Note concerning Gary Webb: there are cases of people shooting...

[Ladyhawk]

...themselves more than once in order to commit suicide. My friend who is a psychologist held a lady's brain inside her head while the doctor worked on her. She had shot herself in the head FIVE TIMES with a .22 pistol. And before you get all technical on my ass, a .22 can actually do more damage than a higher caliber weapon because the bullet slows down as it enters the body. Of course, a .45 at close range probably would have put a grapefruit-sized hole in her head.

Regardless, the lady lived and suffered no ill effects. My psychologist friend has many stories of people who tried to whack themselves and should have succeeded, but didn't.

I personally knew an LA Crip who was shot seven times by rival gang members and lived through it. The shots were in the neck and torso. By all rights, he should have died.

I heard of another guy who committed suicide by drilling holes in his head. I can't remember how many holes he drilled, but it was several. Sometimes the human body doesn't die like it should. This happens more than most people realize.

I am more inclined to believe Webb's wife. She said he was despondent and wanted to die. Webb shooting himself twice makes more sense than his being whacked years after he revealed some unpleasant things about the Bush Crime Family. I doubt he was even a dot on the BFEE's radar since he was out of work.

[Bluzmann57]

1. Well dammit, that blows conspiracy theories out of the water.

n/t.

[Ladyhawk]

3. Hey, it could have been a conspiracy, but in this instance...

...I don't think so.

I'm just saying that the suicide theory makes more sense to me considering what I've heard and seen.

[BlueEyedSon]

2. With a SHOTGUN???

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22gary+webb%22+shotgun&btnG=Search

[Ladyhawk]

5. What gauge...I guess I should read it, eh?

I'm wondering if two shotgun blasts = five shots with a .22 pistol? Actually, since he only lived through the first blast (supposedly), does 1 shotgun blast to the head = 5 shots with a .22 pistol? If the pellets missed vital parts of the brain, he might have retained enough of his faculties to shoot himself again.

Then again, one would think that a shotgun would take part of his head off. I'd be interested in the autopsy reports. Which blast was the first, according to the examiner? What structures did it damage upon impact?

It would be possible to live through a shotgun blast to the head at point blank, but not exactly probable. Is it probable that a lady would survive five gunshots to the head and survive with no noticeable effects?

I suppose I should have had my facts straight before posting, but I just wanted to share some experiences I've had with the human body surviving things it shouldn't.

I'll read up on this. I might change my mind.

[Garbo 2004]

8. Where does it say he killed himself with a shotgun? .38 pistol

was the report. http://www.sacbee.com/content/community_news/arden_carmichael/story/11772759p-12657577c.html

[Ladyhawk]

13. Then it's very possible he committed suicide.

Remember Brady after he was shot in the head during the Reagan assassination attempt? He was on his hands and knees for a time. I believe he could have pulled a trigger during that time. Much of the brain damage from a gunshot wound comes when the brain swells within the skull. The brain has nowhere to go, so it compresses in on itself and causes global damage.

The lady my psychologist friend knew had so thoroughly destroyed her skull that her brain was falling out of her head. So even though she destroyed parts of her brain with the gunshots, the destruction of her skull allowed the brain to swell without compression and further damage.

Hey...it's a theory. :)

[burn the bush]

4. I believe it's not impossible, and would depend on your weapon

but in most cases, when you get shot in the head, you are not able to do it a second time even if u live.
Also weren't there reports on him getting threats> Anyone know if thats true?
While we're at it, where was the wife?

[Ladyhawk]

6. I'd like to know if someone has survived a single point-blank...

...shotgun wound to the head.

As for not being able to do it a second time, I don't know. Depending upon the impact and path of the wound(s), a person may retain almost full faculties for awhile. In the case of such a wound, the most damage takes place when the brain swells inside the skull. The brain has nowhere to go, then you get serious global damage.

[shraby]

7. I would think it would depend on if

you used birdshot, buckshot or slugs.

