Although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers. [For more details on the report, see Parry's Lost History.]
See No Evil
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's Volume Two was posted at the CIA's Internet site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood.
Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of Volume Two.
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-cocaine story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, some of them rose to become top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb's career never recovered.
Unable to find decent-paying work in a profession where his past awards included a Pulitzer Prize, Webb grew despondent. His marriage broke up. By December 2004, he found himself having to move out of his rented house near Sacramento.
Instead, Webb decided to end his life.
Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A. Times one more chance to set matters right, to revisit the CIA's admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability from the Reagan-era officials implicated in the contra crimes.
But all that followed Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb.
The L.A. Times ran its mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of the admissions in the CIA's Volume Two. No one reading this obit would have understood the profound debt that American history owed to Gary Webb, who deserved the lion's share of the credit for forcing the CIA to make its extraordinary admissions.
Though a personal tragedy for his family and friends, Webb's suicide conveyed a larger message, too. Gary Webb was a kind of canary in the American mine shaft. His fate represented a warning about the dangers that can befall a nation whose journalists care more about their salaries and status than the truth and the public's right to know.
The fifth anniversary of Webb's death should be a moment for reflection, too, by progressives and independent-minded Americans that it is long past time to build media institutions that can support brave journalists who dare to tell difficult truths.
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