The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/58587/the-cia-msm-contra-cocaine-cover-up
The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
Media
by Robert Parry | September 27, 2014 - 9:39am
In 1996 as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream medias hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.
Entitled Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story, the six-page report describes the CIAs damage control after Webbs Dark Alliance series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.
Although the CIAs inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administrations cover-up, the mainstream medias counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.
In fall 1998, when the CIA inspector generals extraordinary findings were released, the major U.S. news media largely ignored them, leaving Webb a disgraced journalist who unable to find a decent-paying job in his profession committed suicide in 2004, a dark tale that will be revisited in a new movie, Kill the Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner and scheduled to reach theaters on Oct. 10.