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December 23, 2004
Lisa Pease Describes Gary Webb's Memorial Service
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/
Gary Webb's Memorial Service
This past Saturday, I woke at 6 AM and drove six hours through dense fog to reach Sacramento to attend the memorial service for Gary Webb.
I can’t put into words what Gary meant to me. In my lifetime, there have been only a few people I have truly admired and loved with all my heart. Gary was one of those people. But I knew what was important about him. He was a truth teller in the best tradition. He spent his life writing major exposes of government corruption long before his famous and, if I can say it, fatal Dark Alliance series.
I won’t rehash here the details of his research and the forces he challenged with that story. As most of you know, when I heard he had committed suicide, like so many, I found that nearly impossible to believe. I had met the guy twice, and he struck me as a lion of a man, with a huge, fighting spirit. I knew I had to attend the memorial, to hear from those closest to him what happened. I knew I’d have doubts if I didn’t. I had to see for myself.
I arrived about an hour early and headed for the room where the service was to be held. I did a double-take as I passed the elevator. A man who conveyed the essence of Gary Webb stood there, casually dressed. I kept moving so I wouldn’t stand and stare. I would see him again.
When I got to the door of the room where the service was to be held, I paused, not sure if I should enter yet or not. A few people were just starting to set up tables. I wasn’t even 100% sure I was in the right place. But then I saw Mike Ruppert, who had gotten there just ahead of me, and said hello. A lovely, delightful woman approached me and said she was Gary’s sister-in-law Diana Webb. I started to say something - who knows what, and even as I opened my mouth I started to cry. I apologized, saying I had promised myself I wouldn’t lose it, and Diana instantly made me at ease saying something like, don’t worry - everyone will be losing it today.
Diana asked for my name. When I told her, she said, “Lisa Pease! I loved your Emperor’s New Clothes piece!� I was both shocked and thrilled that she knew who I was. I had sent the family a condolence the night before, with a link to my blog, and Diana and Gary’s ex-wife Susan Bell had both read and loved my little satire. They felt it captured in a nutshell all that happened in that story. People who didn’t follow the unfolding attack on Gary won’t understand the piece. But they had lived through it, and recognized every nuance and reference. Diana told me excitedly that they had put memorial binders together of articles about Gary, and mine was the top piece, right in the front. I can’t tell you how moved I was by that. Other pieces in the binder were from Mike Ruppert, Peter Dale Scott, and several others.
I offered to help set up. I wanted to do what I could. His children had put together a couple of folding board displays of pictures of Gary from all parts of his life, including his book cover and their favorite magazine article, “The Pariah,� by Charles Bowden in Esquire. There were lovely arrangements of flowers that people had sent. And the awards. Gary had won so many awards over his career, from various organizations at various different newspapers. The biggest prize was a Pulitzer he shared with the rest of the San Jose Mercury News team for their coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
As I stood there, surrounded by reminders of his greatness, I felt all the more sad. It wasn’t just a fluke. It wasn’t my imagination. He had spent his whole journalistic career doing what all journalists should do, and so few EVER do, seeking out and telling not just truth, but really important truths, the kind of truths that could change people’s lives for the better. That’s who he was.
Along with the pictures and article references, there were some cartoons and other humorous pieces too. There was this little propaganda poster from a Kentucky paper he had once worked for, saying how they’d NEVER kill a story. There were Tom Tomorrow cartoons. But front and center, everywhere you looked, were the references to the Dark Alliance series. That was the key moment in his life. The moment after which everything he held dear slowly slipped away from him.
As I helped set up, I used that as my little personal time to honor the man, soaking up every last image, reading each award, conducting my own silent prayer for the soul of this lost man.
Suddenly, Susan Bell, Gary’s ex-wife, entered. She was a beautiful woman, remarkably pulled-together under the circumstances. She exuded calm at the moment. When Diana said “This is Lisa Pease,� Susan also recognized my name immediately. She thanked me for a condolence message I had e-mailed the night before, which she had read and appreciated so much she forwarded it to others. She asked me if I would read the Emperor’s New Clothes piece at the ceremony because she thought it told the story and might add a little levity to the ceremony. All his family at some point mentioned something about Gary’s great sense of humor. I remember when I first wrote it, I had sent a copy to Gary, and he had very much appreciated it. Of course I said yes.
