A Mole in the Progressive Movement?
Wed Jan 5, 2005 15:17
64.140.158.54
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
A Mole in the Progressive Movement?
By Andres Kargar
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/kargar01042005
I’ve been pondering this piece since I heard the news of the death of Gary Webb. I had been following Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series with great interest, not because the US government’s involvement in drugs was anything new to me, but simply because I was wondering how long it would be before the corporate media would descend upon Gary like a bunch of vultures and kill his story and his livelihood.
And it happened as I had expected. We are all aware how the corporate press isolated and dismembered Gary. By publishing the results of his painstaking research, Gary had sealed his fate and guaranteed that no mainstream outfit would ever allow him to do anything significant on their behalf.
Despite the fact that the US corporate media can deceive and tame large sectors of the population, there are many from the left, the right, and just plain old Americans who distrust them. Gary’s final emaciation, however, had to come from someone with progressive credentials, and that honor was bestowed upon David Corn of The Nation magazine who stepped in to strike the final blow. Corn, who had not spent a single hour of research on the subject, attacked Gary’s report and claimed that Gary Webb “had overstated the case and had not proven his more cinematic allegations.” Imagine this: a scandal of this magnitude is unfolding that exposes how American citizens are falling victims to the CIA’s drug-running operations, and David Corn sees his patriotic duty to pinpoint how “the case is being overstated.” Personally, if I ran across such an “overstated” and “flawed” report, I would hold the CIA and Los Angeles authorities responsible and demand real investigations, rather than wasting my time, pinpointing unspecified flaws and immeasurable overstatements.
Having been a reader of his material, I knew this was not the first time Corn had been stepping in to attack any serious challenge to the status quo, but I had to search around a little to refresh my memory.
Just recently, in an article in The Nation, David Corn had tried to discredit Greg Palast’s (the award-winning investigative reporter – http://www.GregPalast.com ) claims of fraud in the 2004 presidential elections.
Greg Palast was accused of being a conspiracy-theory nut, and people like him were discredited as making accusations based on supposition ("Those who say yes—at this point—are relying more on supposition than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote count was falsified to benefit Bush"). And of course, Mr. Corn’s interpretation of the facts presented by Greg Palast and others must be the only acceptable one to declare the elections not fraudulent, but fraught with glitches here and there.
In November 2002, at the height of the Bush administration’s intrigues against Iraq and the popular antiwar demonstrations, David Corn steps in to attack and discredit the organizers of these demonstrations (in practice lining up with the Bush regime). In an article in the LA Weekly, Corn accuses the International ANSWER organization (Act Now to Stop War & Racism) of being a front for the Worker’s World Party.
“Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists.” David Corn presumably understands enough math to calculate that the rest could have been members of church groups, union representatives, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
However, since in today’s world, populations in their millions here and there are accused of being “terrorists,” obviously David Corn should have the right to call only a few million antiwar demonstrators dupes of the Workers World Party.
That’s not all. In 2001, David Corn and Marc Cooper (another Nation “liberal") sided with Pacifica Radio Network’s rogue management in their attempts to clean the member radio stations of progressives, sell some stations, and basically dismantle the progressive network.
Later in 2002, David Corn steps in to discredit a fellow by the name of Michael Ruppert who claimed that the Bush administration had been warned in advance of 9/11 attacks. Despite the fact that I always marvel at the vastness of David Corn’s areas of expertise (and intervention), I have to say Michael Ruppert’s basic claims are common knowledge today and were also made in other ways by FBI whistleblowers and others.
David Corn’s response to all these accusations: conspiracy theory—it’s simpler than thinking.
Reviewing all this material might make one think of a mole in the progressive population, but unfortunately, the problem of conformism goes beyond the David Corns, Marc Coopers, and Christopher Hitchens (see http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ ) as individuals. From the positions these people are, as liberals or “progressives”, they can influence others and lead them down the path of conformism, passivity, or false complacence.
Such complacence today is encouraging a section of America’s so-called progressives to accept the Empire’s brutal war against the Third World and the destruction and re-colonization of these countries. Fear and ignorance forces them to buy into this fabricated “war on terror” and the militarization of the society, our minds and consciousness. For when we buy into this crusade, we have accepted the Empire.
Andres Kargar can be reached at galileo19@hotmail.com .
