 |
Dr. Cyril Broderick |
Comments on Dr. Cyril Broderick 's article from very naïve and babyish Africans
Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
It
is highly unfortunate that a prominent Liberian News Organization will
engage in such a preposterous and baseless claims. This is sad
commentary for journalism in Liberia; what happens with vetting news
story? Your role in the society is to educate people but not to
misinform them.
Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
@
Sal Amander: I have gazillion of evidence to prove that the author is
misleading the Liberia people in the face of tragedy. Instead of
engaging him, I rather spend that time calling my people and educate
them about the danger of Ebola.
Lamii Kpargoi · Follow · Top Commenter · 265 followers
Ken Marblow · Healthcare Professional at Bærum kommuneThis
publication is very harmful and may affect building an open,
cooperative and trust-based relationship amongst academics, scholars and
politicians....on all levels
Samuel S Holmes · Houston, Texas
I heard about this whole article from some people in Liberia before it
was even published. I was very critical and is still critical about the
findings. Broderick mades several references to support his arguments or
story. It is up to us the readers to do our own research to validate
the sources and key statements such the centers that were mentioned. Do
they exist? Have the articles mentioned in the above Broderick article
appeared in peer-review science journal or legitimate or reputable
journals or news outlets. Asking these questions help us put on a
critical thinking hat. If these few questions can be answered, we have
the ground to discredit / approved Broderick article. Our call to
action is to help educate our brothers and sisters who have heard many
version of this article with the truth based on a critical analysis of
Broderick.
Must Read:
Gem in the trash: Bold and Brilliant son of the soil Dr. Cyril Broderick(Professor of Plant Pathology) exposes Babylon USA’s role in Manufacturing the Ebola virus strains in West Africa.
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2014/10/gem-in-trash-bold-and-brilliant-son-of.html
US Bio-warfare Laboratories In West Africa Are The Origins Of The Ebola Epidemic says American law professor Francis A. Boyle
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2014/10/us-bio-warfare-laboratories-in-west.html
The Ebola Breakout Coincided With UN Vaccine Campaigns
U.S. is Responsible for the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Liberian Scientist
Ebola as a US neo-imperialistic weapon: Portray Africans as poor helpless zombies: Come in as a solution to the Ebola virus you have created : Use this pretext to steal their mineral resources : Obama: Ebola crisis 'spiraling out of control' : US military to help Ebola effort
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2014/09/ebola-as-us-neo-imperialistic-weapon.html
John Hagee’s Racist nonsense : John Hagee: Ebola is God's punishment for Obama 'dividing Jerusalem': Hagee’s Logic: BLACK Obama divides Jerusalem; God pours out his wrath by infecting BLACK AFRICANS with Ebola
Structural racism : The US Military and the Ebola Outbreak: How comes among the Ebola medics flown to the US, it is only the Black nurse that died??
Dear Global research.ca , The US invented the Ebola Virus from Bundibugyo, Uganda that is why they have a patent for their invention. The US’s invention of that virus is not a claim, it is the truth.
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2014/09/dear-global-researchca-us-invented.html
US experts to monitor deadly hemorrhagic fevers in Uganda???????????????????????/
THE DRUG EPIDEMIC, VIRUSES, EBOLA, AND AIDS[IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK
http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000081.htm
U.S. To Temporarily Halt Funding For Controversial Virus Research
http://watchmanafrica.blogspot.com/2014/10/scientists-fight-for-superbug-research.html
Is The US Government The Master Criminal Of Our Time?
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/10/20/us-government-master-criminal-time/Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
It
is highly unfortunate that a prominent Liberian News Organization will
engage in such a preposterous and baseless claims. This is sad
commentary for journalism in Liberia; what happens with vetting news
story? Your role in the society is to educate people but not to
misinform them.
Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
@
Sal Amander: I have gazillion of evidence to prove that the author is
misleading the Liberia people in the face of tragedy. Instead of
engaging him, I rather spend that time calling my people and educate
them about the danger of Ebola.