The next person I met was the man I had passed at the elevator: Kurt Webb, Gary’s younger brother. They were only 13 months apart in age hence the resemblance. They don’t look that much alike, but the essence is there.
As each new person entered, Mike Ruppert quietly and quite delicately, I’ll add, asked all the appropriate questions, and pointed out the rumors that had been floating on the Internet. Each family member in turn confirmed yes, suicide, no question. Yes, there were two gunshots, but the first one so missed the brain that Gary had to shoot again. Yes, Gary had left a suicide note. When Ruppert mentioned some suggested the suicide note was a forgery, Susan’s eyes flew wide with shock, as she said there’s NO way that was a forgery. She said he had written each of his children a personal note. He had sent boxes to his Mother’s house, but she thought that was just temporary because he was moving. But he sent her things like his baby shoes, and so forth. He knew he wasn’t moving. He had had his motorcycle stolen, something he really loved, just prior. Sadly, the motorcycle was recovered, but Gary was not around to see it.
Kurt said early on and more than once, there’s nothing we can do or say now to bring him back. I’m sure the family all wonders why they didn’t see the signs, why they didn’t do more. But as Kurt described it to me, it was as if Gary was sinking into a vortex; there was nothing any of them could do to bring him back. From what I heard, Gary was seriously, perhaps even clinically depressed, but he never wanted to burden his family with that and would always put on a good show for them. He was a proud man who didn’t want to ask for help. But, as Diana said when she spoke about him, he was always there for others. When she had a cancer scare in her family, she had asked Gary to help her find out whatever he could. And like the true journalist he was, he went to the library and gave them the best information he could find.
I wish so much I had known he was hurting. I would have tried to help. I’m sure all of us who knew him or cared about him would have tried to help. And maybe all our help wouldn’t have been enough. We’ll never know.
Many people started arriving. Diana came in with a fax from Robert Parry. She said they had asked him to come and he said of course, but he had not allowed enough time to clear security and missed his flight. Instead, Parry sent a moving statement, which I had a copy of but may have left at work. He said that Gary Webb’s story was a tragic reminder that information is not a birthright. It has to be fought for, and sometimes even died for. It was incredibly powerful and eloquent and short, a miraculous combination. I’ll try to get another copy and will post on my blog for all to see.
One man came in who had never met Gary Webb or any of his family. He was one of the many who came solely because he wanted to honor the memory of the journalist who stood up and told the truth. I talked to him for a while, and when he asked my name, again it was, “Lisa Pease!� Turns out he had read the book Jim DiEugenio and I had put together, The Assassinations. The man had talked to his children about how unreliable the press was, and told me he had put together a list for them of “truthworthies� - those who could be trusted to tell the truth. He told me Gary and I were both on that list, which I took as a tremendous honor. I told his story to another man, a friend of Gary Webb’s that I talked to afterwards at the reception downstairs. That man asked, how can you tell who is reliable and who isn’t? I told him, learn any one really big and important news story in depth. Find out who is telling the truth and who is not. Then follow those people. People who tell the truth about the important stories tell the truth about other stories. People who lie about one important story will lie on another, and so on. He said, so it’s really about the people doing the reporting? Yes, I said. Another person standing by said, that’s really a good way to go about it. I hope people start paying attention to bylines. There are good people out there working to tell the truth, and then there are the others who are working to gain and preserve their position, which usually means not telling the truth.
The room could only hold about 300 people. It was packed - I’m sure we represented a fire hazard. People were lining the walls and sitting in the aisles, with more gathered in a herd just outside the side doors at the front and back of the room. As the crowd was gathering, I was off in a side hallway with a copy of the Emperor’s piece, reviewing it since I hadn’t read it in years. I noticed Gary’s brother standing nearby, looking so completely sad, so completely alone. I went over to him and said, I think you could use a hug. He answered, I think I could and I threw my arms around him and just held him. I felt his energy rush out of him like water running up the beach, but I kept holding him and his energy regathered, like water flowing back to the sea, and we broke and he regained his composure. He even was able to make a wry comment when I asked if he was the older or younger brother. He’s younger, by 13 months.
