Narco News 2001
"Why
the Lawsuit?
To Silence
Him"
A Message From
Gary Webb
"Make no mistake. This court fight isn't about any
particular story NarcoNews has done. It's about ALL of them,
and all of the ones yet to come. And it's a battle over the continued
independence of Internet journalism as well. The silencing of
Al Giordano and NarcoNews isn't a theoretical possibility that
might happen a couple years from now. It's already happening.
Al and his volunteer lawyers are hip-deep in it right now. And
they need our help."
- Pulitzer
Prize Winning Journalist Gary Webb
March 16,
2001
March 16, 2001
Dear Friend,
Not
long after I wrote a series for the
San Jose Mercury News about a drug ring that had flooded South
Central Los Angeles with cheap cocaine at the beginning of the
crack explosion there, a strange thing happened to me. I was
silenced.
This, believe it or not, came as something
of a surprise to me. For 17 years I had been writing newspaper
stories about grafters, crooked bankers, corrupt politicians
and killers -- and winning armloads of journalism awards for
it. Some of my stories had convened grand juries and sent important
people to well-deserved jail cells. Others ended up on 20/20,
and later became a best-selling book (not written by me, unfortunately.)
I started doing television news shows, speaking to college journalism
classes and professional seminars. I had major papers bidding
against each other to hire me.
So when I happened across information
implicating an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency in the
cocaine trade, I had no qualms about jumping onto it with both
feet. What did I have to worry about? I was a newspaperman for
a big city, take-no-prisoners newspaper. I had the First Amendment,
a law firm, and a multi-million dollar corporation watching my
back.
Besides, this story was a fucking outrage.
Right-wing Latin American drug dealers were helping finance a
CIA-run covert war in Nicaragua by selling tons of cocaine to
the Crips and Bloods in LA, who were turning it into crack and
spreading it through black neighborhoods nationwide. And all
the available evidence pointed to the sickening conclusion that
elements of the US government had known of it and had either
tacitly encouraged it or, at a minimum, done absolutely nothing
to stop it.
And that's when this strange thing happened.
The national news media, instead of using its brute strength
to force the truth from our government, decided that its time
would be better spent investigating me and my reporting. They
kicked me around pretty good, I have to admit. (At one point,
I was even accused of making movie deals with a crack dealer
I'd written about. The DEA raided my film agent's office looking
for any scrap of paper to back up this lie and appeared disappointed
when they came up emptyhanded.)
To this day, no one has ever been able to show me a single error
of fact in anything I've written about this drug ring, which
includes a 600-page book about the whole tragic mess. Indeed,
most of what has come out since shows that my newspaper stories
grossly underestimated the extent of our government's knowledge,
an error to which I readily confess. But, in the end, the facts
didn't really matter. What mattered was making the damned thing
go away, shutting people up, and making anyone who demanded the
truth appear to be a wacky conspiracy theorist. And it worked.
As a result, the CIA was allowed to investigate
itself, release a heavily censored report admitting that it had
worked with cocaine traffickers, and simultaneously declare itself
innocent of any wrongdoing. And that's where our firebrand national
news media has let the matter lie to this day.
Now
it's NarcoNews' turn for the silence
treatment. And, if I had to guess, I'd venture to say that it's
probably more important to the folks selling us the Drug War
to shut up Al Giordano than it is to silence mainstream reporters
who, in my father's eloquent words, wouldn't say shit if they
had a mouth full of it.
No one can lean on NarcoNews's editors,
or their bosses, or its board of directors to reign Al in or,
failing that, reassign him to the night copy desk. The only person
they can lean on is Al, who doesn't take to being leaned on.
And they can't shut down the Internet either. So two choices
remain.
They can grit their teeth and suffer Al's
reporting, day after aggravating day, as he exposes the ugly
underside of this endless war on drugs - and actually makes things
happen, like real journalists are supposed to do. Or they can
try to make it impossible for him to do his job by harassing
him with specious lawsuits, bedevil him with lawyers and depositions
and interrogatories and subpoenas, and reduce him to penury.
Why? To silence him. To make him go away. To keep him from looking
under rocks that reporters aren't supposed to look under.
Make
no mistake. This court fight isn't
about any particular story NarcoNews has done. It's about ALL
of them, and all of the ones yet to come. And it's a battle over
the continued independence of Internet journalism as well. The
silencing of Al Giordano and NarcoNews isn't a theoretical possibility
that might happen a couple years from now. It's already happening.
Al and his volunteer lawyers are hip-deep in it right now. And
they need our help.