Lamii Kpargoi · Follow · Top Commenter · 265 followers
Ken Marblow · Healthcare Professional at Bærum kommuneThis
publication is very harmful and may affect building an open,
cooperative and trust-based relationship amongst academics, scholars and
politicians....on all levelsSamuel S Holmes · Houston, Texas
I heard about this whole article from some people in Liberia before it
was even published. I was very critical and is still critical about the
findings. Broderick mades several references to support his arguments or
story. It is up to us the readers to do our own research to validate
the sources and key statements such the centers that were mentioned. Do
they exist? Have the articles mentioned in the above Broderick article
appeared in peer-review science journal or legitimate or reputable
journals or news outlets. Asking these questions help us put on a
critical thinking hat. If these few questions can be answered, we have
the ground to discredit / approved Broderick article. Our call to
action is to help educate our brothers and sisters who have heard many
version of this article with the truth based on a critical analysis of
Broderick.
Nana Ampadu · Works at Volta River Authority
Do
you know that things like this would not be allowed in the mainstream
journals, because of it seriousness against the Authority? This link
may also interest you:
http://www.mathaba.net/
http://www.mathaba.net/
Nyemade Wani · Top Commenter · University Of Liberia, Monrovia, Liberia campus
A
little learning is a dangerous thing. So you have something from the
web - so if I google Liberia and see people eating human hearts in
Liberia I will assume that all Liberians are cannibals? grow some
little brain cells.
Follow · Top Commenter · Manager at Consultants International inc
Nyemade Wani Grow up!!!. Stop being naïve. Watch, Listen and learn. Disturbing US Government Medical Experiments (CNN) https://www.youtube.com/
Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
It
is highly unfortunate that a prominent Liberian News Organization will
engage in such a preposterous and baseless claims. This is sad
commentary for journalism in Liberia; what happens with vetting news
story? Your role in the society is to educate people but not to
misinform them.
Dukuly Khalil · Follow · Founding Partner at Doukoure & Karrat SARL
@
Sal Amander: I have gazillion of evidence to prove that the author is
misleading the Liberia people in the face of tragedy. Instead of
engaging him, I rather spend that time calling my people and educate
them about the danger of Ebola.
Lamii Kpargoi · Follow · Top Commenter · 265 followers
These
are the kinds of publications which are going to do more harm to our
fight against Ebola than good. Dr. Broderick could have waited till this
thing was contained before publishing his speculations.
Dr. Broderick has inadvertently placed an anti-Ebola weapon in the hands of ebola skeptics!
Dr. Broderick has inadvertently placed an anti-Ebola weapon in the hands of ebola skeptics!
Ansu Opa Dualu · Top Commenter · Coalition of Concerned Liberians
Any
Liberian child and probably other Africans, who were born in the late
70's and eighties, like I was, who were forcibly vaccinated with donated
drugs from Western countries were technically lab rats. Why do you
think most Liberians (of that era) test positive for TB, Hepatitis,
etc. even though they don't have these illnesses? Look on your arm, you
will see the booster shot mark!! This is because of those experimental
antibodies these so-called vaccines infused into our young bodies! I am
not suggesting that this Prof's argument is all true, but its basis is
steep in reality and not farfetched.
Nana Ampadu · Works at Volta River Authority
You
state that Ebola was found in Virginia in 1989, then why did it travel
all the way to Liberia and Sierraleone. People like you believe in
reports only coming from America media but you don't believe any report
coming from Africa. This paper is creating awareness so that African
will refuse any vacination as a biogun that they manufacture and use as a
weapon of mass destruction only to anihilate African race.
Jesse Mason · Follow · University Of Liberia, Monrovia, Liberia campusI
support Dr. Broderick 100%. I said this ever since that Ebola was made
by genetics scientist who create this virus and found the cure also that
countries when successfully infested will go back to them and purchase
the drug. They are using it for culling the world population mainly
Africa for the so purpose of gaining control of the Africans resources
criminally. They have discovered also that Africans will not take up
arms to destroy each other any more therefore this means of money making
has been developed. many more I can tell you on this...... Watch
nations that claiming to love us are the main doer of the act.Randolph E. Ben-Davies · Follow · Top Commenter · Manager at Consultants International inc
I
too agree 100% with Dr. Broderick. Genetic engineering is constantly
going on all the time, creating more deadly micro-organism for military
use. The USA Bio warfare military establishments are involved in many of
these researches; just as it was secretly involved in infecting people
of African descent with syphilis in 1932 at Tuskegee Military Institute,
a training base for Black military pilots. To the contrary, anyone who
claims that this is impossible is not only naïve but ill-informed.