Kurt opened the ceremony. He talked of his brother as first, foremost, and always, a writer. He talked about how as kids they had gotten a play mimeograph machine, with rubber type blocks you could put in it to print out pages. Kurt wasn’t that into it, but Gary loved it, and put together little pages of print that he’d then proudly show to his parents. Gary knew his calling from the start. He wanted to be a reporter. In High School, he wrote up an editorial for his school paper criticizing the drill team for putting women in military uniforms and changing their batons to guns and flags. The cheerleaders were outraged, and Gary’s newspaper advisor suggested he apologize. Why should I apologize for expressing an opinion, Gary had asked. He never did apologize.
He was nearly through school when he had to drop out, but managed to get a mentor at a local paper and learned the ropes from the inside. He threw himself into his work, not content to just be a stenographer, but to seek out the story behind the story. All he ever wanted to be was a writer. And above all, Kurt said, Gary always wanted to seek out and tell the truth.
When Gary worked on the Dark Alliance story, he spent months working nights and weekends, staring at pages deep into the night, going to libraries, talking to people. He was tenacious and persistent. He knew this was an important story. He never gave a second thought to whether this was a good use of his time. This was what he was born to do, and he did it.
As Kurt wrapped up, he asked that people refrain from any political statements, that people could talk about that below. But in a few minutes, he found himself lashing out at the Los Angeles Times for their horrible obituary of Gary Webb. The whole family, at various points while I was there, expressed their pain at that story. It was as if the LA Times just had to try to prove themselves right again by proving Webb wrong. But they aren’t, and they can’t. Never could.
Susan Bell spoke next. She spoke very briefly, and was clearly overcome with emotion. I had seen her at the start of the day where she was remarkably calm. But not long before the ceremony began, she told me she had just seen Gary’s parents for the first time since his death, and all the emotion just came flooding back.
The children spoke next. Ian, the oldest at 21, spoke first. I don’t remember his comments because I was so caught up in the pain I felt for his loss. Eric, the second one, spoke next. In Gary’s note to Eric, he said he hoped he would be the one to follow in his footsteps. I do remember a part of 16 year-old Eric’s statement. Eric said he had never realized what an important man his father was, what he had meant to so many people. Christine, the youngest of his children, read a poem she had written to her father. I remember something from the last line, something like, you were right there in the car, in the seat next to me a moment ago. I can’t believe you’re gone. It was utterly heartbreaking.
Diana Webb spoke next, talking about Gary the brother-in-law, the friend who was always there for others. Diana also read Parry’s moving statement which I simply must find again.
Mike Ruppert was next, with statements from Peter Dale Scott, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and others. He movingly spoke of how Gary Webb’s stories had essentially saved his own life, how he had at one point stuck a gun in his own mouth, but had felt so vindicated and revived by Gary’s outing of the whole CIA-drugs connection that it gave him renewed vigor. “It was as if Gary took the gun out of my mouth and put it in his.� At the end of his presentation, he talked of how, in Central America revolutionary movements, when a comrade falls, and roll is called, all who remain call out “presente� when the dead man’s name is called to signify his presence and to scare the oppressors. He asked the crowd to join him. He called Gary’s name, and the crowd yelled back, loudly and firmly, “PRESENTE.�
I spoke next. I opened by saying when I go to fill out forms, there’s always that spot where they ask for religious affiliation. I always want to check the box that isn’t there, the one marked simply, “truth.� The truth is my religion, and I said Gary Webb had just become a saint in my church. I then went on to read the Emperor’s New Clothes story. It got a few chuckles and a few people came up to me afterwards to say they enjoyed that.
After I spoke, a Chinese FBI-CIA man spoke in a rambling way about having done things he wasn’t proud of, but how Gary Webb had saved his life. Others spoke beautifully of various aspects of Gary. One woman, a fellow reporter, said, what we haven’t talked much about here yet was Gary the man. He was the smartest person I knew. He could do ANYTHING. He could take a $500 computer and upgrade it to a $3000 one. He could take a car apart and put it back together again. He could do ANYTHING.