[Ladyhawk]

12. Yeah, no kidding. Also, did he use a .410 or a 12-gauge?

That would make a big difference.

[alfredo]

9. Could his muscles twitching

cause him to pull the trigger again before he dropped?

I had a friend hit a tree head first. He was doing 75 to 80 mph on his motorcycle. He hit a bern, lost contact with the bike before hitting the tree about 12 ft off the ground. When they found him he had grabbed a hand full of dirt in his clinched hands. Even after that incredible shock, his body was still able to move, his hands grasp.

Webb being able to pull the trigger again could be possible when I think of my friend's death. He probably didn't pull the trigger consciously.

[Octafish]

10. Yeh. Just as he's written a series on Uncle Sam Psyops on Merika's Youth

For those who give a damn about possibilities other than what the authorities report:

From what I've read his wife is a wonderful person. She, better than anyone, understood Webb's work. She, better than I, understood what his state of mind might be the moment he died.

Me, I think his death suspicious. “Stories from 10 years ago…” or whatever doesn’t wash it as an explanation, especially.

Webb was writing about, and working on, some serious reporting. US Army applying psychological warfare against the America’s youth in order to develop better soldiers and easier enlistees, for one.

Some chimperors might find that against the law, needing recruits for his illegal war. That means more than a permanent exile, in some empires and totalitarian regimes.

[Garbo 2004]

11. Except that story had already been reported long before...even in MSM.

The use of video games for recruitment and assessment. He did a good job on the story but it was wasn't breaking news or an exclusive expose. How much threat was it to anyone to report on a story already reported on by others long before? And in a local freebie weekly, not a major news outlet that was going to get much play.

http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2004-10-14/cover.asp

[Octafish]

14. It's a lot deeper than that.

Webb hurt the BFEE in more ways than one. His weapon? The Truth.

From Kobe Bryant to Uncle Sam
Why They Hated Gary Webb

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch

I read a piece about Kobe Bryant a couple of days ago. The way it described his fall made me think of Bryant as a parable of America in the Bush years, that maybe even W himself could understand. No longer the big guy leading the winning team to victory over Commie scum, but a street-corner lout, picking on victims quarter his size, trying always to buy his way out of trouble. Don't leave your sister alone with Uncle Sam! No one want to buy Uncle Sam's jerseys anymore, same way they don't buy Kobe Bryant's.

This business of Uncle Sam's true face brings me to Gary Webb and why they hated him. Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News for besmirching the Agency's fine name by charging it with complicity in the importing of cocaine into the US.

There are certain things you aren't meant to say in public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the US used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year (even though Seymour Hersh treated the CIA with undue kindness in Chain of Command: the Road to Abu Ghraib) . A prime no-no is to say that the US government has used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also that the CIA's complicity with drug dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947. That last one is the line Webb stepped over.He paid for his presumption by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press, as the chapter from Whiteout we ran on our site yesterday narrates.

Friday, December 10, Webb died in his Sacramento apartment by his own hand, or so it certainly seems. The notices of his passing in many newspapers were as nasty as ever. The Los Angeles Times took care to note that even after the Dark Alliance uproar Webb's career had been "troubled", offering as evidence the fact that " While working for another legislative committee in Sacramento, Webb wrote a report accusing the California Highway Patrol of unofficially condoning and even encouraging racial profiling in its drug interdiction program." The effrontery of the man! "Legislative officials released the report in 1999", the story piously continued, "but cautioned that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes", no doubt meaning that Webb didn't have dozens of CHP officers stating under oath, on the record, that they were picking on blacks and Hispanics.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/

[el_gato]

15. bending over backwards to not disturb faith in the official line

people are murdered for much more mundane things than global conquest and fascism. How many people have to "commit suicide" that have knowledge of the innerworkings of the halls of power before some of
you begin to question the official story.

Gary Webb
Mark Lombardi
Steve Kangas

I guess it's just accident that when you investigate the powerful it somehow magically makes you suicidal.