Reply #15: You're confusing two people: Gary Sick vs. Gary Webb [View All]

[JHB]

Both brought up "old news" about buried Reagan-era scandals during Poppy Bush's and Clinton's administrations:

Gary Sick was the Carter NSC staffer who was the "go to" guy about Iran during the embassy hostage crisis. He didn't believe stories of Republican attempts to cut a deal with the Iranians (the convenient timing of the release he considered to be Iranian spitefulness against Carter, which they were fully capapble of, rather than being evidence of Reaganite interference, and reports of contacts that he'd heard lacked credibility) for years, until the late 80s when he found what he considered credible evidence of contact between Iranian and Reagan campaign operatives, and wanted the matter reopened.

Gary Webb was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who revived the story about connections between cocaine traffic and the network supporting the Contras in his "Dark Alliance" series in 1996. He lost his job at the SJMNews thanks to Bush/conservative pressure against companies whose reporters dug too deeply against them.

Both men generated new inquiries at the congressional level, but in both instances the results were spun into the ground as "nothing to see here, move along". Some of us around here consider these hearings to be two more glaring examples of Democratic officialdom's spinelessness which has let the Republicans get to the point where they are now.

On Edit: corrected the timeframes: Webb's series ran during the Clinton years.