Another woman introduced herself as a screenwriter from Los Angeles who had been working on a script for Dark Alliance. She, as were most of the speakers, was barely able to talk through her tears, saying he was her hero and she was devastated by his loss, and that his story needs to be told. I had thought the same thing on my long drive up from Los Angeles - his is truly a moving, compelling story of a genuine hero. The story needs to be told.
One young man got up to say, Webb was the first reporter to get up and speak for his community (he was African American), and how grateful he was, and how surprised and thrilled he had been to see a big-time reporter take up the fight on his behalf.
Another man was a hockey friend of his, and said that Gary didn’t know how to put on the brakes when skating, or in life. Whatever he did, he did it full out. He never could put on the brakes.
The ceremony ended with a video presentation the children had put together on the computer, projected onto a screen. It had music and pictures and headlines, summing up the too short, amazing, sweet and sorrowful life of their father.
At that, the ceremony adjourned, and everyone moved to a reception hall on the floor below. I met up there with fellow Kennedy researcher Doug DeSalles, who lives in Sacramento and who had interviewed Gary Webb for his radio show in years past. Doug had planned to interview him again the following week until he found out the shocking news of Gary’s death.
A woman in a lovely hat came up and introduced herself. It was Virginia McCullough, keeper of the Mae Brussell files! I told her the Walter Pincus “How I Traveled Abroad On CIA Subsidy� article I gave Gary in the early days after Pincus’ attack came from Mae’s files. I had never met Virginia in person, although we knew of each other, had many friends in common, and had talked on the phone once. She became the recipient of the files shortly after my visit to them. She’s still trying to find a home for the amazing collection but most places want to break it up and she wants someone to take it all as one big piece. It was really nice to finally meet her. She was there with her husband and a friend who I think was a publicist - all nice people. By then I felt literally faint and realized it had been about six hours since I had eaten anything, so I grabbed some food. But I still felt just horrible. I’d been crying for hours and my face just hurt. Diana Webb had invited me to join the family in the bar, but I just needed to lie down and let the swelling from the tears subside for a bit. (Decongestants help, I discovered.) I had told Doug it was my birthday and he offered to buy me dinner on the occasion. That was nice. I needed a break from all the sorrow and Doug is always interesting.
So that was it. I returned to my hotel room (I stayed at the Doubletree, where the ceremony was held) and then rose and drove the six hours home the next day.
I hear there’s going to be another memorial service right here in Los Angeles. I hope anyone who can possibly make it here will show up for that. He was one of a nearly extinct breed - a true journalist. He deserves all the honor we can shower upon him.
Lisa Pease
12/21/04
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/
Posted by Thieme at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2004
a cold snowy Monday in the upper Midwest
a cold snowy Monday in the upper Midwest ... the intelligence organization Debka – independent? an Israeli front? a false flag operation? your guess is as good as anybody’s – reports that tomorrow a major attack is due (if true to a lag time of 53 days between video tapes and attacks), that terror attacks against three Israeli consulates in the United States are in the works, and that the details of the recent attack on Jedda show good reconnaissance and likely infiltration, promising more death and destruction in the future ...
on the other hand, a toddler at the coffee shop this morning climbed up on the window ledge and scuttled back and forth making happy noises, a wide smile on his round face. His parents periodically got up to monitor his explorations. ...
the yin yang of a week that will culminate in Christmas, either snowy and white or bloody and red ...
I still want to believe that we have a vote ... for innocence and new life and the simplicity of a family having coffee in the morning ... or for chaos ...
faith is ultimately a decision that the universe is meaningful rather than meaningless ... the universe can not exist half meaningful, half meaningless ... it is either all meaningful or all meaningless ...
and our minds seem to have evolved to ask questions we can never answer ...
Posted by Thieme at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
A Few Responses to Gary Webb's Death
I too think there was a black cloud that swept over the internet yesterday and stunned everyone.
Gary is in peace, he finished his work, an accomplishment. His children can be proud of their dad.
Our work is still on-going and ahead.
Webb should have his name written in large face on the museum to reporters killed in the line of duty. What his spineless newspaper and the agency did to him was slo-mo-murder.
It remains true though, that while the more vocal among us are criticised and can be marginalised through manipulation of the facts, by some or other uncanny force, just when one starts to believe the battle has been lost to whatever oppressing force, suddenly more support becomes visible, and others rise up to lift the 'Aquila' of freedom and truth. And somehow, there are always more 'Aquilifers' to keep on going.