More from Andres Kargar
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/listing/C121/
=====================
Sacramento County - sacbee.com
... County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative
reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head. ...
- 2005-01-05
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/sacramento/story/11772732p-12657577c.html
Facing a barrage of calls from the media and the public, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head.
"The cause of death was determined to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head," the coroner's statement said.
"Information and evidence gathered at the scene of death, including a handwritten note indicating an intention on the part of the decedent to take his own life, resulted in 'suicide' as the determined manner of death.
"The investigation is continuing and will take an estimated additional six to eight weeks to complete."
The statement was issued because of the number of calls that had flooded the Coroner's Office since The Bee reported Sunday that Webb's death was caused by more than one wound.
Webb, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning.
Webb, who most recently had been writing for the Sacramento News & Review, is survived by his ex-wife and three children.
Such a case normally would have sparked little notice. But Webb gained notoriety in the 1990s after writing a series of stories for the Mercury News linking the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s.
His newspaper and others later questioned the conclusions in Webb's reporting, and he left the San Jose newspaper in 1997 after being moved to a suburban bureau.
But Webb's allegations spawned a following, including conspiracy theorists who have worked the Internet feverishly for days with notions that because Webb died from two gunshots he was killed by government agents or the Contras in retribution for the stories written nearly a decade ago.
Webb's ex-wife, Sue Bell, discounted such theories Tuesday, saying the 49-year-old Webb had been distraught for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper.
"The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," Bell said.
She said that before he died Webb wrote and mailed notes to family members and placed his baby shoes in his mother's shed.
Webb had paid for his own cremation earlier in the year and had named Bell months ago as the beneficiary of his bank account, she said. He had sold his house last week, because he could no longer afford the mortgage, and was upset that his motorcycle had been stolen last week.
He had apparently laid out his driver's license before taking his father's .38-caliber pistol, which he kept in his nightstand, to shoot himself.
Coroner Robert Lyons said his office had been swamped with calls. "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots," he said, "but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility."
Services for Webb are pending.
The Bee's Sam Stanton can be reached at (916) 321-1091 or sstanton@sacbee.com .
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/sacramento/story/11772732p-12657577c.html
A Mole in the Progressive Movement?
By Andres Kargar
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/kargar01042005
I’ve been pondering this piece since I heard the news of the death of Gary Webb. I had been following Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series with great interest, not because the US government’s involvement in drugs was anything new to me, but simply because I was wondering how long it would be before the corporate media would descend upon Gary like a bunch of vultures and kill his story and his livelihood.
And it happened as I had expected. We are all aware how the corporate press isolated and dismembered Gary. By publishing the results of his painstaking research, Gary had sealed his fate and guaranteed that no mainstream outfit would ever allow him to do anything significant on their behalf.
Despite the fact that the US corporate media can deceive and tame large sectors of the population, there are many from the left, the right, and just plain old Americans who distrust them. Gary’s final emaciation, however, had to come from someone with progressive credentials, and that honor was bestowed upon David Corn of The Nation magazine who stepped in to strike the final blow. Corn, who had not spent a single hour of research on the subject, attacked Gary’s report and claimed that Gary Webb “had overstated the case and had not proven his more cinematic allegations.” Imagine this: a scandal of this magnitude is unfolding that exposes how American citizens are falling victims to the CIA’s drug-running operations, and David Corn sees his patriotic duty to pinpoint how “the case is being overstated.” Personally, if I ran across such an “overstated” and “flawed” report, I would hold the CIA and Los Angeles authorities responsible and demand real investigations, rather than wasting my time, pinpointing unspecified flaws and immeasurable overstatements.
Having been a reader of his material, I knew this was not the first time Corn had been stepping in to attack any serious challenge to the status quo, but I had to search around a little to refresh my memory.
Just recently, in an article in The Nation, David Corn had tried to discredit Greg Palast’s (the award-winning investigative reporter – http://www.GregPalast.com ) claims of fraud in the 2004 presidential elections.
Greg Palast was accused of being a conspiracy-theory nut, and people like him were discredited as making accusations based on supposition ("Those who say yes—at this point—are relying more on supposition than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote count was falsified to benefit Bush"). And of course, Mr. Corn’s interpretation of the facts presented by Greg Palast and others must be the only acceptable one to declare the elections not fraudulent, but fraught with glitches here and there.