Also “In October 2010 it was revealed that in Guatemala, U.S. Public Health Service doctors went even further. It was reported that from 1946 to 1948, American doctors deliberately infected prisoners, soldiers, and patients in a mental hospital with syphilis and, in some cases, gonorrhea, with the cooperation of some Guatemalan health ministries and officials. A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis without the informed consent of the subjects. When the subjects contracted the disease they were given antibiotics though it is unclear if all infected parties were cured”
http://en.wikipedia.org/
Also “In October 2010 it was revealed that in Guatemala, U.S. Public Health Service doctors went even further. It was reported that from 1946 to 1948, American doctors deliberately infected prisoners, soldiers, and patients in a mental hospital with syphilis and, in some cases, gonorrhea, with the cooperation of some Guatemalan health ministries and officials. A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis without the informed consent of the subjects. When the subjects contracted the disease they were given antibiotics though it is unclear if all infected parties were cured”
http://en.wikipedia.org/
Top Commenter · Salt Lake City, Utah
Ebola
is man made, so is AIDS, so is cancer. Lamii until you realize that no
fight against Ebola will be effective. Rather than burying your head
in the sand, add organic sulfur to your diet. It is the lack of sulfur
in our diets which makes our terrain susceptible to infection.
Our study has not encountered Ebola but most every other viral infection on the Planet we
have encountered with no one dying of anything.
Since the movie "Out of Africa" the one percent has been eyeing that same beauty without
any dark skinned folks messing up the view.
If the Gates, old Bill and Melinda were serious about protecting those in Africa they would investigate organic sulfur a crystal food which transports oxygen into the cells and the virus goes dormant. No one has ever killed a virus.
Got sulfur?
Jeff Leen, the Washington Post's assistant managing editor for
investigations, begins his
renewed attack on the late Gary Webb's Contra-cocaine reporting with a
falsehood.
Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that "an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof." But Leen must know that it is not true. Many extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without "extraordinary proof" or any real evidence at all, including by Leen's colleagues at the Washington Post.
However, if new evidence undercut those suspicions and shifted the blame to people on "the U.S. side" -- say, the Syrian rebels and the Ukrainian government -- then the standards of proof suddenly skyrocket beyond reach. So what you get is not "responsible" journalism -- as Leen tries to suggest -- but hypocrisy and propaganda. One set of rules for the goose and another set for the gander.
The Contra-Cocaine Case
Or to go back to the Contra-cocaine scandal that Brian Barger and I first exposed for the Associated Press in 1985: If we were writing that the leftist Nicaraguan Sandinista government -- the then U.S. "enemy" -- was shipping cocaine to the United States, any flimsy claim would have sufficed. But the standard of proof ratcheted up when the subject of our story was cocaine smuggling by President Ronald Reagan's beloved Contras.
In other words, the real dictum is that there are two standards, double standards, something that a careerist like Leen knows in his gut but doesn't want you to know. All the better to suggest that Gary Webb was guilty of violating some noble principle of journalism.
But Leen is wrong in another way -- because there was "extraordinary proof" establishing that the Contras were implicated in drug trafficking and that the Reagan administration was looking the other way.
When Barger and I wrote the first story about Contra-cocaine trafficking almost three decades ago, we already had "extraordinary proof," including documents from Costa Rica, statements by Contras and Contra backers, and admissions from officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration and Ronald Reagan's National Security Council staff.
However, Leen seems to dismiss our work as nothing but getting "tips" about Contra-cocaine trafficking as if Barger and I were like the hacks at the Washington Post and the New York Times who wait around for authorized handouts from the U.S. government.
