The Tragic Saga of Gary Webb - The Movie

[Wombaticus Rex]

Exactly.

Casolaro could have just as easily disappeared -- they're kinda good at that -- but he wasn't.

For a reason.

[thatsmystory]

I recently watched Kill the Messenger and it hit home regarding the lack of success in pushing for 9/11 justice. The 9/11 truth movement can avoid all the pitfalls and it won't matter. The mainstream media is simply never going to cover 9/11 in an honest manner. Two good examples are the Saudi related Joint Inquiry report 28 pages and al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The analysis of these aspects has been made using government reports and yet the media will not investigate them in an honest manner. 60 Minutes suspended Lara Logan for a report on Benghazi but there was no outrage when Logan and 60 Minutes dismissed Ali Soufan's highly credible accusation of CIA interference in the Cole investigation. Only in a country with a complicit media would that sort of conduct be tolerated. Kill the Messenger reminds us that the game is rigged.

[Project Willow]

...

A movie that makes Webb look like he really was -- a courageous journalist who pursued and exposed an important truth, and then was destroyed for it, and never found vindication but only defeat in his life -- is a) what actually happened, b) very compelling to us, and more dramatically and commercially viable than an untruthful movie that attacks Webb, and c) a hell of a message to send to young journalists today: "Do the right thing, defy the assholes, and you will be destroyed."

Exactly.

Casolaro could have just as easily disappeared -- they're kinda good at that -- but he wasn't.

For a reason.

Yep.

Finally saw it via Netflix disc. It is a great big warning, and amplifies any existing feelings of hopelessness, well, for me anyway. Still glad it's there, better to be realistic than foolishly, fatally polyanna. I think there could be all kinds of interesting intersections to discover between Webb's and Bryant's work. Certainly both have documented aspects of media control. If only I had all the time in the world...

[Nordic]

...

A movie that makes Webb look like he really was -- a courageous journalist who pursued and exposed an important truth, and then was destroyed for it, and never found vindication but only defeat in his life -- is a) what actually happened, b) very compelling to us, and more dramatically and commercially viable than an untruthful movie that attacks Webb, and c) a hell of a message to send to young journalists today: "Do the right thing, defy the assholes, and you will be destroyed."

Exactly.

Casolaro could have just as easily disappeared -- they're kinda good at that -- but he wasn't.

For a reason.

Yep.

Finally saw it via Netflix disc. It is a great big warning, and amplifies any existing feelings of hopelessness, well, for me anyway. Still glad it's there, better to be realistic than foolishly, fatally polyanna. I think there could be all kinds of interesting intersections to discover between Webb's and Bryant's work. Certainly both have documented aspects of media control. If only I had all the time in the world...

Hey if we had money and time we could start a genuine Think Tank.

If I ever win the Lotto I promise to do that.

[MinM]

You have to give Jeremy Renner credit for getting this made. He obviously didn't get any help promoting or distributing it but they seemed to stay true to Webb's story.

In the commentary the director (Michael Cuesta) draws comparisons to All the President's Men and Parallax View.

Fred Weil: Some stories are just too true to tell.

*****

I recently saw Kill The Messenger which I liked, so it's not completely surprising to hear a mainstream Hollywood film will be made about Mena CIA drug running and Barry Seal.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/70036

It will be a reteaming of Edge of Tomorrow star Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman.

Gary Spinelli (the Dolph Lundgren flick STASH HOUSE) sold MENA to Universal last year for a cool million. It's a true story about a pilot named Barry Seal, a drug-runner who worked alongside both the C.I.A. and the Columbian cartels. Cruise would be playing Seal, and according to that Deadline report, would also utilize his real-life flying skills; not a stretch, considering what he's been willing, time and time again, to do for his movies (seriously, watch that M:I-2 opening again).

Sadly, I have the feeling the American public wants no apology jingoistic garbage like American Sniper as far as political docudramas than stuff that exposes uncomfortable truths. Funny how times have changed since the public's strong appetite for media/political thrillers(3 Days of the Condor, the Conversation, Parallax View, All The President's Men, Blow Out, Network, etc)

Hard telling what the American public has an appetite for since some of the better projects get killed before they take off (ie., Hugh Jackman's Orders to Kill and Wesley Snipes' Code Name Zorro).