In November 2002, at the height of the Bush administration’s intrigues against Iraq and the popular antiwar demonstrations, David Corn steps in to attack and discredit the organizers of these demonstrations (in practice lining up with the Bush regime). In an article in the LA Weekly, Corn accuses the International ANSWER organization (Act Now to Stop War & Racism) of being a front for the Worker’s World Party.
“Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists.” David Corn presumably understands enough math to calculate that the rest could have been members of church groups, union representatives, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
However, since in today’s world, populations in their millions here and there are accused of being “terrorists,” obviously David Corn should have the right to call only a few million antiwar demonstrators dupes of the Workers World Party.
That’s not all. In 2001, David Corn and Marc Cooper (another Nation “liberal") sided with Pacifica Radio Network’s rogue management in their attempts to clean the member radio stations of progressives, sell some stations, and basically dismantle the progressive network.
Later in 2002, David Corn steps in to discredit a fellow by the name of Michael Ruppert who claimed that the Bush administration had been warned in advance of 9/11 attacks. Despite the fact that I always marvel at the vastness of David Corn’s areas of expertise (and intervention), I have to say Michael Ruppert’s basic claims are common knowledge today and were also made in other ways by FBI whistleblowers and others.
David Corn’s response to all these accusations: conspiracy theory—it’s simpler than thinking.
Reviewing all this material might make one think of a mole in the progressive population, but unfortunately, the problem of conformism goes beyond the David Corns, Marc Coopers, and Christopher Hitchens (see http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ ) as individuals. From the positions these people are, as liberals or “progressives”, they can influence others and lead them down the path of conformism, passivity, or false complacence.
Such complacence today is encouraging a section of America’s so-called progressives to accept the Empire’s brutal war against the Third World and the destruction and re-colonization of these countries. Fear and ignorance forces them to buy into this fabricated “war on terror” and the militarization of the society, our minds and consciousness. For when we buy into this crusade, we have accepted the Empire.
Andres Kargar can be reached at galileo19@hotmail.com .
More from Andres Kargar
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/listing/C121/
=====================
Sacramento County - sacbee.com
... County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative
reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head. ...
- 2005-01-05
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/sacramento/story/11772732p-12657577c.html
Facing a barrage of calls from the media and the public, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head.
"The cause of death was determined to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head," the coroner's statement said.
"Information and evidence gathered at the scene of death, including a handwritten note indicating an intention on the part of the decedent to take his own life, resulted in 'suicide' as the determined manner of death.
"The investigation is continuing and will take an estimated additional six to eight weeks to complete."
The statement was issued because of the number of calls that had flooded the Coroner's Office since The Bee reported Sunday that Webb's death was caused by more than one wound.
Webb, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning.
Webb, who most recently had been writing for the Sacramento News & Review, is survived by his ex-wife and three children.
Such a case normally would have sparked little notice. But Webb gained notoriety in the 1990s after writing a series of stories for the Mercury News linking the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s.
His newspaper and others later questioned the conclusions in Webb's reporting, and he left the San Jose newspaper in 1997 after being moved to a suburban bureau.
But Webb's allegations spawned a following, including conspiracy theorists who have worked the Internet feverishly for days with notions that because Webb died from two gunshots he was killed by government agents or the Contras in retribution for the stories written nearly a decade ago.
Webb's ex-wife, Sue Bell, discounted such theories Tuesday, saying the 49-year-old Webb had been distraught for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper.
"The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," Bell said.
She said that before he died Webb wrote and mailed notes to family members and placed his baby shoes in his mother's shed.
Webb had paid for his own cremation earlier in the year and had named Bell months ago as the beneficiary of his bank account, she said. He had sold his house last week, because he could no longer afford the mortgage, and was upset that his motorcycle had been stolen last week.
He had apparently laid out his driver's license before taking his father's .38-caliber pistol, which he kept in his nightstand, to shoot himself.
Coroner Robert Lyons said his office had been swamped with calls. "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots," he said, "but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility."
Services for Webb are pending.
The Bee's Sam Stanton can be reached at (916) 321-1091 or sstanton@sacbee.com .
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/sacramento/story/11772732p-12657577c.html
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