Following the Money
Barger and I actually were looking for something different when we encountered the evidence on Contra-cocaine trafficking. We were trying to figure out how the Contras were sustaining themselves in the field after Congress cut off the CIA's financing for their war.
We were, in the old-fashioned journalistic parlance, "following the money." The problem was the money led, in part, to the reality that all the major Contra organizations were collaborating with drug traffickers.
Besides our work in the mid-1980s, Sen. John Kerry's follow-on Contra-cocaine investigation added substantially more evidence. Yet Leen and his cohorts apparently felt no need to pursue the case any further or even give respectful attention to Kerry's official findings.
Indeed, when Kerry's report was issued in April 1989, the Washington Post ran a dismissive story by Michael Isikoff buried deep inside the paper. Newsweek dubbed Kerry "a randy conspiracy buff." In his new article attacking Gary Webb, Leen just says:
In this context, Leen paints himself as the true investigative journalist who knew the inside story of the Contra-cocaine tale from the beginning. He wrote:
"Beginning in 1985, journalists started pursuing tips about the CIA's
role in the drug trade. Was the agency allowing cocaine to flow into the United States as a means to fund its secret war
supporting the contra rebels in Nicaragua?
Many journalists, including me, chased that story from different angles, but
the extraordinary proof was always lacking."
Again, what Leen says is not true. Leen makes no reference to the groundbreaking AP story in 1985 or other disclosures in the ensuing years. He just insists that "the extraordinary proof" was lacking -- which it may have been for him given his lackluster abilities. He then calls the final report of Kerry's investigation the "final word."
But Leen doesn't explain why he and his fellow mainstream journalists were so incurious about this major scandal that they would remain passive even in the wake of a Senate investigation. It's also not true that Kerry's report was the "final word" prior to Webb reviving the scandal in 1996.
Government Witnesses
In 1991, during the narcotics trafficking trial of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the U.S. government itself presented witnesses who connected the Contras to the Medellin cartel.
Indeed, after testimony by Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder about his $10 million contribution to the Contras, the Washington Post wrote in a Nov. 27, 1991 editorial that "The Kerry hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," and that "The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."
But the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry's hearings had been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past neglect.
In other words, it didn't seem to matter how much "extraordinary proof" the Washington Post or Jeff Leen had. Nothing would be sufficient to report seriously on the Contra-cocaine scandal, not even when the U.S. government vouched for the evidence.
So, Leen is trying to fool you when he presents himself as a "responsible journalist" weighing the difficult evidentiary choices. He's just the latest hack to go after Gary Webb, which has become urgent again for the mainstream media in the face of "Kill the Messenger," a new movie about Webb's ordeal.
What Leen won't face up to is that the tag-team destruction of Gary Webb in 1996-97 -- by the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times -- represented one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism.
The Big Papers tore down an honest journalist to cover up their own cowardly failure to investigate and expose a grave national security crime, the Reagan administration's tolerance for and protection of drug trafficking into the United States by the CIA's client Contra army.
This journalistic failure occurred even though the Associated Press -- far from a radical news outlet -- and a Senate investigation (not to mention the Noriega trial) had charted the way.
Leen's Assault
Contrary to Leen's column, "Kill the Messenger" is actually a fairly honest portrayal of what happened when Webb exposed the consequences of the Contra cocaine smuggling after the drugs reached the United States. One channel fed into an important Los Angeles supply chain that produced crack.
But Leen tells you that "The Hollywood version of [Webb's] story -- a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media -- is pure fiction."
He then lauds the collaboration of the Big Three newspapers in destroying Webb and creating such enormous pressure on Webb's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, that the executive editor Jerry Ceppos threw his own reporter under the bus. To Leen, this disgraceful behavior represented the best of American journalism.
Leen wrote:
"Gradually, the Mercury News backed away from Webb's scoop. The paper
transferred him to its Cupertino
bureau and did an internal review of his facts and his methods. Jerry Ceppos,
the Mercury News's executive editor, wrote a piece concluding that the story
did not meet the newspaper's standards -- a courageous stance, I thought."