Thanks to Cruise being crazy as crap and being unencumbered in protecting his image ie., Hugh Jackman or a Wesley Snipes, he's free to put out these types of movies. Not only unencumbered but his church owes their existence to actively seeking out blackmail material on the powers that be ..

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief
Friday, February 06, 2015

In 2013, Bob spoke to author Lawrence Wright about his book, "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief," which delves deep into the history and practices of the Church, including its hostility toward reporters and strong ties with Hollywood. With the debut of the film version of his book at Sundance last week, we revisit the conversation...

BOB GARFIELD: You're not the first journalist to delve into Scientology. The St. Petersburg Times now the Tampa Bay Times, did it. The Los Angeles Times did it, Time Magazine and an author, Paulette Cooper.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: She was the very first to do an exposé of Scientology in the middle seventies, and the Church harassed her. They framed her for threatening the President with assassination and threatening the Church with a bomb threat. It was all phony but they got her indicted. And it wasn't until the FBI raided the Church in 1977 and found a file called Operation Freakout that they discovered that there was a plan all along to drive Paulette Cooper insane or to get her locked up and imprisoned.

BOB GARFIELD: Operation Freakout, the dirty tricks and the harassment of Cooper, foreshadowed another initiative of a breathtaking or a stomach-turning scope. Tell me about Operation Snow White.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: L. Ron Hubbard was paranoid about the information that the government was amassing on Scientology at the time, so he ordered his wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of what was called the Guardian's Office - that was their sort of secret police and CIA - to infiltrate organs of American government and foreign governments, and also Washington Post, other newspapers. They infiltrated the IRS, the FBI, the Justice Department. They infiltrated the American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations.

BOB GARFIELD: With moles, members as employees.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Yeah, more than 5,000 people were employed in this effort to gain control of all the pertinent information about Scientology, either steal it or change it or just bring it to the awareness of the Church.

BOB GARFIELD: Throughout the book, you employ neutral language. You keep your cool, even when you're writing about David Miscavige, who comes off as a violent sociopath. [LAUGHS] And you’re equally detached-sounding when you write about L. Ron Hubbard himself, despite the lies and the paranoia that you also describe. But there is one character in the book who just can't escape your opprobrium, and that's Tom Cruise.

[CLIP/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]:

ANNOUNCER: Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise, Scientologist.

TOM CRUISE: I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it’s something that you have to earn.

[END CLIP]

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: The Church was always looking for an exemplary figure that would represent Scientology to the world, a shining celebrity that would give credibility and attention to the Church. He's their symbol. He’s the most important Scientologist, except L. Ron Hubbard, there ever has been. He's their main pitch man. It’s his close friend, David Miscavige, who runs the Church. It’s Tom Cruise, who benefits materially from the labor of these impoverished Sea Org workers who have built him an airplane hangar for his airplane collection and handcrafted a limousine for him and surround his household staff and cook his dinners.

BOB GARFIELD: And, if you're right, pimping him a girlfriend.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: You know, he was breaking up with Penelope Cruz and he let it be known that uh, he wanted another girlfriend, and they auditioned a number of different Scientology women, and they came upon a very attractive Iranian-American. Her name was Nazanin Boniadi, and they told her that they had a mission for her. And they put her in the Celebrity Center, away from her family, and they took her shopping in Beverly Hills for a new wardrobe. They fixed her hair. They fixed her teeth. And then they took her to New York. There she found the object of her mission was Tom Cruise. She moved in with him, lived with him for a while and then went in with him in his hideaway in Telluride. David Miscavige and his wife came, and one night they were talking, and Miscavige speaks in a kind of rapid Philadelphia brogue and she couldn't quite understand him. And so she, a couple of times, asked him to repeat himself.

And the next day everybody was inflamed with her, the way she treated the leader of the Church. And after that, Cruise decided to have nothing more to do with her, and she went off to Clearwater, Florida, the spiritual headquarters. She was made to clean out a garbage dumpster and clean a public toilet with a toothbrush.