You must have noticed that somehow, despite the best efforts of those wielding the dark cloud of censorship, lightning bolts of truth keeping flashing through, and in this sign we can base hope and draw support. They keep trying, but they never quite win, and I don't believe they ever will win.
Many of us live life on the edge... your own words I'm sure... and what is marginalisation by definition? Our only challenge is to remain on the front edge and not the rear edge, ahead of the storm, not crumpled, tossed and torn in its wake. It seems that the 'oppressors that be' do not realise how in many ways their actions may just be helping to keep us where we actually belong - on the edge.
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually
to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly
preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." John LeCarre
He was/is one of my heroes, too. What the LATimes did is unforgivable, and typical.
Posted by Thieme at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)
The Meaning of Sacrifice
Words are used frequently today to mean exactly the opposite of what they mean.
So maybe we need to remind ourselves that sacrifice means ... sacrifice.
To make a sacrifice means being willing to sacrifice ourselves. It means giving up our time, our energy, even our lives. It doesn’t have to be splashy. It can be as quiet as dedicating our lives to justice and truth and acts of compassion.
But it doesn’t mean sacrificing someone else. It means sacrificing ourselves. It means using ourselves all up.
Mel Gibson had a hit showing images of Jesus being tortured to death and, say what you will about the movie, it certainly made the point that sacrifice means sacrifice.
Unfortunately many Christians take shelter in the comforting belief that because Jesus was murdered, they’re off the hook.
They tend to ignore less comforting words in the Christian scriptures that tell disciples they had better expect to endure what he endured, if their commitment has any meaning at all.
That’s not the free lunch many seem to want. Getting the goodies and sneaking through life without paying for them is “cheap grace,� as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it during World War II shortly before being executed for participating in a plot to kill Hitler.
Gary Webb, the courageous journalist who killed himself this week in Sacramento, is still very much on my mind. Speaking yesterday to his ex-wife intensified the pain of his loss.
He was never the same after they attacked him, she said. He never really recovered.
In other words, his decade-long assassination was in slo-mo, inch by slow inch. The courage and commitment that fueled his passion for justice and truth was battered over time by the refusal of establishment newspapers to acknowledge their mistakes or ever let him work again. Jayson Blair, Christopher Newton, Jack Kelley, and Janet Cooke could get work, but Gary Webb? Never.
And now, the New York Times, one of the papers that savaged Webb unfairly, reports that the Army National Guard has fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and will offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.
Now, I wouldn’t compare blood money like that to the sums we are told were paid to families of suicide bombers by “evil doers.� Who would suggest such a thing?
But I would note that the only cause we sincerely believe in is one for which we are willing to sacrifice ourselves or members of our families. Otherwise our noble words are nothing but lies.
The current war is noteworthy for the unanimity with which those ordering young people to fight and die in the Middle East refuse to go themselves or allow their children to go. The double-take by the congressman in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 comes to mind.
That is a Huge Hole at the heart of the rhetoric about this war and why we are fighting it. Politicians speak of sacrifice but never send their own to die and never go themselves.
Instead, they ask others to die for the Empire. And we see through it.
Do we wonder, then, why fewer people are enlisting, even for such a handsome bounty obviously intended as a signing bonus for the poor? Because the rich will never risk death for a pittance like that.
Why should they? The rich are doing quite well. The Wall Street Journal wrote this week of the pain of the super-wealthy who own merely hundred-foot yachts. They used to be real trophies but now they’re dwarfed by bigger boats. That’s because the rich have grown richer, much much richer, as the current administration has taken care of its “base.�
Well, someone has to get rich when times are good. That NY Times article also notes that the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other units to use.
Twenty billion dollars means a lot of profit. That can buy some really big boats.
"We're in a more difficult recruiting environment, period," General Blum complained, noting that rising death tolls had an impact.
But don’t look for the sons and daughters of those beating the drums of war to volunteer anytime soon. Bonuses are up this year on Wall Street (“Honey, buy the Lexus,� said the headline), Paul Allen is building a 500-foot yacht the size of a small cruiser, and closely-held Bechtel continues to sacrifice itself for the good of the world.
