It took me a while, reading Marc Cooper’s post about the suicide of journalist Gary Webb, to realise why the name rang a bell: he was the guy back in 1996 who broke the story about the Contra link to the crack cocaine flooding into Los Angeles. His series, in the San Jose Mercury (later published as “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion“), explained how “a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” At first the story went nowhere, but under public pressure – especially from outraged black politicians – the press heavyweights like the Washington Post and the LA Times weighed in, and dumped all over Webb and the Mercury. The evidence for CIA involvement turned out to be thin, but Webb did make it as a hero of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair’s highly entertaining “Whiteout“.
Cooper’s first post on Webb has all the details, which don’t reflect well on the mainstream press.
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