BOB GARFIELD: You observe in the book that the fate of the Church of Scientology hinges on its staying in good graces with the Internal Revenue Service, which gets to determine whether an organization is a bona fide tax-exempt religion. At the moment, the IRS is copacetic with David Miscavige and penal punishments and harassment and, and violence?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: That tax exemption was granted in 1993. The Church of Scientology at the time was a billion dollars in arrears on its past taxes. It just decided not to pay taxes. And it had to get a tax exemption or it would go out of business. So they launched 2400 lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents. They had private investigators trailing agents to see who drank too much, who was fooling around, and they published personal stories smearing the character of people that were working for the agency.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, it’s one thing to bully an author and another thing to bully apostates. But the IRS, the IRS? How do you man-handle the IRS?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: It’s amazing to think about that this rather small organization could bring the IRS to heel. But they really were intimidated by Scientology. So the deal was that those lawsuits would stop and those personal stories would stop, and the Church gained its exemption. And once that happened, the vast protections of the First Amendment encompass the Church and its behavior...

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/265094- ... ranscript/

The Scientologists and the Film Critics

BTW it took Tom Cruise's money and clout to produce this exposé of The New Republic ..


http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017230565

[MinM]

@espn: ICYMI: Ex-NFL QB Erik Kramer was wounded in what his former wife is calling a suicide attempt: http://es.pn/1PosThb

At the end of the dvd commentary for Kill the Messenger they mentioned that on his first attempt to shoot himself Gary Webb merely grazed his temple. Sounds pretty much like what happened with Erik Kramer only Webb finished what he started. Which sounds very plausible.

[divideandconquer]

Taken from a review I found interesting: http://www.nathankleffman.com/2014/10/government-drug-dealing-from-kill.html

Just like when I woke up and saw how 100 different puzzle pieces only formed a coherent picture when taken together, watching Kill the Messenger in isolation may result in one walking away with the feeling that the story of government drug-dealing must be exaggerated. Sure, there may be a few bad apples, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead, take a look at decades of government complicity, collaboration and encouragement of worldwide drug-dealing, from the forests of Nicaragua to the mountains of Afghanistan. Think of the hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money laundered through the largest and most prestigious banks on the planet. Contemplate the additional billions spent by tax payers to "fight" a hopeless war that does nothing to stop drugs, but if anything just takes out the government's small-time competition in the drug-dealing business. Finally, review the network of industries making hundreds of millions in building jails, housing inmates, and profiting off of their slave labor. Taken together, this is something so diabolical it only belongs at the doorstep of a shadowy group like the Illuminati.

[bks]

thatsmystory wrote:

I recently watched Kill the Messenger and it hit home regarding the lack of success in pushing for 9/11 justice. The 9/11 truth movement can avoid all the pitfalls and it won't matter. The mainstream media is simply never going to cover 9/11 in an honest manner. Two good examples are the Saudi related Joint Inquiry report 28 pages and al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The analysis of these aspects has been made using government reports and yet the media will not investigate them in an honest manner.

Missed this the first time 'round, but a good reminder: Damning facts often do get reported. The genius of the corporate media system, and a core aspect of the professional dishonesty it breeds among its inhabitants, is the requirement that the factual record never be presented coherently or in a defragmented way. This is why sites like HistoryCommons can be so vital and powerful: they use the empire's recording of its own deeds in building the case against it, something that can be done if you just drop the professional journalist's cowardice and career orientation. HC doesn't always succeed in this effort, but I'm convinced that their way of history is a very, very good way, and wish I'd done more to help them when more of the 9/11 chips were on the table.

[tapitsbo]

Perhaps one of the next large-scale "deep events" will itself be a limited hangout/partial reveal of past events.

[seemslikeadream]

Write "Gary Webb was right" 500 times on the blackboard

Barry Seal wasn’t starring in a Jason Borne movie
Posted on November 13, 2015 by Daniel Hopsicker

As MCA Universal prepares a preemptive strike against America’s most important recent history—the public assassination of one of the original American Drug Lords in a movie starring a world- famous Scientologist playing a man outweighing him by a good hundred pounds—it may be time to stand up for what's left of the truth.

badcasting

So here it is…This really happened.


On the evening of January 22, 1963 ten American men are on a night out on the town in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, wearing black suits and black skinny ties, smoking and drinking around a ringside table with a white table cloth. At some point, the men look up, then break into a drunken chorus of "Cheese!"