Words used to have meanings. But propaganda sure works. And death by inches is just as effective as dioxin in the soup or a bullet in the head.
Posted by Thieme at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
Comments to The Battle Not to Rage or Despair
I guess some people often prefer to respond directly to posts sent as Islands in the Clickstreams rather than register and add comments to the blog. So long as people do that, I'll add selected relevant responses to posts.
Response:
Hi Richard,
I've been getting your e-mails for years and have never commented, but this one struck such a nerve, I have to. For a while now I've been saying that the biggest problem we face is not the economy or even the war, but the increasingly pervasive distortion of reality. It's like screaming into a strong wind.
Even a few short years ago, when Bill Clinton lied about sex, the lying was considered an impeachable offence. Now the same people who so relentlessly drove that horse don't even bother to cover up the fact that they are lying--about things of much greater import than b.j.s in the oval office--and no one seems to care. The other night I saw a drug ad on television. There were heartwarming pictures of people holding hands and laughing and running on the beach. The soundtrack behind it was a full twenty seconds of a voiceover stating all the horrendous side effects, including kidney failure and death. It was chilling. But Americans don't notice that. They run in droves to their doctors to demand the latest pastel pill.
Over and over, the talking heads on the nightly news casually refer to spin doctors--people who are paid big bucks to turn truth into lies--and no one finds the fact of this outrageous. It is terrifying how quickly the abnormal becomes normal.
When you take the lies and mix in the bloodlust, it all starts to feel like Germany in the thirties.
Second response:
What you say about "history of this country through the twentieth century is largely not known by many of its citizens" is something I heard a couple of months ago from my 84 year old mother. It struck me
then, just as your article did now.
She lives in a retirement community and told me how she was appalled at seeing this in her contemporaries! The interesting thing is that she in a diehard Republican, so her 'despair' is in a different directions than yours.:-o Before you might dismiss her as an 'old lady', you should know that she is like her mother who lived to be 103 and was sharp and kept up on what was going on in the world almost until the day she died. My mom is even more educated and follows even more closely our current social, political and economic events.
So that kind of dichotomy from two experienced and well informed people concerns me. Are we, as a country, heading down a road where the side that has the most rage will win power?
A third response:
Those words make me feel less insane for whatever that is worth.
Posted by Thieme at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2004
Gary Webb is Dead
The San Jose Mercury News reports that “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.�
I was heartsick. Just knowing that Webb was alive was enough to keep me going through difficult nights.
The Mercury News says that “Webb, an award-winning journalist, 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.'�
Of course the newspaper did not report that he resigned only after months of commuting to a dead-end assignment 150 miles from his family and home to which he had been exiled. Forced to work so far from his family, Webb grew depressed and made a sane choice.
So he was not a stranger to depression. Conspiracy stories are already suggesting that his suicide was something else, but I know he would want more than anything for solid investigative work to stitch together all of the pieces, that we not impose a pattern prematurely. That’s what he did for his stories and it’s the least we can do for him.
Besides, why kill him now? As I said in my blog-piece three days ago:
Voices of clarity and conscience are effectively controlled and spun into irrelevance rather than silenced. Marginalization is more effective than assassination – it leaves no dead heroes as leaders, after all – and there’s no blood.
Webb understood that.
His Dark Alliance series was attacked not for what it said (the CIA initially denied then later admitted there were connections between operatives and drug cartels) but for what attackers claimed it said. Webb expected that kind of distortion and created a web site loaded with primary documents, transcripts and audio tapes of interviews so interested parties could read and hear for themselves what sources had said. It was one of the first times the Web was used to support a mainstream story that way and the site had over a million hits.
But a person can only say “I didn’t say that ... I didn’t say that ...� so many times. The mass mind soon accepts the oft-repeated distortion as reality.
Or as a friend, a political consultant, recently said, “You can’t always change reality but you can always change the facts.�
Or as Joseph E. Levine said, “You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.�
Or as I said three days ago:
the manipulation of the herd by the substitution of symbols and images largely irrelevant to matters at hand, used so efficiently in the recent election, makes persons of clarity and conscience feel impotent and ineffective.
In May 2000, I was exploring a story with some dark edges to it. I was anxious and needed encouragement to persist. I asked Gary about the consequences of his investigation and its impact on his life. Above all, was it worth it?
