Cocaine, the CIA, and the mysterious "suicide" of 4 investigative journalists

presumably like a few of you, i've been dimly aware for some time of the allegations of cia drug-running, but it has only been since i started following daniel hopsicker's madcow morning news blog last october that i've started paying closer attention (here, here, and here)... now i see that brasscheck tv has some great youtube clips that chronicle some of that history...


2007


1980s

from brasscheck tv...

Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Webb, the journalist who broke the original CIA-Crack story in the 1990s, was rewarded by his employer the San Jose Mercury with a demotion.

He was also hounded out of the journalism profession by a smear campaign whose participants included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner.

In 2004, Webb who remained active as an independent journalist reportedly, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head - twice.

Webb joined three other men - authors Danny Casolaro and J.H. Hatfield and artist Mark Lombardi - who "committed suicide" after getting too close to Bush family secrets.

I asked a mathematician to calculate the numerical odds of four American men who all were interested in this subject committing suicide and this is what he said:

"Examining the male U.S.suicide rate for recent years, we can extrapolate a conservative estimate of 17 male suicides per 100,000 people, or 0.017%. The odds of 4 specific, male biographers committing suicide would be the 4th power of 17/100000, or 8.3521 4.913 x 10^-17...roughly 1 chance 10,000,000,000,000,000. About as good a definition of impossible as you can get.

A person would stand a better chance of playing the Canadian lottery 6/49 exactly twice in one's lifetime and winning the grand jackpot BOTH TIMES! (That is, picking 6 numbers out of 49 possible numbers and matching all 6 numbers out of 6 random draws, on 2 separate occasions, and having only purchased two Canadian lottery tickets ever.)

This calculation should be regarded as a conservative estimate: the actual odds against such a "coincidence" would be much greater. For example, if any of the biographers were female, the odds would be even greater."

to paraphrase atrios, why does our media hate us...?

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