{"id":139751,"date":"2014-09-26T22:30:45","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T22:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139751"},"modified":"2014-09-26T22:30:45","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T22:30:45","slug":"ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"The CIA\/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Robert Parry<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In\u00a01996 \u2014 as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it \u2014 the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media\u2019s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foia.cia.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/DOC_0001372115.pdf\">internal report<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Entitled \u201cManaging a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,\u201d the six-page report describes the CIA\u2019s damage control after Webb\u2019s \u201cDark Alliance\u201d series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.<\/p>\n<p>Although the CIA\u2019s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration\u2019s cover-up, the mainstream media\u2019s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.<\/p>\n<p>In fall 1998, when the CIA inspector general\u2019s extraordinary findings were released, the major U.S. news media largely ignored them, leaving Webb a \u201cdisgraced\u201d journalist who \u2014 unable to find a decent-paying job in his profession \u2014 committed suicide in 2004, a dark tale that will be revisited in a new movie, \u201cKill the Messenger,\u201d starring Jeremy Renner and scheduled to reach theaters on Oct. 10.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cManaging a Nightmare\u201d report offers something of the CIA\u2019s back story for how the spy agency\u2019s PR team exploited relationships with mainstream journalists who then essentially did the CIA\u2019s work for it, mounting a devastating counterattack against Webb that marginalized him and painted the Contra-cocaine trafficking story as some baseless conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2014\/09\/26\/the-ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover-up\/?\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Parry In\u00a01996 \u2014 as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it \u2014 the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media\u2019s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}