Narco News and Al Giordano face an April
9th deadline to respond to the Banamex censorship lawsuit or
they will be declared in default - guilty without a single fact
being heard in a case where the facts prove them right.
A civil lawsuit is different than a criminal
case: complex legal issues require trained lawyers to dig through
the law books on procedural issues so far from the basic truths
about photographs of cocaine trafficking on the coast of Mexico.
The bank's lawyers at Akin Gump are paid astronomic fees to raise
every small point of process and delay the day when the facts
come to light in New York City court.
If this case goes to trial, that's when
Narco News will triumph. And all of us will win with it as the
real facts of the corruption of the international drug war come
to light in the media center of New York.
The hard part comes right now, in navigating
the maze of irrelevant process issues, as any reporter who has
covered the courts has seen. Narco News will either be able to
have skilled attorneys get them through this complicated phase
or - I can see it coming - Al will have to take a long trip to
the law library himself, abandon reporting for the coming weeks
or months in order to wage his own defense. Then you and I will
not be able to read new reports on Narco News at this key moment
when Plan Colombia explodes regionally and more Latin American
voices are raised against the drug war, like the Mexican police
chief yesterday, who, if not for Narco News, would never be heard
by those of us who speak and read in English.
That is what is at stake: Whether a skilled
reporter has to retire for months to become a pro se lawyer,
or whether he can continue reporting the facts to us.
I was silenced but am not silenced any
more. When, the other day, the film rights to my book Dark Alliance
about US complicity in the cocaine trade were purchased for a
television movie, I wrote Al to pledge part of those proceeds
to his defense. In the years to come, there is no question that
Narco News will be proven right and will be helping the next
generation of reporters fight efforts to censor them.
But
wouldn't it be wonderful if this time
the censors failed entirely to take Al and Narco News out of
circulation, for a year, for months, even for a week? Wouldn't
that be the best deterrent against bankers and lobbyists from
waging these frivolous lawsuits against Free Speech on the Internet?
I understand that Narco News needs only about $13,000 more to
be able to have the most difficult stage of the lawsuit process
- that which it faces immediately - handled with professional
legal assistance, thus allowing Al to continue expending his
energy and time in reporting to us the facts. One person of means
could solve this problem with a check. Two dozen people giving
$500 could do it. 130 people giving a hundred dollars… you
can do the math: If half of Narco News' readers give one dollar
each, Narco News will keep publishing.
The hard part is that it must be done
now, today. Please join me in sending a check to:
Drug War on Trial
C/O Thomas Lesser, Esq.
Lesser, Newman, Souweine & Nasser
39 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Al
often says that Narco News never wanted
to ask its readers for a cent, and I sense that it pains him
to ask the readers who benefit from his reporting to support
his defense in court. That's why I'm writing you. This lawsuit
is bigger than the fate of one Internet publication. It is larger
than, but it will decide, free speech issues in cyberspace for
years to come. What is at stake here is nothing less than whether
the public knows the truth and the facts about the war on drugs
in our hemisphere.
If we don't all act today, we will be
in the dark again tomorrow,
Sincerely,
Gary Webb
Journalist
Biography of Gary Webb
from Seven Stories Press:
Gary Webb was an investigative
reporter for 19 years, focusing on government and private sector
corruption and winning more than 30 journalism awards.
He was one of six reporters
at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for
General News Reporting for a series of stories on northern California's
1989 earthquake. He also received the 1997 Media Hero Award from
the 2nd Annual Media & Democracy Congress and in 1996 was
named Journalist of the Year by the Bay Area Society of Professional
Journalists.
In 1994 Webb won the H.L.
Mencken Award given by The Free Press Association for a series
in the San Jose Mercury News on abuses in the state of California's
drug asset forfeiture program. And in 1980 Webb won an Investigative
Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award for a series that he co-authored
at the Kentucky Post on organized crime in the coal industry.
Prior to 1988 Webb worked
as a statehouse correspondent for The Cleveland Plain Dealer
and The Kentucky Post. From 1988 through 1997 he was a reporter
for the San Jose Mercury News where the "Dark Alliance"
series broke in 1996. Months later, Webb was effectively forced
out of his job after the San Jose Mercury News retracted their
support for his story. He is now a consultant to the California
State legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He lives
with his wife Susan and their three children in the Sacramento
Valley area of California.
We have gone into
debt to file important legal motions
Please lend a
hand with our defense fund
Make checks payable to "Drug
War on Trial"
Drug War on Trial
c/o Attorney Tom Lesser
39 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
We now accept
credit card contributions through PayPal
Drug War on Trial
narconews@hotmail.com
The
Hard Part Begins Today