Robert Parry uses Gary Webb's suicide to illustrate the sorry state of the US media.

This article demonstrates how astray the supposedly liberal media has gone. And remember, the roots of this story go back to the 80's. IMHO, there are no more important issues than addressing the problem of the conservative American media.

If they'd done their job then, we wouldn't be suffering through this corrupt excuse of an administration now.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/120906.html

SNIP

"Though a personal tragedy, the story of Gary Webb’s suicide has a larger meaning for the American people who find themselves increasingly sheltered from the truth by government specialists at cover-ups and by a U.S. news media that has lost its way.

Webb’s death had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations – that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn’t have been true.

Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series, published in August 1996, revived the story of how the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of these crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously."

to "disrupt the drug trade" and had crops razed in Bolivia and refineries burnt in Peru. One of the commentators at the time mentioned that it was passing strange, since most of the crops were grown in Peru and most of the refineries were in Bolivia.

Looked good on paper, but in reality? Mostly for show.

That left Poppy's rogue CIA-protected Contra network with all the advantages of a monopoly, including supplier-set pricing.

It's the Al Capone business model set by the Probition liquor trade.

At the time I didn't think of that angle, but it makes sense.

have georgie and jeb.

The Taliban seriously curtailed opium growing in Afghanistan, and now we have record harvests and the world is awash in reletively cheap heroin

Iraq under Saddam had one of the lowest addict populations in the Middle East, and now it's huge.

The war on drugs means more drugs- run as a monopoly,

The war on terror means more terror- run as a monopoly.

But, as Perry says, you won't read it in the papers.

The day I lost all faith in newspapers was the day the Screw York Times, Whoreshington Post and Lies Angeles Times all conspired to cover up Oliver North's Contra Cocaine operation and then they all ganged together to drive Gary Webb to suicide.

From that day forward, I don't believe anything printed in a mainstream newspaper. They all LIE for the Republican Party.

...but it's hard to follow a lot of times because there's really no order to it. Always sad to see a great journalist go though.

march into Corporate Greed. What a sad story. And does everyone remember the small town in Arkansas that these small airplanes filled with drugs landed while Bill was Governor? Was it Mesa, Arkansas?

It's all about the money and power. That's when Bill became blackmail material. He might as well of inhaled.

near the Oklahoma border. Some beautiful countryside, rather sparsely populated. LOTS of lonely mountain backroads...

:freak:
dbt
Remember New Orleans

work. Robert Parry is such a good writer who get's to his point without making one wade through irrelavancies or egotistical rhetoric.

about Gary Webb when I need a kick in the ass.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/12/15/184725/08