Gary Webb's Last Story: The Killing Game

Gary Webb's Last Story: The Killing Game

by Ellen Komp

When investigative reporter Gary Webb was found dead of a gunshot wound on
December 10, 2004 the initial reports all called it an apparent suicide,
despite the fact that no crime scene details or reasons why Webb would have
taken his own life were revealed. The LA Times, which led what HTTP://FAIR.org
called "damage control for the CIA" on Webb's San Jose Mercury News series
linking the CIA with drug trafficking, broke the story of Webb's death on
Sunday and all news outlets dutifully followed suit with their reports.

The Sacramento coroner's office, which has been deluged with phone calls
about the incident, confirmed that Webb had been shot two times in a
statement released the following Tuesday. The Sacramento Bee interviewed
Webb's ex-wife, Sue Bell, who said that Webb had been despondent over his
inability to get a job with a major newspaper and the theft of his
motorcycle just before his death helped push him to suicide, in her opinion.
The Bee reported Webb had paid for his own cremation earlier this year, had
just sold his house because he was unable to meet mortgage payments, and
shot himself with his father's .38 caliber gun.

Ed Smith, spokesperson for the Sacramento coroner's office, said by
telephone that the office would release no further information until the
case is closed, in perhaps two months' time. Smith said that it is not
uncommon for suicide victims to be shot twice, but would not say where the
bullets pierced Mr. Webb or if his fingerprints were found on the weapon.
According to Smith, no sheriff's investigator has been assigned to the case
and it was a Sacramento patrol officer who reported Mr. Webb's death to the
coroner.

Ray Horton of the Humboldt County coroner's office said in an interview for
KMUD radio in Redway that "the flags go up" at his office when a suicide
victim is shot twice. Two-shot suicides almost always involve smaller
caliber weapons, Horton said, adding that the fact that a .38 was used in
Webb's death "should be highly suspicious."

Webb, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, was most famous for writing that
Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold tons of crack cocaine in Los Angeles
and funneled millions of dollars in profits to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan
Contras during the 1980s. As was Senator John Kerry before him, Webb was
discredited for his investigations, even though a report by the CIA later
confirmed them. In 1997, then-Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos
backed away from Webb's series, and later received an ethics award from the
Society of Newspaper Editors. After quitting the newspaper in December 1997,
Webb continued to defend his reporting with his 1999 book "Dark Alliance:
The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion."

ConspiracyPlanet.com remarks that Webb joins artist Mark Lombardi, J.H.
Hatfield (author of "Fortunate Son"), and journalist Danny Casolaro as the
fourth 'suicide' by a researcher "who had a detailed understanding of the
structure and function of the Bush Crime Family." But liberal commentators
from the Nation to Counterpunch discounted such talk, wondering aloud why
Webb would be targeted so long after his explosive series was published.

Webb was most recently employed by the Sacramento News and Review as a
reporter for their Chico weekly. Chillingly, Webb's last article for that
paper was a cover story that ran on October 21, 2004 titled "The Killing
Game." It was an expose of the US Army's development of video games that
simulate warfare and its use of them to recruit young warriors.

According to Webb's article, the Army and civilian directors of a Navy think
tank at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey joined together in 1999 to
develop "America's Army," an online computer game used to attract computer
gamers into the military.

America's Army was released to the public on the July 4, 2002 (the first
fourth of July after 9/11). There are now more than 4 million registered
users of the game, mostly 13- and 14-year-olds, more than half of whom have
completed the required preliminary weapons training and gone online to play.
The Army says the game has 500 fan sites on the Web, and recruiters have
been busy setting up local tournaments and cultivating an America's Army
"community" on the Internet.

According to Webb's article, the Army has been collecting player information
in a vast relational database system called "Andromeda" that recruiters will
be able to use to look up a player's statistics if one of them shows up in a
recruiting office. Currently, Army game developers are in the process of
creating a statistics-tracking system that can tell how much time a player
spends online, how many kills he's made, which battlefields he's best at,
how many kills he averages an hour and similar minutiae.

"Suppose you played extremely well, and you stayed in the game an extremely
long time," military economist Col. Casey Wardynski told Webb. "You might
just get an e-mail seeing if you'd like any additional information on the
Army."

Through an exclusive long-term contract the Army signed with the French
software company Ubisoft, America's Army will be out in a "console" version,
for use with Xbox and Sony game machines. Currently, it is playable only on
high-end PCs, "which reaches a certain demographic for household income,"
Wardynski tells an interviewer. "We'd like to reach a broader audience, and
consoles get you there. For every PC gamer, there are four console gamers."
Also in the works, he says, are an America's Army clothing line, comic books
and toy action figures.

When American's Army was released, Webb reported, Miami attorney Jack
Thompson went on ABC News and threatened to seek an injunction, saying it
wasn't the government's job to provide kill 'em games to youngsters. "He was
deluged with angry e-mail and allegedly received death threats," the article
states.

In an interview by telephone, Thompson said he reported death threats he
received by email through chatrooms to America's Army website administrators
after he appeared on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings in 2002. He
called those idle threats, but opined, "I wouldn't be surprised if DOD
and/or the video game industry had [Webb] killed... A lot of money and power
is at stake." The commercial video game industry is grossing $15 billion
yearly, according to Thompson.

Thompson recently wrote a letter to Sen. John McCain calling for the ouster
of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld because of his support of the
Institute for Creative Technologies (ICI) at the University of Southern
California (USC). Thompson writes, "It is now known that ITC has taken
taxpayer dollars and created an urban warfare virtual reality simulator for
our soldiers a) which is being sold as a commercial game to civilian
teenagers, with Rumsfeld's approval, and b) and which is being used by
foreign terrorists to train their operatives to repulse our troops in Iraq."

On November 20, USC announced it received a second five-year grant for ICI,
with the U.S. Army more than doubling its support to $100 million. The
endowment represents the largest research grant ever received by USC. With
the $45 million the University has spent since 1999, it developed two games,
Full Spectrum Command (PC) and Full Spectrum Warrior (Xbox), which has since
become a top-selling consumer game. Imbued with a high level of artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities, both games contain features tailored to the
Army's training methods and were developed with teaching personnel at the
infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia, according to a USC press release.

In a bizarre coincidence, as reports of Webb's death were circulating,
Oracle software announced it finally succeeded in its hostile takeover of
PeopleSoft. Webb had worked for the state of California as a member of an
audit committee investigating former Gov. Gray Davis' controversial award of
a $95 million no-bid contract to Oracle Corp. in 2001. Tom Dresslar, a
spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, was quoted in Webb's
obituaries around the state as a fellow member of that committee.

During the lead up to the announcement of the Scott Peterson death penalty
verdict on Monday, Fox News ran an interview with Oracle chief Larry Ellison
claiming the US economy is on the upswing, while the news runner at the
bottom of the screen attempted to debunk stories run by all the major
networks that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was
poisoned. Fox's Bill O'Reilly reportedly told his former producer that
critic Al Franken "would get a knock on his door" someday. What passes for
news and the thuggery that accompanies it in the wake of Gary Webb's passing
is even more chilling than his death.

Robert Parry, who published an article on Webb at www.consortiumnews.com ,
also makes the case on that site for liberals to support independent media.
Webb's tragic apparent suicide makes it very clear that this is desperately
needed.

See Webb's last story at
http://www.newsreview.com/issues/chico/2004-10-21/cover.asp

By Ellen Komp updated 12/17/04
ellen@civilliberties.org

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/kompellen,garywebb,12,18,04.htm