"Courageous"? What an astounding characterization of Ceppos's act of career cowardice.
But Leen continues by explaining his role in the Webb takedown. After all, Leen was then the drug expert at the Miami Herald, which like the San Jose Mercury News was a Knight Ridder newspaper. Leen says his editors sought his opinion about Webb's "Dark Alliance" series.
Though acknowledging that he was "envious" of Webb's story when it appeared in 1996, Leen writes that he examined it and found it wanting, supposedly because of alleged overstatements. He proudly asserts that because of his critical analysis, the Miami Herald never published Webb's series.
But Leen goes further. He falsely characterizes the U.S. government's later admissions contained in inspector general reports by the CIA and Justice Department. If Leen had bothered to read the reports thoroughly, he would have realized that the reports actually establish that Webb -- and indeed Kerry, Barger and I -- grossly understated the seriousness of the Contra-cocaine problem which began at the start of the Contra movement in the early 1980s and lasted through the decade until the end of the war.
Leen apparently assumes that few Americans will take the trouble to study and understand what the reports said. That is why I published a lengthy account of the U.S. government's admissions -- both after the reports were published in 1998 and as "Kill the Messenger" was hitting the theaters in October. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga."]
Playing It Safe
Instead of diving into the reeds of the CIA and DOJ reports, Leen does what he and his mainstream colleagues have done for the past three decades, try to minimize the seriousness of the Reagan administration tolerating cocaine trafficking by its Contra clients and even obstructing official investigations that threatened to expose this crime of state.
Instead, to Leen, the only important issue is whether Gary Webb's story was perfect. But no journalistic product is perfect. There are always more details that a reporter would like to have, not to mention compromises with editors over how a story is presented. And, on a complex story, there are always some nuances that could have been explained better. That is simply the reality of journalism, the so-called first draft of history.
But Leen pretends that it is the righteous thing to destroy a reporter who is not perfect in his execution of a difficult story -- and that Gary Webb thus deserved to be banished from his profession for life, a cruel punishment that impoverished Webb and ultimately drove him to suicide in 2004.
But if Leen is correct -- that a reporter who takes on a very tough story and doesn't get every detail precisely correct should be ruined and disgraced -- what does he tell his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward, whose heroic Watergate reporting included an error about whether a claim regarding who controlled the White House slush fund was made before a grand jury.
While Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein were right about the substance, they were wrong about its presentation to a grand jury. Does Leen really believe that Woodward and Bernstein should have been drummed out of journalism for that mistake? Instead, they were lionized as heroes of investigative journalism despite the error -- as they should have been.
Yet, when Webb exposed what was arguably an even worse crime of state -- the Reagan administration turning a blind eye to the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States -- Leen thinks any abuse of Webb is justified because his story wasn't perfect.
Those two divergent judgments -- on how Woodward's mistake was understandably excused and how Webb's imperfections were never forgiven -- speak volumes about what has happened to the modern profession of journalism at least in the mainstream U.S. media. In reality, Leen's insistence on perfection and "extraordinary proof" is just a dodge to rationalize letting well-connected criminals and their powerful accomplices off the hook.
In the old days, the journalistic goal was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," but the new rule appears to be: "any standard of proof works when condemning the weak or the despised but you need unachievable 'extraordinary evidence' if you're writing about the strong and the politically popular."
Who Is Unfit?
Leen adds a personal reflection on Webb as somehow not having the proper temperament to be an investigative reporter. Leen wrote:
It's interesting -- and sadly typical -- that while Leen chastises Webb for
not admitting error, Leen offers no self-criticism of himself for missing what
even the CIA has now admitted, that the Contras were tied up in the cocaine
trade. Doesn't an institutional confession by the CIA's inspector general
constitute "extraordinary evidence"?
Also, since the CIA's inspector general's report included substantial evidence of Contra-cocaine trafficking running through Miami, shouldn't Leen offer some mea culpa about missing these serious crimes that were going on right under his nose -- in his city and on his beat? What sort of reporter is "preternaturally calm" about failing to do his job right and letting the public suffer as Leen did?