A shutter snaps. A flash-gun goes off. A nightclub photographer advances his camera.

Barry-MexCity63-HiRez



Write "Gary Webb was right" 500 times on the blackboard

Most of the men wear loopy grins. Most of the other tables are empty. Maybe its almost closing time, maybe on the kind of night which began much earlier at a restaurant whose name no one remembers. The moment—even as it happened—probably meant nothing to anyone there.

untitledG

Almost 40 years later that had changed, because the picture freezes an important moment in time, and is the only extant photograph of the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

And look who was there: Yale graduate Porter Goss, who will one day become Director of the CIA during the middle years of George W. Bush's administration, sitting beside Barry Seal, whose cocaine fueled the go-go 80's, and who Federal prosecutors called ‘America's biggest drug smuggler.’

Its a picture that changes your worldview. It has historic significance. A young Porter Goss, in a photograph of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military and intel types who look exactly like you'd expect a secret CIA assassination team to look.


It's Peachy!
AK0eGqqwIt's like finding a snapshot of J. Edgar Hoover wearing a peach sundress and matching lipstick. You're a little surprised. But not shocked. Still, once you’ve seen it, its impossible to forget.

The picture turned up during research for “Barry & the boys” in a safe overlooked by a 7-man "clean-up" team from the U.S. State Department, who British journalist and author Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported had been assigned to comb through Seal's records at the home of his widow in Louisiana.
goss-seal4

Ahead of Bill Clinton's 1996 Presidential re-election campaign, in 1995, rumors circulated that Seal's friendship a decade earlier with the then-Arkansas Governor—during Seal’s not-terribly-covert aviation supply operation out of Mena Arkansas, arms down, cocaine back—somehow posed a threat to his campaign.

In 1963, Barry Seal (on the left, third from front) was just 24, yet already a veteran CIA pilot. Sitting beside him (second from left) is Porter Goss.

felix-rodriguez23

Next to Goss (front left) is notorious Cuban "freedom fighter" Felix Rodriguez, whose identity in the picture was so obvious that death threats wafting in from his general direction proved unavailing.

Rodriguez will later go on to fame as an Iran Contra operative and close confidant of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Before he got all Cuba Libre-y he'd been a vice cop in Havana—a vice cop in Havana!—during Batista's Mob-run regime.


"Guido, meet the General. General, meet Guido."
sturgis-seymour1Covering his face with his sport coat on the other side of the table is the only Operation 40 celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft. Frank Stugis couldn't stretch his sport coat high enough to cover his swept-back “Big Wave in Hawaii” pompadour, though he gets points for trying. A decade later he'll be one of the Watergate burglars, and, perhaps unsurprisingly,he's also strongly suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination.

The man beside Sturgis (front right) closely resembles William Houston Seymour,New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation. Unlike others of the spook superstars at the table, I received no confirmation about Seymour. But if it is him, it would make sense.

Double-Chek was a CIA front used to recruit pilots like Barry Seal, sitting right across the table. And Seymour has also been fingered by many Kennedy assassination researchers as the man who impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald during times when the original "lone nut gunman" was out of the country and couldn't be there to impersonate himself.


The 'Apparatchik' from Punta Gorda
goss-secret-32By the time of Goss' confirmation hearings to become head of the CIA, the pic had been widely circulated over the internet. No one in America's mainstream media ever pressed him about it.

Then, too, to no fanfare, in fact to deafening silence, Mohamed Atta and the other 9/11 terrorist hijackers were using Goss' Congressional District in Charlotte County, whose main city of Punta Gorda was founded by "retired" CIA agents, as a base of operations while they conspired to commit mass murder.

Yet like apparatchiks on the podium in Moscow Square standing stoically in the cold, the Sons of Privilege toed the party line. "Rep. Porter J.Goss has disclosed precious few details of his CIA employment from roughly 1960 to 1971," reported a profile in the Associated Press.

Reuters called him a "mystery man," and said he had been "close-mouthed about his past." Well, duh. The creases in his jeans should have been a clue.



