Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy
Robert Parry at Cosortium News - a good summary of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" discoveries about the cocaine smuggling through Mena, Arkansas, participated in by the CIA, Bill Clinton, then Arkansas' governor, President Ronald Reagan, and Vice President George Bush (senior). Webb's treatment by the press led to his "suicide" (he shot himself in the head, twice), but history has vindicated him. It didn't stop people from worshipping Reagan, though, nor did it land Clinton and Bush in jail, where they belong.
Webb's death in 2004 had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations -- that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn't be true.
Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, published in August 1996, revived the decade-old allegations that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.
Though substantial evidence of the contra crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s (initially in an article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985 and later at hearings conducted by Sen. John Kerry), the major news outlets had bent to pressure from the Reagan administration and refused to take the disclosures seriously.