�Yes,� he said. “The CIA admitted it. I know it was the truth, and that's what kept me going. I knew I was right.�
He added, “My eyes were wide open. I knew what I was getting into. My kids suffered but I had the paper behind me - I thought.� After his paper withdrew its support, he drew on the energy of people who knew the truth of the streets. "Support came from all sorts of places," he said. "Especially African Americans."
And his wife? "She was OK with it,� he laughed. “She was used to me getting death threats."
Webb joked that colleagues often said he was naive rather than cynical. We agreed that a cynic might be nothing but a disappointed idealist. If we accept reality as it is without expectations to the contrary, we’re never disappointed.
Gary spoke of his work in terms that I used for ministry. He had been mentored by a journalist who taught him that his work was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That’s what the best bishops taught me too.
I was once asked by Jean Feraca on Wisconsin Public Radio, why are so many of your heroes assassinated?
She rattled off Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Jesus.
Maybe, I said, assassination is the ultimate form of censorship for those who can’t help but tell the truth.
Dark Alliance was Gary Webb’s best shot at doing that.
"You get one chance in a lifetime to do the right thing," he said. "If you don't do it, you surrender, and then they win."
The passion for truth and justice is not a sprint. It’s a long-distance run that requires a different kind of training, a different degree of commitment. Our eye must be on a goal that we know we will never reach in our lifetimes. Faith is the name of believing in the transcendent, often despite all evidence to the contrary.
But what are the options?
Webb knew what he was up against. He said of the CIA, "Richard, these are the worst people on earth that you're dealing with - they lie, plant stories, discredit and worse for a living and have the resources and the experience.
But somebody's got to do it [tell the truth]. Otherwise they win.
The choice is to do the work – or surrender."
And I am grieving for someone who did the work. And never surrendered.
Rest in peace.
Posted by Thieme at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2004
The Battle Not to Rage or Despair
This is NOT about the election. I know it might sound like it is. Lots of people feel those feelings. They’re walking around in shellshock, unable to take in that all of their energy, all of their work resulted in even more conservatives taking over every area of government, that they live in a country tilted so far to the right that a Goldwater Republican, as we used to call them, would look like a liberal today.
This is about the apparent inability of people to learn from the past.
Maybe it begins with our inability even to remember the past.
I was born a few months before D-Day, so some of what I call history is what I lived and some is what was discussed a lot when I grew up. The previous decades – the boom times of the twenties, the Depression of the thirties, events leading up to and including World War 2 – formed a vivid skein of shared images which is what memories are, after all. The causal chain of events from World War 1 forward became part of my framework for understanding of the world.
Sounding like your parents is disconcerting, but here it is .... recent discussions with some young people suggest that there are huge memory holes, an absence of shared ideas and images that makes it feel as if we do not inhabit the same landscape. Our historical points of reference are completely different. Many seem not to have forgotten so much as never to have known recent history.
Here’s a case in point.
In a conversation after dinner at a security conference with smart technocrats in their thirties, I referred to the way America was torn in the sixties and seventies by social revolutions, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, the assassinations....
“What assassinations?� one younger guy asked.
I thought he was kidding.
I looked at him. He wasn’t.
Well, I said, Kennedy, for one. And Kennedy. And King.
I described being in Chicago when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. From a high rise apartment, throughout the long weekend, we watched the city burn. Sirens heard faintly through the thick glass complemented terrified phone calls from a friend who rode in a radio car up and down Roosevelt Road, locating sniper fire for the National Guard.
Maybe that was just your perspective, the guy said. Maybe nobody else noticed.
The mind boggles. Where does one begin? It felt like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the familiar person you are talking to suddenly opens his mouth in an alien wail.
I had intended to recall what Lyndon Johnson said, that a lot of people misunderstood the nature of the pressure he was under during the Viet Nam War. There were liberals and hippies and disenchanted veterans, sure, but they could be handled. The real pressure came from the right. The pressure he found hard to resist called for escalation, more killing, more war.
That was then. That, too, is now.
So the despair to which I refer and the rage that burns white hot at the core of despair when it is not ameliorated by hope or options for meaningful action seems to be felt by more and more people.
