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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and the Liberty Radio Network streaming live worldwide at lrn.fm.
And it's my honor to welcome back to the show the heroic American journalist, Robert Perry.
His website is consortiumnews.com.
He's the author of Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege, and Neck Deep.
And he does some of the best work about government corruption and national security issues and foreign policy that you can find anywhere.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you?
Pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so Lost History.
You wrote this book, Lost History.
It lays out the factual record of CIA-tolerated drug trafficking by Ronald Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra rebels, and the parallel story of how they built the propaganda apparatus of perception management on the American people.
I've never read that, but it sounds like good stuff.
And I have read Dark Alliance, and I do know, well, and I've read a couple of other books along the lines of government drug running back in the days.
And I was just wondering, basically, I just saw this and it reminded me that you knew Gary Webb, the great reporter who wrote for the San Jose Mercury News the groundbreaking series Dark Alliance that turned into the book, which ended up being two or three times as much information in the final book, and who was professionally ruined and basically driven to suicide by a society of American journalists who would not tolerate his telling the truth about the factual record of CIA-tolerated drug trafficking in this country.
And I was just wondering if I could give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit about Gary Webb and what a great guy he was and what an awesome reporter he was, and whether anybody ever found a single actual factual error in anything that he ever wrote, Bob.
Well, actually, Gary called me before he did his Dark Alliance series, which appeared in 1996, because I had co-authored a story back in 1985 for the Associated Press, along with Brian Barger, which was the first story to describe the problem of the Contras getting involved in drug trafficking as a way to help support some of their activities.
Of course, at the time that our story was attacked, and it remained controversial despite more and more evidence coming out.
But the New York Times and the Washington Post and other big publications decided that that was something that they would not tolerate as a possibility, even though the evidence was there that the Contras were doing this.
And it was actually fairly well known inside the Reagan administration that they had a problem with the Contras.
But it remained one of those anathema stories that just couldn't be really discussed.
And so when Gary called me in 1996, he asked what I thought about him going ahead with his series.
And I said, well, I think it's a very, very important story.
How's your relationship with your editors?
Suggesting that he might want to make sure that they were really behind him because that he would come under attack.
And he felt confident that they would support him.
So he went ahead with his series.
And the story they did was fine.
If anything, my only fault, faulting of their stories would have been that they focused on one of the Contra drug channels that they had a lot more information on, one that tied up with this Los Angeles drug gang, and that there were many others.
Basically, there were a number of channels involving the Contras bringing cocaine into the United States from the Medellin cartel to the Cuban Americans in Miami through in Texas, California, all over the place.
So yeah, so the point I would say is that he was focused on narrowly.
But that certainly is nothing wrong with that, since he was focused, he was trying to explain how this one channel contributed to the crack epidemic and so forth.
So but he was heavily attacked.
The Washington Post, the New York Times, the L.A.
Times piled on because they essentially missed the story when it was actually when it was occurring back in the 80s.
So they, instead of admitting that they had screwed up, they it was easier to destroy Gary Webb.
And that's what they proceeded to do.
And ultimately, his editors at the San Jose Mercury News got cold feet.
They didn't want to stand up to all this pressure from the big media.
So they sold him down the river, basically, they demeaned him, and they ultimately forced him to resign.
But what he did in the report, really, one of the most important things that Gary Webb did is also the Congressional Black Caucus.
They forced the CIA to finally do a serious investigation.
And an interesting incident, one of the guys who's also involved in this investigation for the Justice Department was Michael Bromwich, who has just been named by President Obama to sort of look into the some of the Gulf catastrophe.
But Bromwich was at that time the IG, Inspector General for the Justice Department.
But the IG for the CIA, Frederick Hitz, did a pretty responsible job.
Yes, they sort of they still continue to dump on Gary Webb and exaggerate what he had said.
They claimed he was saying the CIA was out selling drugs.
And that wasn't really true.
But what was true and what Hitz confirms is that the CIA knew in detail that the Contras for the entire decade of the 1980s were involved at various levels in the drug trade.
And that key people in the Contras were implicated, that even people that the CIA had put into the Contras were implicated.
And it's all sort of confessed in this remarkable two-volume CIA report.
