10/24/14 – Peter Hart – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton's Show.
Our next guest is Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
That's F-A-I-R, fair.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Good, how are you?
I'm doing real good.
Been a while, and so happy to have you on and especially about this.
Now, I've got a problem with server changeovers and misplaced audio folders, so you cannot listen to my Gary Webb interview at scotthorton.org, but you can find it on YouTube.
So there you go, just put in my name and Gary Webb, and you can hear my interview with him from January 2004 about his book, Dark Alliance, the follow-up to his series in the San Jose Mercury News.
But, you know, I'm reminded more and more, and I know you're older than me, so sorry, Peter, but I'm older, and there are a lot of people who are grown adults who are interested in what's going on in the world who were not paying attention because they were toddlers at the time that Gary Webb came out with his stuff and, you know, created such controversy back then in the mid-1990s.
So I will ask you, sir, to please give us, and, you know, I understand your role in this, so you give us your thumbnail sketch of the story that he reported and why it was so important, and then we can talk all about the saga of Gary and his fight with the media, which is really your dog in this.
Yeah, well, thanks for reminding me that I'm old, because I do remember all of this happening more or less in real time, and the important thing to remind people who are a little bit younger is that this story was the first time that the Internet actually spread a journalistic product that, you know, you couldn't go out and buy a copy of the Mercury News around the country.
You could, on your creaky dial-up, read this story, and it spread because people could go read it for themselves and because, as you mentioned, Gary Webb doing a lot of interviews.
He did a lot of talk radio, particularly black talk radio in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, to try to get some attention to this story, and I think that's the first thing you have to say about him is that he's not a journalist who would report a story and then say, you know, it's not my business to get it out there or to get people involved.
He was very clear.
He wanted people to read it, and he wanted people to do something about it.
The story that he reported, you know, when you hear him tell it, he kind of piggybacked on things that he had read in the papers about a decade earlier, written by a guy named Bob Perry at the Associated Press or co-written by Bob Perry.
Bob Perry was writing about the links between the Contras, that was the CIA's army that was waging a terrorist campaign in Nicaragua to try to unseat the government that we didn't like there, their links to the drug trade, and the piece of it that Gary Webb came along and I think really fleshed out was that he met the dealers themselves and linked these guys who were raising money for the CIA's army in another country via the drug trade.
They were able to supply one dealer in particular in California, a guy named Freeway Rick Ross, with cheap cocaine that Ross turned into crack.
So the story linked a foreign policy adventure from the 1980s to the very real impact that it had and the drug war that people were living with in the 80s and into the 90s.
That was the story that Webb told.
There were a lot of details and I think a lot of fascinating elements.
He did not do certain things.
He did not say the CIA was running this.
He did not say the CIA was in the crack business.
But what he did, if you go back and read his pieces, you can read them at the Narco News website.
It's one of the few places I think where they still all exist in their original form.
You can see that you have a certain group of dealers who are enjoying some kind of legal status that seems to keep them out of trouble with LAPD and DEA.
A lot of lawyers, public defenders saying, I always found it curious that Ross and a couple of these other guys never got rolled up like other people.
Webb started reporting on the drug war asset forfeiture where the government could call someone a drug dealer and start reining in their private property, even if the evidence wasn't particularly strong.
That was where he got into this business.
Freeway Rick was one of those people that for whatever reason, he was never suffering the same kind of consequences as other dealers, even though he was this kingpin of a cocaine trade.
So that's the story he wrote.
I had to go through, like you have a web interview that people can go watch on YouTube.
I had to dig up the old cassettes from the interviews we did with him in real time.
He was always very careful about what they knew and what they didn't know.
It would only come out later that if there's any criticism of the series at all, it's that the scandal turned out to be a lot bigger than Dark Alliance portrayed it.
But that, I think, in a nutshell, that was the story that he told.
To people who are younger than this, they might look at it and go, well, the CIA is in business with some people who are doing some things.