The accumulating evidence of groupthink and its consequences on a national or global level are frightening.
In the Wall Street Journal, for example, Greg Jaffe wrote on December 8, 2004, “Shortly after the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003, the Army kicked off its annual war game, a mock battle in which U.S. forces set out to topple another Middle Eastern regime. ... the game featured a force built around a light, fast, armored vehicle that the Army planned to start producing in 2010. The Army attacked from seven dizzying directions and, when the game ended, appeared on the verge of shattering the enemy force. ‘We walked out and patted ourselves on the back and said marvelous job, ‘ says retired Lt. Gen. William Carter, who commanded U.S. forces in the game. "We didn't understand that what we were seeing in those games wasn't victory.’
Again, the mind boggles.
What were they thinking? How could people who spend so much time analyzing scenarios be so obtuse as not to understand how the world had changed?
And how can they still?
One obvious reason is that everything in military culture militates against challenging groupthink. Promotions are directly related to a willingness to change nothing. By the time one reaches the top a commitment to the status quo and a deep collusion with the system that enabled one to move up have fused.
Groupthink refers to the explicit dynamics which enables a lot of smart people who on their own and in another context would see the truth clearly and be willing tell the truth to become quietly acquiescent and go along with plans despite serious misgivings.
Changing policies without changing the cultures that create policies changes little. The content may be a little different but the context that generates the content remains the same.
During this war, a time of erosion of civil liberties and human rights in the name of fighting a nameless threat that changes its identifying characteristics by the month, the consequences of groupthink are showing up. Articles arrived on my desktop this week about homeless veterans rushed out of service in Iraq into a haze of confusion and depression back home; about an intelligence apparatus so vast, complex, and out of effective control that it is only a matter of time until some whistleblower, his or her conscience grieved beyond consolation, tells the truth about what we are doing; and that article cited above about the inability of military leaders to comprehend realities – to perceive, see, feel or speak them – that contradict groupthink and the voice of authority with which it speaks.
In other words, the manipulation of the herd by the substitution of symbols and images largely irrelevant to matters at hand, used so efficiently in the recent election, makes persons of clarity and conscience feel impotent and ineffective.
Remember Lyndon Johnson: During Viet Nam, at the height of the anti-war movement, the greater pressure came from the Right, not the Left. The Right was the relentless, deeply embedded machinery of our society and culture, and that was when there WAS a Left that still existed as a potent force.
Voices of clarity and conscience are effectively controlled and spun into irrelevance rather than silenced. Marginalization is more effective than assassination – it leaves no dead heroes as leaders, after all – and there’s no blood. Think of how Christianity would look if Jesus had simply been ignored while behind the scenes a variety of other religious rebels, most in the covert pay of the Romans, had been moved forward. What would Mel Gibson have depicted, a sullen Jesus, unable to get his hands on anything real, watching the action from the sidelines?
But how can we talk about all this if the history of this country through the twentieth century is largely not known by many of its citizens? Literacy levels are dropping, more and more books are being published but fewer and fewer are being read. The Net, the preoccupation of many, seldom provides the depth and detail needed to understand complex ambiguous realities. Only books do that, and God help us, we have a leader at the moment who publicly states how little use he has for reading books.
We silverbacks have seen it before, we have heard it before. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is shown in The Fog of War saying, “We were wrong. They saw it as a civil war. We saw it as a battle against Communism. We were wrong,� we remembered that at the time, the ones who said we were wrong were dismissed as the radical fringe.
In public life, people generally acknowledge they are wrong only after consequences for doing so are long past.
President Bush was unable to say there was anything about which he had been wrong for four years. But the blood flecks the windshield and we know that it is not raining red paint. America went for a Sunday ride and we hit somebody and we kept going. The body count rises, larger percentages of maimed and legless veterans are celebrated as medical progress, torture is used around the world with our support, and stories of whistleblowers like Greg Ford (see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/coverup/print.html) are indicators of the growth of feelings of impotence, rage and despair.
The right revelations will come at the right time and that rage will ripen and burst. We have seen it before. We will see it again. The sadness and the pity is that, even when we remember our history, we seem destined or doomed to repeat it.
Posted by Thieme at 01:39 AM | Comments (0)