Every once in a while, individuals stumble upon information that simply CANNOT come out. This type of information usually includes prima facie evidence of capital crimes and/or active covert operations.
The murder of Gary Webb is the highest profile political assassination to occur in the U.S. in several years. Hopefully, we will learn about what Gary was working on before he was killed.
As with all political assassinations that cross my radar, I will continue to monitor the situation closely for any further information. Anyone with inside information on this case is encouraged to contact me via PGP encrypted email. My PGP key is
here. WARNING: IF YOU DO HAVE INSIDE INFORMATION ON THIS THING, DO NOT USE PLAINTEXT EMAIL OR YOUR HOME OR WORK INTERNET CONNECTION. THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY. I would encourage you to CC any information to John Young of
Cryptome. Scroll down the page for John's PGP key. Everyone needs to keep their eyes and ears open, espcially in the immediate aftermath of this crime. If Webb was onto an active op, there's a chance that it might not have been shut down (or retasked) yet:
The full text of Gary Webb's obituary from the San Jose Mercury News follows:
Gary Webb, a former Mercury News investigative reporter, author and legislative staffer who ignited a firestorm with his controversial stories, died Friday in an apparent suicide in his suburban Sacramento home. He was 49.
The Sacramento County coroner's office said that when A Better Moving Company arrived at Mr. Webb's Carmichael home at about 8:20 a.m. Friday, a worker discovered a note posted to the front door which read: ``Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.''
Mr. Webb, an award-winning journalist, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head, Sacramento County Deputy Coroner Bill Guillot said Saturday.
Mr. Webb's friends and colleagues described him as a devoted father and a funny, dogged reporter who was passionate about investigative journalism.
As a staff writer for the Mercury News from 1989 to 1997, he exposed freeway retrofitting problems in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and wrote stories about the Department of Motor Vehicles' computer software fiascos.
Mr. Webb was perhaps best known for sparking a national controversy with a 1996 story that contended supporters of a CIA-backed guerrilla army in Nicaragua helped trigger America's crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. The ``Dark Alliance'' series in the Mercury News came under fire by other news organizations, and the paper's own investigation concluded the series did not meet its standards.
Mr. Webb resigned a year and a half after the series appeared in the paper. He then published his book, ``Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.''
In the past few years, Mr. Webb worked in the California Assembly Speaker's Office of Member Services and for the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. The committee investigated charges that Oracle received a no-bid contract from Gov. Gray Davis. After being laid off from his legislative post last year, Mr. Webb was hired by the Sacramento News and Review, a weekly publication.
Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer who has known Mr. Webb for more than a decade, was distraught Saturday when he heard that his friend may have taken his own life.
``He had a fierce commitment to justice, truth and cared a lot about people who are forgotten and society tries to shove into the dark corners,'' Dresslar said. ``It's a big loss for me personally and a great loss for the journalism community.''
Services for Mr. Webb are pending.MORE: DEAD OF MULTIPLE, SELF-INFLICTED GUNSHOT WOUNDS TO THE HEADMultiple, self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.
Wounds... Self-inflicted...Gary Webb, a prize-winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, officials said.
Mr. Webb, 49, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning of gunshot wounds to the head, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office said Saturday.
He left a note, but officials would not disclose its contents.
"I'm still in a state of shock," said Tom Dresslar, who works as a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and had known Mr. Webb for 15 years.
"He was a hard-core, no-fear investigative reporter," Dresslar said. "He wasn't afraid to stand up to whatever authority."
The two worked together when the Joint Legislative Audit Committee was investigating the Davis administration over the failed Oracle Corp. software contract.
Dresslar said Mr. Webb brought all the skills and tenacity that he had honed as an investigative reporter to his job as an investigator for the Assembly. "I was proud to work with him and call him a friend," Dresslar said.
Mr. Webb was divorced and had three children, according to Dresslar.
Most recently, Mr. Webb had been reporting for the Sacramento News & Review, covering politics and state government.
Mr. Webb had been working in the California Assembly speaker's Office of Member Services until February, when he was ousted after the new speaker, Fabian Núñez, took office.