That doesn't sound that exciting.
But at the time, it caused a massive overreaction from government officials, certainly from the CIA, and then, of course, from other people in the media who decided that instead of trying to nail down their story, they were going to go after Gary Webb.
That part of the story is almost unbelievable.
I remember at the time seeing just the little one square column inch in the Austin American-Statesman that, yeah, I remember that guy Gary Webb that wrote that thing about the CIA and the cocaine.
Well, he's been demoted to the celebrity beat at the San Jose Mercury News.
I remember thinking it was too horrible to be true.
It was too obvious for that to be the real ending to this.
Really, that's what you're going to do to this guy is just completely throw him under the bus, and then that's what they did.
Every other reporter attacked him and even his own bosses.
And correct me if I'm wrong about this, but isn't it the case, Peter, that the most overstated anything in the entire article was some graphic that he didn't even write.
It was the editors who put that there, the very same editors who were the ones who said, yeah, you know, he did get a little hyperbolic there, but it was them.
Yeah, and this is important when we talk about how the media went after Webb.
What did they pick on?
Well, the graphic that a designer chose to accompany the piece online was a crack pipe and the CIA logo.
Now you can make arguments about why that's inappropriate or whatever, but that was, I think, the biggest thing they attacked at first.
You also, though, had journalists who objected to the idea that the Contras were the CIA's army, which is the way Webb referred to them a couple of times in the piece and the series.
And there's nothing controversial about that at all.
This was a loosely affiliated group of exiles and opponents of the Sandinista government.
The CIA grouped them all together.
We're finding ways to fund this operation.
And so this is what we knew as the Contras.
So this was absolutely the CIA's army, no doubt about it.
You could call them the CIA's terror squad if you wanted to.
But this was the caliber of criticism that we saw from the mainstream media.
The first reaction to Gary Webb's stories were silence, you know, and FAIR, along with some others, were protesting at the time saying, you know, other newspapers need to get on board here and try to investigate this.
And, you know, that's the only time anything becomes a scandal in American politics if the rest of the press steps up and they were ignoring it.
Well, they went from ignoring it to trying to go after the guy who reported it.
And the criticisms that were in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times rang hollow.
But they did the dirty work in the sense that his own newspaper, the people, Jerry Seppos, the editor of the paper at the time, they got cold feet and they, I think, felt enormous pressure.
You know, the big guys are after us.
The New York Times is writing about this.
The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz is talking about Gary Webb as if he's a conspiracy theorist, saying, you know, Oliver Stone, check your voicemail.
This was the caliber of analysis.
And I think it's important that you look back at that and you say, well, where did these people end up?
You know, the people who went after Webb instead of going after the real story, none of them paid a price.
Gary Webb did.
So if you're looking for a lesson in this, it's almost, as you say, it's almost too perfect that here's a guy who writes an explosive story, makes the CIA look bad, makes the American government look bad.
And, you know, what's the consequence?
All right, now, hold on.
I'm sorry.
I had to sum up quick because we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Peter Hart from FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, about the great Gary Webb.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Peter Hart.
He's at FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
And he's got an article here, A Worthless and Whiny Attack on a Genuine Journalistic Hero.
And this is a great refutation of Jeff Lean at the Washington Post who decided that on the occasion of the new movie Kill the Messenger about Gary Webb, this great reporter from the San Jose Mercury News, who broke the story or an important part of the story of CIA cooperation with cocaine run in Contras back in the 1980s.
He is basically reproducing, recreating that same media witch hunt that they went on against Gary back then and piling on again now.
And so here Peter Hart's taking him apart.
So now let's get to that because that gets right to the heart of things anyway.
What exactly is it that Jeff Lean is accusing Gary Webb of doing wrong here?
Because I read the thing and it seemed like he somewhat acknowledged that the conclusions were correct.
Yeah, it's a confused piece.
But the point of it, as the Jump headline said, why Gary Webb was no journalistic hero.