But again, the big news media essentially ignored Hitz's own findings, the CIA's own admission.
The New York Times, I guess, to its credit, did do sort of a front page piece that there said, well, gee, maybe there was more here than we had understood.
But they essentially didn't focus on it nearly enough.
The Washington Post kissed off the report.
The L.A.
Times, even though the story was sort of the Webb series was sort of focused on L.A., the L.A.
Times refused to run anything on the CIA's admission.
It was an extraordinary example of the big media ganging up.
And since they were the they're the big media, they don't have to admit they make mistakes.
And so it was horrible what they did.
And it caused Webb, whose family broke up and who suffered terrible career damage, unable really to make a decent living in his profession.
And finally, in 2004, he was driven to suicide.
And then after that, the L.A.
Times and the others did nasty obituaries, essentially demeaning him further.
It was just it was a horrible example of what of the worst of the big media and how and what's happened to it and how they'd rather protect their own turf and and avoid admitting their own mistakes than than being decent toward a colleague.
Wow.
Well, I don't think anybody could have said it better than that in terms of summing up Gary's legacy and the media and and really what it's for, as opposed to what you do.
It's your actual journalism there.
It's the great Bob Perry from Consortium News dot com.
We've come back from this break.
We're going to be asking all about Bradley Manning and the D.O.
D.'s hunt for Julian Assange after this.
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Visit affiliates Liberty Radio Network dot com to learn how that's affiliates Liberty Radio Network dot com.
All right, so welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, Liberty Radio Network and Chaos Radio, Austin.
I'm Scott Worden and I'm talking with the great Robert Perry from Consortium News dot com and author of a bunch of books.
You ought to read Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege, Neck Deep.
And now, you know what, Bob, would it be OK if I was to keep you to the top of the show?
Sure.
Top of the hour, I mean, to say the top of the hour.
OK.
Yeah, because, you know, we have two segments left and I really want to talk about this Bradley Manning thing, but I keep thinking of more questions.
And, you know, when we left off there before the break, we were talking about, you know, CIA connected Contras selling cocaine in America all through the 1980s.
And of course, the media and the story of the heroic martyr to real journalism, Gary Webb.
And and, you know, the the extra little kick at the end, the character assassination in their obituaries of this heroic journalist that every one of these, you know, L.A.
Times, Washington Post and New York Times reporters should have to lay down prone on the ground and bow down to his legacy.
And then they smear him.
And so then I said something about, well, that's a great thing that you just said summing up the purpose of the media.
But that wasn't really right.
It was the method of the media.
But what is the purpose of the media if it's not what you do at Consortium News dot com, Bob?
Well, it's a good question.
The basically is, you know, I grew up essentially working at the Associated Press where there was there was kind of a commitment to doing, you know, just the facts, bam, kind of journalism, which has its shortcomings granted.
But it also it was a commitment to kind of get the stories right.
And increasingly, it seems that the the major media has sort of developed almost a commitment to enforce the conventional wisdom or go with the, you know, serve the powerful in a in a rather obsequious manner of former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who writes for Consortium News dot com a lot, calls it the fawning corporate media or the FCM. And, you know, there's some truth to that.
Perhaps it's a little bit of a broad brush, but it's and there certainly are good journalists and honorable people who try to do the profession right.
But increasingly, we've seen this drift of the powerful media to being less and less committed to the principles of fairness, objectivity and things of that sort, and more to kind of guiding the American people in ways that the power structure seems to want.
And it reached, obviously, very severe dimensions during George W. Bush's presidency when the major news organizations pretty much completely fell down on the job, if you consider the job accurately informing the American people of important matters like going to war.
And even though there's now been sort of an admission, yeah, yeah, I guess The New York Times would agree that they should have done a better job and The Washington Post probably would say the same.
They they're now sort of repeating the same patterns with Iran and using the same demonizing, the same black and white pictures, the same ridiculing of people to try to negotiate peaceful settlement.
It's the same pattern that we're moving on as a nation.
And the media has played a big role in that sort of, I guess some people have referred to it as manufacturing consent.
I think that's Noam Chomsky's concept.
