, but my observation has been that mainstream media is pretty much an establishment lap dog anyway.

My sense is that most MSM leans right first, but, second, is pro-establishment. So, if Republicans are fighting with Democrats over something, MSM will put a thumb on the scale on the side of Republicans. Otherwise, the thumb will go on the side of the establishment du jour, even if the establishment happens to be Democrat at the moment.

I think that is both calculated on the part of the owners of the stations and inculcated over the years by government, sometimes subtly and sometimes heavy handedly.

Jay Rosen, Journalism Professor at NYU called Webb episode “lowest, meanest and all-around worst case of pack journalism ever”

Yes. A day late and a dollar short, a**hole.

Katz is scum. His newest project? A collaboration with Ricky Ross. Scum.

You have to wonder if it even would have happened at all if not for the film being made.

Webb made a terrible mistake when he ran with the CIA planned and helped establish the crack cocaine epidemic. This was the bridge too far. The CIA isn’t that smart and had no motive. Certainly not the assumed one, to further make the inner cities hell.

Just set that aside for a moment. Everything else was right. The CIA and various players and spooks all up and down the Reagan administration played ball with the drug dealers, knowingly or willfully ignorantly in order to support the Contras and various other rightest forces in Central and South America. This was a blockbuster story. The CIA admitted that it had dealings with as I recall 53 known or suspected drug dealers. They even had a press conference in LA about it.

What happened there was everyone was up in arm about the conspiracy to enslave the ghetto with crack. The bridge to far. The great story, The CIA’s dirty dealings, was swamped by conspiracy. Webb to some degree and those who followed his work let the big real provable story sink.

Webb never needed the crack CIA conspiracy and it was pure conspiracy theory. Detroit gangs were probably the first to begin the institution of crack. Then every major city and ever erstwhile gang got on board. The CIA was not whispering into their ears or handing out how to sell crack manuals. The free market took care of that. Since the CIA/crack conspiracy was refutable it followed, somehow, that the whole story was BS. Even though the CIA admitted it, no matter.

This dynamic has played out before.

To be fair, in the video with Dateline that I included in the post Webb categorically denies that he believes that conspiracy nor that he was asserting it. Other people involved jumped on that angle due to history of black oppression etc.

What the story did prove was yet another violation of the Boland Amendment. Which the Reagan Administration explicitly violated in Iran-Contra anyway.

I don’t recall the particulars but am reasonably certain Webb did cover the CIA/crack story. How much he emphasized it or disbelieved it the damage was done. He should never have touched it. He didn’t have to. It was icing on the cake however and too hard to resist. The CIA was dirty so pile on.

That the mainstream press took the ball and ran with it was a travesty and a disgrace.

I watched that CIA press conference. It was sad. The public became obsessed with the bridge too far, the conspiracy. Let’s face it no matter the topic or the group the populist ‘activists’ grab onto the juiciest most emotional stories and run with them. We see it now with the ‘scandals’ and it was no different in South Central. I followed this at the time and had a strong inkling how it would turn out. The mainstream press took it hook line and sinker. If I thought the CIA was smart enough I would say they started and pushed the Langley planned to enslave the ghetto with crack as a disinformation campaign. I doubt they did.

I don’t think his book said that the crack introduction was planned. I think the book said that it happened, because drug dealers were allowed to flourish, in order to finance the illegal war.

so the only reason this guy apologized is because he knew the movie would reveal his own wrongdoings so this is just a craven attempt to get ahead of the bad news — just like the politicians do

if this movie wasn’t being made, he never would have apologized

Timing is very convenient for sure.

x 1,000

When the Mafia brought in “Junk,” they never planned on their own kids dying from OD.

This was just one of so many shameful episodes in the long history of our leading newspapers.

Look how long ago Gary Webb brought to light the notorious links between the CIA and various international entrepreneurs and how they made a whole lot of money by flooding inner cities in the United States with crack cocaine. Look at how so much of the profits from those business efforts were plowed into genocidal civil wars in Central America without the need for for permission from the People of the United States or any sort of oversight by elected representatives (not that there would be any these days…)

Look what happened to Gary Webb.

Look even more closely at the links between the three newspapers most closely involved in smearing Gary Webb (LAT, NYT, and WaPo) and the CIA.

An apology is nice, but at this late date, it hardly matters given Mr. Webb’s unfortunate demise and all. He told the truth as he found it to be, but it was a truth that conflicted with the narrative put forth the Agency and its media enablers, and so he had to be made an example of in order to instruct other would-be investigative reporters to back the fuck off. They got the message.

The story, if anyone dared to tell it completely, is the role the CIA and the other similar agencies play in ensuring that our “news” is told in a certain way by certain agency loyalists, and that their narrative is the dominant narrative throughout the mainstream media without exception.