Choate him out!
preppyGoss is the product of a patrician Connecticut upbringing, an elite prep school, and Yale University, the CIA’s unofficial alma mater. And he was in a secret society too: Book & Snake,according to author (Fleshing Out Skull & Bones) and publisher (Trine Day) Kris Millegan.

So when Yalie Skull & Bonesman George W Bush "tapped" "tapped" "tapped" on Yalie Book & Snakesman ( Snakeshead?Snakes-person?) Porter Goss' icy windowpane, naming him Director of the CIA, it said a lot. Conservatives will be pleased that what passes for civic life in America is still a game of Inside Baseball. Liberals will continue to ignore the issue.

book-snake

In "TERRORISM FIGHT KEEPS REP. GOSS IN POLITICAL FRAY" The Orlando Sentinel reported "During his junior year, he (Goss) met a CIA recruiter through his ROTC commanders… With a prep-school education and a Greek major at Yale, Goss passed up the conventional life to be a CIA spook,"

Going to work for the CIA (or the intelligence industry in one of its many (shape-shifting?) forms is probably no less conventional for Yale graduates from secret societies like Skull & Bones and Book & Snake, statistically speaking, than founding a computer start-up is for graduates of Stanford.

Why else would anyone bother to learn the secret handshake?



A plethora of coincidinks
middle-one1While in Congress, Goss often found himself paired with a fellow Floridian, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee led the joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9-11 attack.

In fact, the two men were having breakfast together in Washington on the morning of September 11th, 2001, along with the head of Pakistani intelligence, a man later accused of wiring $100,000 to Mohamed Atta in the U.S.

When, three years later, questions were raised as to just how it was both major party candidates in the 2004 Presidential election belonged to the same secret society (Skull & Bones, no less), there was a silence, and then a shuffling of feet. Maybe a cough or two. But no answers.

While testifying before Congress on February 9, 2004 about the faulty premise behind the tragically stupid war in Iraq, U.N.’s Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay somewhat pointedly noted that "Closed orders and secret societies, whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of failure without outside input."

Maybe I'm irony-impaired, and need to get down to GNC for some supplements… But while talking about weapons of mass destruction to a committee of the Congress of the United States of America, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector cited—from deep left field and out of the blue—secret societies.

Just how odd do things have to get before nothing seems odd anymore?

[MinM]

CBC News Alerts ‏@CBCAlerts 3h3 hours ago

#LosAngeles orders search of all schools after threat forces closure. Officials say threats common, but being cautious after #SanBernardino.

All of the aspiring little Freeway Ricky Rosses of LA must be thrilled having the LAPD going through their lockers this morning.

Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks
Jesse Katz admits that attacking journalist Gary Webb's CIA-cocaine expose ruined Webb's life
By Nick Schou Thursday, May 30 2013

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, "Dark Alliance," in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.'s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Kill the Messenger is based on Webb's 1998 book, Dark Alliance, in which he attempted to rebuild his ruined reputation, as well as my 2004 biography of Webb, Kill the Messenger, which shares the movie's title. (I worked as a consultant on the script.)

The movie will portray Webb as a courageous reporter whose career and life were cut short when the nation's three most powerful newspapers piled on to attack Webb and his three-part Mercury News series on the CIA's crack-cocaine connection.

The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb's "Dark Alliance" series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America's most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.

Much of the Times' attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb's reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.

Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide.

No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. But on May 22, Katz, who has penned a Los Angeles magazine story hitting newsstands now that resurfaces the Gary Webb episode, essentially apologized, on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk With Larry Mantle.

Katz was discussing "Freeway Rick Is Dreaming" in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine, in which he profiles Ricky Ross, the notorious crack-cocaine dealer with whom Katz has a long, tortured relationship. In 1994, shortly after Ross got out of prison for coke trafficking, Katz wrote that Ross was the mastermind of America's crack-cocaine epidemic, at his peak pushing half a million rocks a day.

"[I]f there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick," Katz's 1994 L.A. Times article claimed. "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived."

But Webb's 1996 Mercury News series exposed a startling fact: Ross' mentor and chief supplier, who helped him climb to the top of the crack trade, was Nicaraguan exile Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes. Blandón belonged to one of Nicaragua's most prominent political families and was a major backer of the "contras" — a rebel movement secretly created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista rebels.