Having been more in the trenches rather than looking at the bigger picture, I would generally have have said that it's very difficult for working journalists to do their job in a responsible way.
It's one of the reasons that 15 years ago, after working at AP Newsweek and PBS, I thought, well, there's this new thing called the Internet.
One of my oldest, my oldest son had just gotten out of college at the time and said, Dad, you know, if you're so upset about not getting your these important stories you're working on any place, why don't you just set up a website, which is how the how ConsortiumNews.com came into existence in 1995.
But I'm not trying to tell you a good answer to your question, except that I'm not sure exactly why this is all happening.
But it's certainly true that the that I'm big stories, big issues, the the U.S.
National Press Corps has has come up very short from what I think Americans would expect or hope from their independent press corps.
Yeah, it seems like even the the real journalists almost now are all just sort of like local news anchor girls who, you know, what they always specialized in was being a pretty girl and being a cheerleader and they want to be on TV and read the news.
But that doesn't mean that they sit around reading your website or or know or care about any of this stuff.
And, you know, we're going to be talking with Glenn Greenwald later, and he's got a piece up today about how David Gregory hosting Meet the Press and asking over and over and over again, asking Obama spokesman, do you trust BP?
Do you feel him?
Do you love him?
And the BP and the Obama spokesman saying, well, look, you know, it's not about a relationship.
It's a mathematical thing.
We're going to hold them accountable, whatever you think of that, you know.
But David Gregory didn't understand the concept.
He asked it over and over again.
And Glenn Greenwald explains how David Gregory doesn't even understand that there's such a thing as like holding someone accountable with facts and like maybe punishments and whatever.
It's all to him a question of do you like him?
Do you trust him?
And of course, to David Gregory, just like Tim Russert before him, the answer is if they have power and they're sitting 90 degrees from him at that table, then he likes him and he trusts him.
Well, I think that's been true.
I think there's also the pressure that the right has imposed on mainstream journalists.
The right has invested literally billions of dollars in building not only their own media structure, but also attack groups that would go after people like me and others who were in the mainstream, who were trying to dig out facts that that didn't exactly fit with the propaganda themes that, say, Ronald Reagan or George Bush senior or others were putting out.
And so part of the game was to to attack those reporters.
But there was a phrase they use, controversialize them.
And so once those reporters got controversialized, it made it harder and harder for them to do their job.
And in the meantime, the reporters who kind of kept their kept good good relations with the right, Tim Russert used to have Rush Limbaugh on quite a bit and just do fawning interviews with Rush Limbaugh.
But that was smart.
If you're if you're if you're Tim Russert and you want to maintain your very lucrative position, that makes a lot of sense, you know, to because you're the right will then not attack you or you can buy yourself a little bit of protection from that.
So that's what we ended up with.
We ended up with kind of a it's not as much even power, although that is certainly a factor as it is avoiding being controversialized by the right.
Once the right gets gets you in their sights and whether you're Dan Rather or whether you're Gary Webb or whoever you are, once they get you in their sights, you're pretty much doomed.
In terms of your career, it may take a while, but you you will you will have severe trouble.
Everything you do will be examined and attacked and twisted and turned and criticized to such a point that eventually your your your bureau chief or your executives will will want you to go.
They will or they'll know if you're lucky, maybe you just get shoved aside into kind of a no account job.
But more likely you're going to you're putting your career on the line.
And that is and that's just something where people like a David Gregory or Tim Russert before him kind of the people that succeeded in this system understood that.
And so they they would they would phrase their stuff in a certain way.
They wouldn't go in certain directions with their questions or stories.
And they've done pretty well.
Thanks.
Well, you know, there is still somewhat a free market of ideas.
And as you pointed out, as your son pointed out to you, hey, we can do this Internet thing instead.
And it is the era of consortium news and antiwar dot com and Glenn Greenwald's blog and on down the line like that.
And yet, well, I don't want to speak for your organization there.
I don't know exactly how it works.
I know it.
Antiwar dot com.
We barely have enough to keep a bare bones staff and to pay our regular writers, our most high profile columnists a pittance for their work.
And somebody has got to be able to pay Dana Priest.
