Democracies must not Kill the Messenger

Canada Free Press ^ | 08/06/15 | Diane Weber Bederman

[Sean_Anthony]

Media dereliction of duty to the citizenry

I recently watched the movie “Kill the Messenger” which was released in the fall of 2014. It’s the story of journalist Gary Webb who in 1996 began looking into links between Nicaragua’s drug-running Contra rebels and the CIA. He published his findings under the title “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury News in which he submitted that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs that made their way into some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighbourhoods. More importantly, he tied the CIA to the drugs. “For the better part of a decade a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tonnes of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles, and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”

He wasn’t the first to make connections between the CIA and the Contras. In 1989, a Senate inquiry into America’s involvement in the drug trade, chaired by John Kerry, found that the U.S. State Department had paid drug traffickers with funds authorized by Congress for “humanitarian assistance to the Contras.” Other journalists wrote about the events. But it was Webb who followed the trail of drugs back to America and blew the story wide open. And the story spread. Many black communities were up in arms that the CIA could have been responsible for the easy accessibility to the new drug-crack cocaine -and the devastation that it brought.