While Blandón supplied Ricky Ross with coke, the Mercury News revealed, Blandón and others in his politically connected drug cartel, which supplied Ross, were using drug profits to arm the contras.

"Dark Alliance" blew the lid off the CIA's ties to America's crack market by showing for the first time not just the agency's role in turning a blind eye to Nicaraguan contras smuggling cocaine to the United States but also vividly illustrating the role of that cocaine in the spread — via marketers like Ross — of crack in America's inner cities.

Katz' rather embarrassed employer, the L.A. Times — caught off-guard by Webb's reporting in its own backyard — yanked Katz all the way from Texas to re-evaluate Ricky Ross' role in the crack epidemic.

Katz recast Ross as a much less central player in the crack plague, thus helping dilute the effect of "Dark Alliance," which had caused a firestorm of outrage, particularly in black communities.

"The story of crack's genesis and evolution," Katz newly wrote, "is filled with a cast of interchangeable characters, from ruthless billionaires to strung-out curb dealers, none of whom is central to the drama."

In researching the scandal over "Dark Alliance" for my book, I interviewed Katz about the stark disconnect between his two stories about Ross, and he struggled to answer. "I'm not sure I can answer that in a wholly satisfying way," he mused.

In his new Los Angeles magazine story, Katz buries and downplays his role in the debacle. Katz says he was just one of many reporters who ganged up on Webb. He apologizes only for bloating Ross' importance in his first Times piece on the dealer.

Contacted days ago, Katz said my interview of him for Kill the Messenger — "questions I didn't really have good answers for" in part inspired the new magazine article, but he had to edit out some of his self-reflection because the story ran too long.

He mostly focuses on Ross' near-miraculous early release from a life prison sentence, his hair-weave business schemes, his name-rights lawsuit against Florida rapper Rick Ross and a floundering movie deal. However, on AirTalk, when Mantle noted that many listeners were calling in with questions about "Dark Alliance," Katz made his confession.

"As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope," Katz explained. "And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California."

Katz stated there were "some flaws" in Webb's stories, and the L.A. Times "pointed all those out."

Katz seems to be referring to the fact that Times editor Shelby Coffey assigned a staggering 17 reporters to exploit any error in Webb's reporting, including the most minute. The newspaper's response to "Dark Alliance" was longer than Webb's series. It was replete with quotes from anonymous CIA sources who denied the CIA was connected to contra-backing coke peddlers in the ghettos. Eventually, Webb's unnerved editors in San Jose withdrew their support for his story.

L.A.'s alternative papers, New Times L.A. and L.A. Weekly, not only covered the media controversy but also advanced Webb's reporting. In my case, working for both L.A. Weekly and OC Weekly, I revealed that a central character in the Mercury News' series — a security consultant, former cop and partner of Blandón's, named Ronald Lister — gave Blandón weapons, which he sold to Ross, and helped the drug ring launder cash and evade police detection.

While Lister was laundering cash, he was staging "business meetings" with death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson in El Salvador, as well as "retired" CIA agents in California.

Webb was vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandón.

The L.A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post buried the IG's report; under L.A. Times editor Michael Parks, the paper didn't acknowledge its release for months.

The L.A. Times' smears against Webb continued after his death. After Webb committed suicide in a suburb of Sacramento in December 2004 — the same day he was to vacate his just-sold home and move in with his mother — a damning L.A. Times obituary described the coverage by the three papers as "discrediting" Webb.

As Katz admitted to Mantle, "We really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. ... And it ruined that reporter's career."

Under editor Dean Baquet, the L.A. Times did publish a commentary I wrote on the 10-year anniversary of Webb's Mercury News series. In it, I lambasted the paper for its unfair treatment of Webb.

The L.A. Times has never apologized for its attacks on a reporter who took his own life after being hounded out of mainstream journalism. A few months before Webb died, he landed a part-time gig at the alt-weekly newspaper Sacramento News & Review, thanks to its sympathetic editor, Tom Walsh.

The brilliant, award-winning reporter wrote about library funding and traffic-ticket shakedowns. But the pay couldn't cover his mortgage and Webb had reached the end of his dwindling psychological resources.