The point is to say that this movie that's out right now that presents Webb as a guy who told the truth but the big media went after him was, as Lean put it, pure fiction.
The problem is that he either doesn't know what Webb reported or he just doesn't care and he wants to mislead people or lie about it in order to make his point.
Gets right into it, he says, Webb's story made the extraordinary claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in America.
Now if you go back to Dark Alliance, that is not what Gary Webb reported.
So again, in 2014 we're reliving 1996 and 1997 where people at elite establishment media outlets put words in Gary Webb's mouth and then say, of course this is false.
Once you misstate the premise of somebody's reporting to say that they didn't get it right, it's hard to know what else you're going to write.
He goes further and he says, when Webb finally wrote the book version of Dark Alliance, he tried to distance himself from these claims.
I never believed and I never wrote that there was a grand CIA conspiracy.
The idea Lean is trying to tell you is that Webb walked back what he reported.
Again, it's absolutely false.
He actually cites the guy who wrote the Kill the Messenger book, a reporter in Orange County, California, who did really great work tracking down some of the people who wrote their hit pieces on Gary Webb.
And he brings him in to sort of make his point for him.
He says there were some flaws, there was some hyperbole in the piece.
And the interesting thing about that is that this is from an L.A. Times article where if you go and read that L.A. Times article by Nick Schau, his point is that Gary Webb got this story right and the rest of the media got it wrong.
So somebody who says Gary Webb was wrong is citing someone who says Gary Webb got it right to make his point.
This is the caliber of criticism that's going on.
Some of the reactions to Kill the Messenger have been kind of confused.
There's this New York Times story.
The big headline says, Resurrecting a Disgraced Reporter.
And then the sub-headline says, Kill the Messenger Recalls a Reporter Wrongly Disgraced.
They don't even know what's up and what's down anymore.
I think part of the problem with that is that after Dark Alliance, the CIA launched this Inspector General investigation, whatever you want to say about the CIA investigating itself.
Let's just take that with a grain of salt.
But they came back, and if you read the conclusions clearly enough, Gary Webb was correct about some of these things.
We did not have operational control over this crack ring of course, but the CIA looked the other way or worse, knowing that there was drug running going on to send money to the Contras.
That is what Gary Webb's story was in the first place.
You can argue about how much money the crack trade was sending to Nicaragua.
Some of the deniers say, well, it was $50,000, and Webb says it was millions.
The CIA is never going to admit that kind of stuff.
But on the essential point, the CIA essentially agreed with Dark Alliance, and that's the thing that I think is hard for these people to grapple with right now.
Well, and now, have you read the book too?
I admit it was ten years ago when I did.
So in the book, there's just no question about any of this.
If people want to cry about that he overstated the articles in the newspaper, then they must all have dropped dead of heart attacks when they read the book where he talks about how Freeway Rick had such a supply of cocaine that it became in his interest to cut a deal with virtually every cocaine dealer in L.A., north of the 10-2.
And hey, guys, whatever it is you're paying, let's not fight.
I can undercut your guy.
And he ran what was essentially a gigantic tens of millions of dollars a year business.
They call him the Walmart of crack and cocaine and whatever.
He stopped gang wars by being the common supplier of different gangs at different times.
I mean, if you read the book, if anything in the book is true, then the article just pales in comparison.
It only is just beginning to kind of identify the extent of the effect that this particular supply of cocaine had on south-central Los Angeles in that era, the rise of the Crips and the Bloods and their gang war.
Well, you know what the book is.
If you listen to Gary Webb speak in 1996, he was saying, you know, we've got a lot more stories.
This is the beginning of a series.
We have more to report.
His paper backed out of that idea.
The book, I think, represents Webb's full account, you know, the things he wanted to continue writing for the Mercury News that he couldn't.
So that's why I think the book expands on some of this.
You have to look at the original reporting, the original series as the beginning of that story.