Perhaps all one needs to know about the sorry state of today's mainstream journalism is that Jeff Leen is the Washington Post's assistant managing editor for investigations and Gary Webb is no longer with us.
[To learn how you can hear a December 1996 joint appearance at which Robert Parry and Gary Webb discuss their reporting, click here.]
Our study has not encountered Ebola but most every other viral infection on the Planet we
have encountered with no one dying of anything.
Since the movie "Out of Africa" the one percent has been eyeing that same beauty without
any dark skinned folks messing up the view.
If the Gates, old Bill and Melinda were serious about protecting those in Africa they would investigate organic sulfur a crystal food which transports oxygen into the cells and the virus goes dormant. No one has ever killed a virus.
Got sulfur?
Will the US employ its mainstream media to counteract Dr. Cyril Broderick’s expose just like Garry Web’s expose??
THE DEATH OF GARY WEBB
[Is the government sending us a message?
THE
MYSTERIOUS DEATHOF MICHAEL HASTINGS:
a repeat of the Gary Webb affairThe government's war on truthtellers
 |
| Journalist Gary Webb. (image by YouTube) |
Washington Post's Slimy Assault on Gary Webb
Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that "an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof." But Leen must know that it is not true. Many extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without "extraordinary proof" or any real evidence at all, including by Leen's colleagues at the Washington Post.
A
different rule actually governs American journalism -- that journalists need
"extraordinary proof" if a story puts the U.S. government or an
"ally" in a negative light but pretty much anything goes when
criticizing an "enemy."
If,
for instance, the Post wanted to accuse the Syrian government of killing
civilians with Sarin gas or blame Russian-backed rebels for the shoot-down of a
civilian airliner over Ukraine, any scraps of proof -- no matter how dubious --
would be good enough (as was the actual case in 2013 and 2014, respectively).
However, if new evidence undercut those suspicions and shifted the blame to people on "the U.S. side" -- say, the Syrian rebels and the Ukrainian government -- then the standards of proof suddenly skyrocket beyond reach. So what you get is not "responsible" journalism -- as Leen tries to suggest -- but hypocrisy and propaganda. One set of rules for the goose and another set for the gander.
The Contra-Cocaine Case
Or to go back to the Contra-cocaine scandal that Brian Barger and I first exposed for the Associated Press in 1985: If we were writing that the leftist Nicaraguan Sandinista government -- the then U.S. "enemy" -- was shipping cocaine to the United States, any flimsy claim would have sufficed. But the standard of proof ratcheted up when the subject of our story was cocaine smuggling by President Ronald Reagan's beloved Contras.
In other words, the real dictum is that there are two standards, double standards, something that a careerist like Leen knows in his gut but doesn't want you to know. All the better to suggest that Gary Webb was guilty of violating some noble principle of journalism.
But Leen is wrong in another way -- because there was "extraordinary proof" establishing that the Contras were implicated in drug trafficking and that the Reagan administration was looking the other way.
When Barger and I wrote the first story about Contra-cocaine trafficking almost three decades ago, we already had "extraordinary proof," including documents from Costa Rica, statements by Contras and Contra backers, and admissions from officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration and Ronald Reagan's National Security Council staff.
However, Leen seems to dismiss our work as nothing but getting "tips" about Contra-cocaine trafficking as if Barger and I were like the hacks at the Washington Post and the New York Times who wait around for authorized handouts from the U.S. government.
Following the Money
Barger and I actually were looking for something different when we encountered the evidence on Contra-cocaine trafficking. We were trying to figure out how the Contras were sustaining themselves in the field after Congress cut off the CIA's financing for their war.
We were, in the old-fashioned journalistic parlance, "following the money." The problem was the money led, in part, to the reality that all the major Contra organizations were collaborating with drug traffickers.
Besides our work in the mid-1980s, Sen. John Kerry's follow-on Contra-cocaine investigation added substantially more evidence. Yet Leen and his cohorts apparently felt no need to pursue the case any further or even give respectful attention to Kerry's official findings.