I think I'm paraphrasing maybe Glenn or somebody else from the other day here that somebody has to be able to tell Dana Priest, yes, we will pay your giant salary and we will pay your first class airfare and we will make sure you have your resources.
Go ahead and spend six months breaking a story about secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe, whereas you just can't do that.
Bob, can you?
Antiwar dot com sure as hell can't do that.
So what do we do when we're competing and we're hurting The Washington Post bad, but we don't have really a replacement for for the the budget, frankly, to to get real stories like that accomplished.
I lose him.
I'm here.
Oh, no.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, obviously, it's nice when Dana Priest actually is given that freedom to go through those kinds of stories.
And he's right up to the break here, Bob.
I'm the worst at this whole heartbreaks thing.
We're going to work it out.
It's the LRN network.
I'm Bob Perry.
We'll be right back.
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I'm an idiot.
That one was my fault.
That was human error, not technical.
It happens.
Chaos Radio Liberty Radio Network.
OK, we're talking with the heroic Bob Perry from Consortium News dot com.
And I had asked him, what are we going to do when antiwar dot com and Consortium News eventually, you know, we really are competing on the level with The Washington Post in terms of readership and whatever.
But we don't have the budgets to afford the highest caliber investigative reporters what they require to break some of the biggest stories.
Seems like, Bob, we're going to rely more and more on, you know, WikiLeaks type journalism, because that's all we're going to have is what people on the inside are willing to just give up to the public all at once.
Well, I'm not sure it's all that dire.
I do think, obviously, the more money you have invested in things like your place or Consortium News dot com.
I hope the point of what we were setting up was not just for for me to do the journalism I was doing, but for others.
That was why we called it Consortium at the beginning.
We never quite got the Consortium part going very well in terms of getting enough resources to really fund much.
But I still remain hopeful that at some point people will understand the need for that and begin investing or contributing more to let that happen.
But but you're right.
I mean, there's even though in the mainstream press, there's much less money today to do serious investigative work than there used to be.
The Washington Post is laying off a lot of staff and so are most of the big newspapers.
So they're cutting corners and there's just not that much.
But you still there's no reason why people inside the government or who have important information can't get it out.
There are places like yours, mine or WikiLeaks, you name it, that can put documents up on the Internet.
We put up secret and top secret material over in the past and history that would not have been known if we had not dug it out.
So I think it can be done.
It's just it's really a matter of getting it done.
All right.
Now, what do you have to say about this young Bradley Manning?
I know what the Post has to say about him is he's the world's biggest loser.
Right.
It is a piece that Colin Rowley wrote and I sort of edited and contributed to it, too.
So she wanted me to have a joint byline.
But but basically this young army specialist decided apparently because he saw wrongdoing and thought it needed to be exposed to to hand over a significant number of documents, including video to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks so far has not really done a lot with them, apparently, but there was one that was an encrypted video of a helicopter gunship attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists and a number of other seeming civilian Iraqi male and two kids were wounded in the attack.
And that was quite a dramatic video that sort of showed the kind of callousness that that was part of what we know is the surge when when there was a real demand to to get those body counts up and the and so the American helicopter gunship people were pretty aggressive in getting approval to go after these people, even though they just seem to be walking down the street.
So having seen that is is certainly was an important way to understand what the surge was about, that it was a case of slaughtering a lot of people that didn't seem to be threatening the American troops or anything else.
They were some innocent civilians looked like being gunned down.
So I think there's some there was some great value in that.
And but but but Manning then perhaps foolishly thought he had befriended a someone on the Internet, a guy named Adrian Lamo, who was a convicted computer hacker.
And then and Lamo then turned him in to the authorities.
And so Manning has been put in custody in Kuwait by the U.S. military.
Well, it is sort of the Washington Post, as Colleen Rowley points out in this piece that you co-authored with her.
It's at the Huffington Post and that Consortium News Today WikiLeaks case echoes Pentagon papers.
I guess she you're saying she's kind of the principal author of this thing.
She makes the case quite persuasively with a few selective quotations that they are just going after the character of this what 20 year old kid or something.
Twenty two.
Twenty two.
Basically, yes.
