Friends,

      I’m posting this now even though it’s an incomplete, early draft, because I want to add it to the responses to Al’s Dec 15th posting, “Gary Webb: Do What He Did”, before it’s absurdly late. It’s intended as

1. a response to Al,
2. some info about Gary Webb (for people not yet into NarcoNews),
3. a continuation of my effort to mobilize rejection, absent hard evidence, of the supposed electoral victory of Bush,
4. condemnation of the role of the commercial media in killing Gary Webb, and in covering up the scale of, and possible theft by Republican electoral fraud, and
5. a proposal for eviscerating the power of corporate media in the U.S.

Beheading America
an open letter to Alberto Giordano
on the deadly corporate media
December 15-??, 2004

      First off, Al, I want you to know I love you. You probably know that already, but I want to make damn sure there’s no doubt in your imaginative mind. Not only do I love you, but I need you. I need your inspiration as well as your down-to-earth shrewdness.

      I was going to write this article before Gary Webb ended his struggle and was discovered dead on Dec 10. In my Dec 9 piece, “Man! Do we ever need grassroots authentic media in order to know the truth!”,[1] I said, “The corporate media is burying the news about the possibly-stolen U.S. election.” and promised, “Subsequently I’ll detail how the hearing yesterday (Wed, Dec 8) of the Democratic members of the House Committee on the Judiciary (the Conyers Committee) on electoral fraud in Ohio has until now been unreported by so-called mainstream media. ... I believe it ought to be as newsworthy as events in the Ukraine.”

      As you know, I’m not the world’s fastest guy, and between my promise on the 9th and now, Gary Webb’s murder/suicide struck the NarcoNews community[2] like a bombshell - an irretrievable loss. And I use the term murder advisedly because I’m sure the agents of capitalism, in his case the bosses of the so-called mainstream American media, maliciously tried to destroy the possibility of Gary making a living as a journalist. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Al Giordano’s NarcoNews , which is full of information about this tragedy, here’s a bit of background on Gary Webb. I need to say this because two close contacts, each of them quite radicalized, said to me just yesterday (i.e. on the 16th), “Who’s Gary Webb?” when I remarked to them about his death.

Who’s Gary Webb?

      I didn’t know Gary Webb personally. I learned of him in the summer of 1996 when one of the collective members of the Lucy Parsons Center,[3] made photo enlargements of Gary’s August 22 and 23 articles in the San Jose Mercury News and posted them in our storefront windows. They damn near filled the windows, and folks stood outside reading the blockbuster articles. That was how I first learned about Gary Webb. Some years later I read Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, which lays out more fully than his newspaper exposé the role of the CIA in working with drug smugglers to sell crack cocaine in inner city Los Angeles to get money to fund the Contras, a major part of the U.S. effort to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

      Gary had it right, but his work was attacked by the major commercial media, which succeeded in coercing his editor at the Mercury News, who had initially been fully supportive, to back away from Gary’s work and refuse to allow him to continue investigating his major break, then assigning him to a poor location, forcing Gary to give up his job. It marked the end of his career as an investigative reporter, and finally, the end of his life.[5]

Beheading America, the corporate Media’s role

      Al, I know you were distraught when you pounded out your anguished piece,[6] full of self-accusation, remorse, rage and the bitterest sorrow, flailing about at all the targets that came to mind, especially yourself, your failure, your lack of understanding, and so on, as though Gary’s final irrevocable act was a direct consequence of your personal failing. And the hatred you feel resonates with me.

      I know about hatred, first hand. There are bastards who deceived Freda (my wife) and me almost 40 years ago at the University of Massachusetts Boston Campus and who were, I’m quite certain, responsible for having contributed substantially, if not actually causing, her early death.[7] I hate their guts to this day, viscerally, those slimy academics with their petty ambitions overriding any impulse they might once have had towards intellectual honesty and achievement. Fucking con-men, and the worst of it was that for a time we were conned, not understanding their conniving to get rid of us. So on that I’m with you, Al.

      But, as I used to say to students in my radical science courses,[8] as much as I hate some people – e.g. Henry Kissinger,[9] Joseph McCarthy,[10] Augusto Pinochet,[11] Oliver North,[12] Francis Cardinal Spellman[13] – my deepest hatred is towards the institutions that create such psychologically misshapen monstrosities. Among them are the major institutions that shape ideology – the corporate media, the entire formal so-called educational establishment, all the oppressive machinery of the government – police, military, “justice” system, in short the entire apparatus of the nation-state operating to instill and enforce domination of, by and for the ideology of capitalism – power, private profit and money above all else. It’s that deep hatred of the dominant institutions that binds us together as revolutionary compañeros and compañeras.

Notes

[1] On the NarcoSphere at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/12/10/ 03440/993. A fully footnoted version is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/S alz/2004-12-09.htm.

[2] See http://www.narconews.com/ and a series of articles and comments about Gary Webb on the NarcoSphere at

[3] The Lucy Parsons Center http://www.lucyparsons.org/ was then located at Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[4] To get a few more details, there’s a short article in the December 12, 2004 Sacramento (California) Bee by Sam Stanton and Sandy Louey, at http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/11744167p -12630255c.html. A much more informative article is “America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb” by Robert Parry, December 13, 2004, at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html. The articles in the San Jose Mercury News that triggered the attack on Gary Webb are available at http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/webb.html.

[5] “Gary Webb: Do What He Did”, by Al Giordano, posted on Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 06:47:24 pm EST, datelined Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico, December 15, 2004. Available at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/12/15/ 184725/08#14. Al begins, “I keep imagining the last moments of Gary’s life. He is looking down the barrel of a gun.”

[6]  A page in memory of Freda Friedman Salzman, with information about this difficult period of her life, with its tragic ending, is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Freda/in dex.htm.

[7] Science for Humane Survival, at href=“http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman _g/SfHS/index.htm.

[8] Henry Kissinger, . . .

[9] Joseph McCarthy, . . .

[10] Augosto Pinochet, . . .

[11] Oliver North, . . .

[12] Francis Cardinal Spellman, . . .