Webbgate: Congrats to James DiEugenio

[Paul Rigby]

Blessed Bob Parry replies to slimy Washington Post and posthumous attack on Webb:

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/18/wpo...gary-webb/

How fitting that this terrific rejoinder should come from Bob Parry, who was the first American to report on the Contra-cocaine scandal.

A common theme of both Contra-cocaine and JFK's assassination (and so much else) involves the Central Intelligence Agency, both in terms of the original crimes AND, when parts of the truth began to emerge, the fabrication of media disinformation campaigns.


Some have argued here that it is unlikely the CIA would have engineered the JFK hit on its own, that it surely had directives from someone above, or at least on an equal level. That's not an unreasonable analysis, but it is interesting to remember the thoughts leaked to the press by Kennedy Administration officials in Saigon less than two months before the assassination:


"CIA agents represent a tremendous power and are totally unaccountable to anyone," the Washington Daily News of 10/2/63 reported, indicating the comments were made by an unnamed Administration official. The paper also reported, "One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer."


In the same article, the paper also quoted an Administration official saying that if there was ever a coup d'etat in America, "it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon." The very next day, Arthur Krock quoted some of this in the New York Times, explaining how unfair it is to criticize the CIA because... wait for it... the Agency isn't allowed to fight back! Jeff Leen, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor and author of the Gary Webb hit piece so beautifully and quickly deconstructed by Mr. Parry, is following in the same tradition as Krock and far too many other "reporters" of their ilk. Propagandists serving wretched masters, and little more.

Dick Starnes, the Scripps-Howard journalist responsible for the startling piece to which Krock took umbrage, owed some parts of his despatch to fellow American journalists, most of whom had read CIA Financing Planned Coup D'Etat, The Times of Vietnam, 2 September 1963. The latter's a remarkable piece in and of itself, and thus one assiduously ignored by historians ever since. The CIA wrecked the Times of Vietnam printing press shortly thereafter, prompting a reprint a week later. As Hanoi had copies of the original, the only people being kept in the dark by the Agency's activities were, as ever, the American people. Plus ca change.