The rest of it is the story that Gary Webb could not report because his newspaper bailed on him, and the rest of the media attacked him.
That's why I think you see a more expansive view of all of this.
But still, you know, you look at it, and I think it's an extraordinarily careful work that does not step into the areas that he's accused of.
Even though, you know, and I remember at the time, the criticism of Webb's story was that, you know, there's a lot of history of the CIA being involved in the drug trade, that if that was in your newspaper article, it really would have bolstered the idea.
It wouldn't seem so unusual for the CIA to be running drugs.
And he agreed.
He said, you know, of course, there's a lot of history that I wish we could have gotten in there.
So if anything, there was criticism of Webb's reporting when it appeared in the Mercury News.
If anything, it was this could have gone further than it did.
And I think that, you know, when you look at the book, you look at the reports that came out afterwards, the main point you can make about Gary Webb is that the story got bigger and more explosive.
And that's when the elite media walked away.
It's the same thing that happened with Bob Perry's stories, you know, that came 10 years earlier.
There was a very frightening story being told to elite reporters, people who I think self-identify with government officials and government agencies.
And that story was that our government is doing something fundamentally unconscionable.
And I don't know how to report this out.
You know, that's why, you know, you look at this Washington Post, this attack on Webb.
And, you know, the guy's point is that, you know, if you make an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary proof.
Well, somebody like that is waiting for an invoice that's marked CIA and it's addressed to a drug dealer and it's got a price for the cocaine on it.
That's never going to happen.
What Gary Webb reported was what a good investigative journalist does, which is to show you the links between all these things.
Well, on the other hand, I mean, well, I mean, maybe this is along the same lines of what you mean.
But when you talk about the extent of the cover that was provided to these guys by the federal government to prevent the LAPD from cracking down on them, I mean, that's all you need to know right there.
The CIA went and got, retrieved money for one of the drug dealers because he got busted.
And that's the part they concede in the CIA report.
That's the reason you thought, no way.
The CIA admitted that that was what they did in their own report.
So, come on.
All right.
And now, I'm sorry, we're over time, but for people who aren't familiar, at least, you know, people listening to the recording later of this, we have to give a word to the fact that in case, you know, people don't know about this and hell, it's worth bringing up anyway.
They ran this guy into his grave.
They ruined his life, they being the CIA and all other media lapdogs, which is 99% of them.
They ruined this guy's life, ruined his career, and then his life, and then he took his own life.
That's it.
Yeah.
You know, he ended up being transferred to a bureau that was something like 90 minutes from his house.
You know, we want you to stay away from the stories you were reporting before.
He got a job in state government doing investigations for a committee.
Ended up at a weekly newspaper in Sacramento for a while, but really was just drummed out of journalism.
In 2004, took his own life, and I think, you know, that's the message, and I think that's why people like Bob Perry are so passionate about this and don't want to let Webb's memory fade, because to them, they see a reporter who did the kind of thing that journalists are supposed to do and look at what the rest of his quote-unquote profession did to him, and look at what, you know, what cowards he was surrounded by.
That is the story of Gary Webb, and, you know, you can read his reporting and you can let it live on that way and remind yourself, as a recent piece in the Huffington Post did, actually, that the people who went after Gary Webb are still around.
They still have jobs in the mainstream media.
A lot of them helped Elias in a war with Iraq a couple of times now.
Exactly.
Almost hit Iran and Syria.
All right.
Very same ones.
No accountability, and so the very same reporters will get us in the same trouble, although at least it makes your job easy.
You know who's RSS feed to follow.
I guess so, yeah.
That's right about it.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Peter.
It's great to have you back on the show.
Appreciate it.
Great talking to you.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Peter Hart.
Great fairness and accuracy in reporting, and here he is being very fair, to the heroic Gary Webb, a worthless and whiny attack on a genuine journalistic hero.
Again, fair.org and Robert Pape right after this.
Hey, y'all.
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Hey, y'all.
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