The New York Times and the Washington Post are giving him the Gary Webb treatment.
Right.
And when the one of the points of the piece is that when Dan Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers nearly four decades ago, the major news media was essentially on the side of getting out the story.
The New York Times ran the original piece about it when Richard when President Nixon tried to suppress it and stop it.
Other newspapers, including The Washington Post, stepped forward to continue printing and ultimately like 18 newspapers kept printing parts of Ellsberg disclosures, making Nixon's effort to suppress the truth irrelevant.
Ultimately, it was overturned then by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Here you have a young guy.
Turning over evidence, what he what he sees is sort of shocking behavior in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the attitude of The New York Times and The Washington Post has has been to to to run articles essentially calling him a loser and saying he's sort of unstable.
And, you know, the usual treatment that you might see to somebody who is who is being made into a into sort of a non-person almost someone who doesn't really measure up.
Now, according to some of these emails, the kids, the young fellow says 22, that he felt there was it was wrongdoing that he was seeing.
He thought maybe he could change it by releasing some of this material.
Instead, he's been locked up by the U.S. government.
Well, and they even announced whether he's even getting, you know, military style due process under the Code of Justice and all that, or whether they're going to rendition him off to Bagram to be crucified or what?
Well, at this point, they're investigating.
I don't think they've brought formal charges against him.
It's not that I know of, but they have but they are investigating him and they're apparently trying to see exactly what he may have given to WikiLeaks.
The the fellow who turned him in claims that he that he may have turned over something like a quarter million documents, which sounds rather extravagant.
And WikiLeaks says it doesn't have anything like that.
But they've not said what they do have.
So it's right now it's under investigation.
And apparently the U.S. government is trying to locate people inside WikiLeaks to see if they can gain some cooperation.
Well, and he does say in there that this will show how the West exploits the first world, I guess he says, exploits the third world corrupt dealings that he calls almost criminal, because, of course, government officials can't commit crimes.
But, you know, almost criminal dealings with all the countries around the world and that Hillary Clinton will wake up one morning and have a heart attack when she sees what he's put out.
Well, it'd be interesting to see more about what he what he tried to release.
But what is also disturbing is that instead of instead of pushing to to at least find out more in that regard, the major news organizations have sort of played this this role of demeaning this young person to the point even that some people who I think should should be on on this fellow's side are concerned about maybe they shouldn't.
Some of the whistleblowers aren't sure they should embrace them, because, you know, what if he's really unstable?
What if what if he's he's really this this disgruntled fellow that the Washington Post told us that he was short?
He's only five, two or something.
So all that kind of treatment that he's getting has has caused has caused some hesitation, even among people who should who would normally rally to the defense of somebody exposing important secrets.
And it's sad, and especially, you know, with the whole media component and all that reminds me of Tom Englehart's essay on antiwar dot com today about the you know, this is Soviet America, the beginning of it's not that original of a sentiment, but it really does seem more and more like I'm living in East Germany, even though I'm on the West Coast of the USA here, Bob.
And and, you know, as long as we're the USSR and we have our own domino theory about transforming everybody into our system all throughout Central Asia and perpetual war in Afghanistan until the point where our empire completely falls apart and and on down the line, it kind of brings up one of the earlier questions from the beginning of the interview.
And I hope we have time to fit in a short answer here.
What do you think about all the drug running going on in Afghanistan under American occupation and CIA occupation?
You know, I know that there are good sources on this and I've read some of them, but I just want to hear what you think about.
Well, I want to really quickly, I've always been a little surprised that there's been more reporting and accepting reporting about the drug trafficking out of the Afghanistan and going back to the 80s than with Central America.
So it's been sort of an odd anomaly that one set of drug traffickers gets much more protection by the press than the other.
Maybe because it's closer to home and back then the Reagan folks wanted to protect it.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder why they would even bother anymore when they just print all the money they need.
Why even, you know, the American taxpayer buy them all the drones that they need to kill people with.
Bob, why do they even need to run drugs?
Our government.
Good questions.
Maybe we can investigate that.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it very much.
All right, everybody, that is the great Bob Perry.
Almost called him something else.
The great Bob Perry, Consortium News dot com.
