Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 11, 2007

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the “crack epidemic” and the L.A. Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb’s contra-cocaine reporting in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA inspector general’s 1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged – and more.