Indeed, when Kerry's report was issued in April 1989, the Washington Post ran a dismissive story by Michael Isikoff buried deep inside the paper. Newsweek dubbed Kerry "a randy conspiracy buff." In his new article attacking Gary Webb, Leen just says:
"After an exhaustive three-year investigation, the
committee's report concluded that CIA officials were aware of the smuggling
activities of some of their charges who supported the contras, but it stopped
short of implicating the agency directly in drug dealing. That seemed to be the
final word on the matter."
But why was it the "final word"? Why didn't Leen and
others who had missed the scandal as it was unfolding earlier in the decade at
least try to build on Kerry's findings. After all, these were now official U.S. government
records. Wasn't that "extraordinary" enough?
In this context, Leen paints himself as the true investigative journalist who knew the inside story of the Contra-cocaine tale from the beginning. He wrote:
"As an investigative reporter covering the drug trade
for the Miami Herald ... I wrote about the explosion of cocaine in America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the role of Colombia's
Medellin Cartel in fueling it.
Again, what Leen says is not true. Leen makes no reference to the groundbreaking AP story in 1985 or other disclosures in the ensuing years. He just insists that "the extraordinary proof" was lacking -- which it may have been for him given his lackluster abilities. He then calls the final report of Kerry's investigation the "final word."
But Leen doesn't explain why he and his fellow mainstream journalists were so incurious about this major scandal that they would remain passive even in the wake of a Senate investigation. It's also not true that Kerry's report was the "final word" prior to Webb reviving the scandal in 1996.
Government Witnesses
In 1991, during the narcotics trafficking trial of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the U.S. government itself presented witnesses who connected the Contras to the Medellin cartel.
Indeed, after testimony by Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder about his $10 million contribution to the Contras, the Washington Post wrote in a Nov. 27, 1991 editorial that "The Kerry hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," and that "The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."
But the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry's hearings had been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past neglect.
In other words, it didn't seem to matter how much "extraordinary proof" the Washington Post or Jeff Leen had. Nothing would be sufficient to report seriously on the Contra-cocaine scandal, not even when the U.S. government vouched for the evidence.
So, Leen is trying to fool you when he presents himself as a "responsible journalist" weighing the difficult evidentiary choices. He's just the latest hack to go after Gary Webb, which has become urgent again for the mainstream media in the face of "Kill the Messenger," a new movie about Webb's ordeal.
What Leen won't face up to is that the tag-team destruction of Gary Webb in 1996-97 -- by the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times -- represented one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism.
The Big Papers tore down an honest journalist to cover up their own cowardly failure to investigate and expose a grave national security crime, the Reagan administration's tolerance for and protection of drug trafficking into the United States by the CIA's client Contra army.
This journalistic failure occurred even though the Associated Press -- far from a radical news outlet -- and a Senate investigation (not to mention the Noriega trial) had charted the way.
Leen's Assault
Contrary to Leen's column, "Kill the Messenger" is actually a fairly honest portrayal of what happened when Webb exposed the consequences of the Contra cocaine smuggling after the drugs reached the United States. One channel fed into an important Los Angeles supply chain that produced crack.
But Leen tells you that "The Hollywood version of [Webb's] story -- a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media -- is pure fiction."
He then lauds the collaboration of the Big Three newspapers in destroying Webb and creating such enormous pressure on Webb's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, that the executive editor Jerry Ceppos threw his own reporter under the bus. To Leen, this disgraceful behavior represented the best of American journalism.
Leen wrote:
"The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los
Angeles Times, in a rare show of unanimity, all wrote major pieces knocking the
story down for its overblown claims and undernourished reporting.
"Courageous"? What an astounding characterization of Ceppos's act of career cowardice.
But Leen continues by explaining his role in the Webb takedown. After all, Leen was then the drug expert at the Miami Herald, which like the San Jose Mercury News was a Knight Ridder newspaper. Leen says his editors sought his opinion about Webb's "Dark Alliance" series.