Sadly, because Webb shot himself in the head twice — the first bullet simply went through his cheek — many falsely believe the CIA killed him. As Katz, if not the rest of the Times crew, knows, it wasn't the CIA that helped load the gun that killed Gary Webb.

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/news ... atz-crack/

Michael Cuesta is one of the guys behind Showtime's propaganda series "Homeland" started in Israel.

Peter Landesman's dubious past has been documented in The Curous Case of Peter Landesman.

viewtopic.php?p=235749#p235749

[MinM]

https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/ ... 7053732864

...Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called “Frogman Case.”...

CIA Drug Asset

Along the Southern Front, in Costa Rica, the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander...

...Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica.
Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas charged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the contras.

Gomez “was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the contras] and nobody was taking ... profit they weren’t supposed to,” Cabezas stated publicly.

But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez’s picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment.

While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas’s allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz’s report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez’s direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry’s investigation in 1987...

Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA’s station chief in Costa Rica, later confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez “was involved in a very sensitive operation” for North’s “Enterprise.” The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged...

@UPROXX

Yes, O.J. Simpson really made a 1994 NBC pilot titled Frogmen that was locked away forever http://uproxx.it/1UeS3Vm
11:13 PM - 15 Mar 2016

The seventh episode of The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story focused mainly on the infamous bloody glove moment at the trial, where Christopher Darden directed Simpson to try it on only to have the plan backfire when the glove appeared too tight. It was an important moment in the trial, and therefore an important moment in the series, but it was completely overshadowed — for me, at least — by a brief discussion Marcia Clark had with Christopher Darden’s friends about O.J. Simpson’s starring role in a scrapped 1994 NBC pilot titled Frogmen.

Yes, Frogmen was a real thing. It was described at the time as a kind of A-Team-esque series about beach bum former Navy SEALs. If you read that sentence and thought, “Well that sounds like an incredible television show,” there’s a good reason for that: It sounds like an incredible television show. From a 2000 Los Angeles Times article about the pilot:

The premise centers on a team of Navy SEALs who, as described in the pilot, “take on special assignments for the government and private sector.”

Simpson plays their leader, John “Bullfrog” Burke, who goes to Costa Rica with four fellow ex-SEALs seeking to rescue a former friend who married Burke’s ex-wife. Burke’s crack team includes a ladies’ man, a master of disguise and a skilled con man. Burke, meanwhile, fronts his operation out of a dive shop in Malibu. The final shot features the group having returned triumphant from their mission–grabbing surfboards and plunging into the surf.

It’s like The A-Team meets Point Break. Starring O.J. Simpson. As a man named Bullfrog. That would be like if someone made a show today about… actually, I don’t have an analogy here. This show was a snowflake. It never made it to air, though, because Simpson was arrested and charged with double murder while Warner Bros. — the studio that was producing the two-hour project — was putting the finishing touches on it. But it almost made its way into the trial anyway due to one scene, in particular.

The show was discussed, but never introduced as evidence, during Simpson’s criminal trial for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman. In a chilling echo of those killings, a scene in the two-hour movie meant to launch the action-drama series features Simpson’s character grabbing what he believes to be an intruder (the young woman turns out to be his daughter) and momentarily holding a knife to her throat.

As for the current state of Frogmen, don’t expect to see it pop up on cable any time soon. All that exists of the project is a 25-minute sales presentation video, which Warner Bros. has locked away in the deepest, darkest part of its vault. (The writer of the Los Angeles Times story, Brian Lowry, was allowed to view the video by a source close to the project.) And they appear to have no intention of releasing it. If they didn’t cash in on the surefire ratings bonanza at the time of the trial, one assumes they’re perfectly happy to let it keep collecting dust.

There is one more interesting fact about Frogmen, though. In addition to Simpson, the pilot also starred an actor named Evan Handler as “a reluctant member of the team.” Handler went on to appear on shows like Californication and Sex and the City, and you can catch him on television right now as… Simpson lawyer Alan Dershowitz on The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

Ryan Murphy, you sly dog.

http://uproxx.com/tv/oj-simpson-frogmen/

keywords: frogmen, costa rica, iran-contra, nbc