Mr. Webb won more than 30 journalism awards in his career, which included stints with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the San Jose Mercury News.
But it was Mr. Webb's tenure at the Mercury News from 1988 to 1997 that made his name in the business and eventually drove him from daily newspapers.
Mr. Webb, who was based in the newspaper's Sacramento bureau, authored a three-part investigative series in 1996 that linked the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandin ista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding south-central Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The series, "Dark Alliances: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," was controversial almost from the start.
Even as newspapers nationwide carried versions of Mr. Webb's reporting and congressional leaders called for investigations, the CIA director at the time visited Los Angeles for an unprecedented town hall meeting with area residents at which he denied the allegations and was met with loud jeers.
Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, followed up with reports questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper turned on him.
In a letter to readers published in the Mercury News in May 1997, then-Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos told readers there had been problems with the series and that "we fell short at every step of our process - in the writing, editing and production of our work."
Within a month of that note's publication, Mr. Webb told the Washington Post that he had been pulled off the story, and his editors had told him they would not publish his follow-ups.
He also said he was fighting a transfer from the Sacramento bureau to a posting in Cupertino.
By then, however, his fate at the Mercury News was sealed, and he left the paper that year, eventually taking a job with the Assembly.
Mr. Webb later published a 548-page book based on his series, and in a 1998 interview with The Bee he said he still was befuddled over how he became notorious while the allegations in his stories were dismissed.
"That is an amazing phenomenon," he said. "I'm still not exactly sure how that happened."MORE: Red Light, Green CashThis is a recent story by Gary Webb about the criminal activities related to cities robbing the public blind with traffic cameras.
Maybe the traffic cameras were only the tip of the iceberg. What else did Webb find out?
MORE: The Killing GameThis is another recent Gary Webb article. This one describes disturbing aspects of a video game designed jointly by the U.S. Army and Navy called
America's Army. Clearly, this game is the front end of a something that makes the original MKULTRA programs seem innocuous by comparison. I wonder what close analysis of the sound and graphics used in this game would reveal... Are any "extra" image frames inserted into the gameplay? Just what exactly is contained on the audio tracks?
Are you confused? Are you wondering where I'm going with this? Too lazy to read the books, the declassified documents, the victim accounts? Then watch the 2004 version of
The Manchurian Candidate again and pay close attention to the scenes where the troops are being
modified. Note the video displays. Oh sure, that's just a movie. It's all made up.... Well, how about the
18,000 pages of recently released information related to CIA mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. That's right. The documents describe the creation of information couriers and unsuspecting assassins in the 1950s and 1960s. But all of that research and development ended, you tell yourself, because the government realized how evil all of that stuff was and quit working on it.
Yep. Everything is A-Ok.
Oh yeah, by the way, make sure your children download the latest free first-person-shooter games from the U.S. military, and that they "play" for several hours per day. What's that? The guy who wrote this article is dead of
multiple, self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. Nevermind all of that. Supersize your freedom fries... One last thing. How many of the kids playing this game are taking psychiatric medications? Ahhh, I'd say .mil has a steady stream of choice MK candidates lined up:
From an Army report: Aptitudes related to information handling and information culture values are seen as vital to the effectiveness of the high-tech, network-centric Army of the future, and young American gamers are seen as especially proficient in these capabilities. More importantly, when young Americans enter the Army, they increasingly will find that key information will be conveyed via computer video displays akin to the graphical interfaces found in games.
With the vast funding of the U.S. government behind them, the Army/Navy team began developing a game that hopefully would turn some of its players into real soldiers. The overall mission statement ... was to develop a game with appeal similar to the game Counter-Strike, wrote Michael Zyda, the director of the Navy think tank. We took Counter-Strike as our model, but with heavy emphasis on realism and Army values and training.
An experimental psychologist from the Navy helped tweak the games sound effects to produce heightened blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate. It was released in digital double surround sound, which few games are. In terms of game play, it was designed as a tactical shooter, slower-paced, more deliberate, but with Counter-Strikes demanding squad tactics and communications--a serious game for kids who took their war gaming seriously.Research Credit: AV
posted by Kevin at 1:17 PM
