U.S. Journalism's Shameful Anniversary
By Robert Parry
December 9, 2005
One year ago, reporter Gary Webb – his life in ruins – killed himself with a handgun. The tragedy made him the final victim of a long-running cover-up protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s tolerance of drug trafficking by its client army, the Nicaraguan contras.
But Webb’s death also could be blamed on the fecklessness of modern American journalism. The nation’s leading newspapers had driven the 49-year-old father of three to his desperate act rather than admit that they had bungled one of the biggest stories of the Reagan-Bush era – the contra-cocaine scandal.
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Revisiting the scandal in a serious way also would have recognized the brave work on the issue by Sen. John Kerry in the latter half of the 1980s – and corroborated the initial contra-cocaine article that I co-wrote with Brian Barger for the Associated Press in 1985.snip...
Contra-Cocaine Case
In my 1999 book Lost History, I deal at length with the earlier exposure of the contra-cocaine trafficking and the investigations that followed Webb’s series. But on this first anniversary of Webb’s death, I am including a summary of that history below:
The contra-cocaine story first reached the public in a story that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985. Even then we had extensive evidence, including official documents from Costa Rica, alleging that contra units were helping major cocaine traffickers at clandestine air strips and commercial ports.
Though the big newspapers pooh-poohed our discovery, Sen. Kerry followed up our story with his own groundbreaking investigation in early 1986 when Ronald Reagan was at the height of his power and George H.W. Bush was eyeing a run for the White House.
The Reagan-Bush administration did whatever it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence, and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe.
But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: the contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States.
Kerry also found that U.S. government agencies knew about the contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.
For his efforts, however, Kerry encountered either media indifference or ridicule. Reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his probe, Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.”
In the ensuing years, other confirmation of the contra-cocaine problem did pop up. During the 1991 federal drug trial of Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega, the U.S. government called to the stand Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder, who testified that the Medellin cartel had given $10 million to the Nicaraguan contras, a claim that one of Kerry’s witnesses had made years earlier.
For once, the Washington Post praised Kerry for his earlier investigation. “The Kerry hearings didn’t get the attention they deserved at the time,” a Post editorial said on Nov. 27, 1991 – without noting that one of the principal reasons for the neglect was the Post's own poor reporting on the scandal.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/120905.html
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