Though acknowledging that he was "envious" of Webb's story when it appeared in 1996, Leen writes that he examined it and found it wanting, supposedly because of alleged overstatements. He proudly asserts that because of his critical analysis, the Miami Herald never published Webb's series.
But Leen goes further. He falsely characterizes the U.S. government's later admissions contained in inspector general reports by the CIA and Justice Department. If Leen had bothered to read the reports thoroughly, he would have realized that the reports actually establish that Webb -- and indeed Kerry, Barger and I -- grossly understated the seriousness of the Contra-cocaine problem which began at the start of the Contra movement in the early 1980s and lasted through the decade until the end of the war.
Leen apparently assumes that few Americans will take the trouble to study and understand what the reports said. That is why I published a lengthy account of the U.S. government's admissions -- both after the reports were published in 1998 and as "Kill the Messenger" was hitting the theaters in October. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga."]
Playing It Safe
Instead of diving into the reeds of the CIA and DOJ reports, Leen does what he and his mainstream colleagues have done for the past three decades, try to minimize the seriousness of the Reagan administration tolerating cocaine trafficking by its Contra clients and even obstructing official investigations that threatened to expose this crime of state.
Instead, to Leen, the only important issue is whether Gary Webb's story was perfect. But no journalistic product is perfect. There are always more details that a reporter would like to have, not to mention compromises with editors over how a story is presented. And, on a complex story, there are always some nuances that could have been explained better. That is simply the reality of journalism, the so-called first draft of history.
But Leen pretends that it is the righteous thing to destroy a reporter who is not perfect in his execution of a difficult story -- and that Gary Webb thus deserved to be banished from his profession for life, a cruel punishment that impoverished Webb and ultimately drove him to suicide in 2004.
But if Leen is correct -- that a reporter who takes on a very tough story and doesn't get every detail precisely correct should be ruined and disgraced -- what does he tell his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward, whose heroic Watergate reporting included an error about whether a claim regarding who controlled the White House slush fund was made before a grand jury.
While Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein were right about the substance, they were wrong about its presentation to a grand jury. Does Leen really believe that Woodward and Bernstein should have been drummed out of journalism for that mistake? Instead, they were lionized as heroes of investigative journalism despite the error -- as they should have been.
Yet, when Webb exposed what was arguably an even worse crime of state -- the Reagan administration turning a blind eye to the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States -- Leen thinks any abuse of Webb is justified because his story wasn't perfect.
Those two divergent judgments -- on how Woodward's mistake was understandably excused and how Webb's imperfections were never forgiven -- speak volumes about what has happened to the modern profession of journalism at least in the mainstream U.S. media. In reality, Leen's insistence on perfection and "extraordinary proof" is just a dodge to rationalize letting well-connected criminals and their powerful accomplices off the hook.
In the old days, the journalistic goal was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," but the new rule appears to be: "any standard of proof works when condemning the weak or the despised but you need unachievable 'extraordinary evidence' if you're writing about the strong and the politically popular."
Who Is Unfit?
Leen adds a personal reflection on Webb as somehow not having the proper temperament to be an investigative reporter. Leen wrote:
"After Webb was transferred to Cupertino
[in disgrace], I debated him at a conference of the Investigative Reporters and
Editors organization in Phoenix
in June 1997. He was preternaturally calm. While investigative journalists are
usually bundles of insecurities and questions and skepticism, he brushed off
any criticism and admitted no error. When asked how I felt about it all, I said
I felt sorry for him. I still feel that way."
Also, since the CIA's inspector general's report included substantial evidence of Contra-cocaine trafficking running through Miami, shouldn't Leen offer some mea culpa about missing these serious crimes that were going on right under his nose -- in his city and on his beat? What sort of reporter is "preternaturally calm" about failing to do his job right and letting the public suffer as Leen did?
Perhaps all one needs to know about the sorry state of today's mainstream journalism is that Jeff Leen is the Washington Post's assistant managing editor for investigations and Gary Webb is no longer with us.
[To learn how you can hear a December 1996 joint appearance at which Robert Parry and Gary Webb discuss their reporting, click here.]
