Cruising around the blogosphere tonight, I found a few interesting tidbits about the case of Gary Webb.

For example, did you know he was one of 18 journalists featured in the book Into The Buzzsaw, about reporters who tried speaking truth to power and who ended up losing a metaphorical limb?

This is a quote of Webb's taken from the book, posted on DailyKos:

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?"

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."

Here is a link to consortiumnews.com's material on the crack/contra story.

There's lots of great links at dkosopedia.com's entry on Gary Webb.

Here is what Webb told Democracy Now! about his series in a 1998 interview (this is from a rush transcript):

Looking back on the whole thing, I think the problem we had in doing the series was that we were overly ambitious. We tried to tell a story in, you know, 10,000 or 12,000 words that really needed about 150,000 words to tell accurately and completely. And I don't regret doing it. I'm glad we did, otherwise the thing would have never gotten out, but in doing the book, I realized how sort of crippled we were, just by the media and that we were trying to do it in.

There is a tribute to Webb in that Democracy Now! story from Robert Parry, another reporter who's looked into the CIA-drugs story and a sad note:

The great tragedy, I suppose, of the personal and professional, is that despite these admissions, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times still refused to deal with the facts. It seemed almost like the editors had more of a stake in covering up the truth than the CIA did. So, Gary Webb’s career was allowed to be ruined. The people who were involved in these -- in protecting the CIA from those major papers, their careers blossomed. Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News who sold out Webb and his series, received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for ethics because of what he did. So, it seemed like all of the people that did the wrong thing got the benefits, and Gary Webb and people who -- including John Kerry, who did honorable work on this topic, received no benefits at all, and in fact were damaged.

In October, Parry wrote a piece for Salon entitled How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal.

Here's a piece he wrote for consortiumnews.com on America's debt to journalist Gary Webb.

And finally (for tonight's purposes), here's something from David Corn of The Nation, someone who criticized Webb from the Left:

As the news of Webb's death circulated across the Internet, some of his fans took the opportunity to demand that I issue a posthumous apology to him. Why? Because I had been critical of his series and book. But my criticism was different from that of the mainstream press. I maintained he had overstated the case and had not proven his more cinematic allegations. But I also credited him for forcing the issue and prodding the CIA to come clean. No one at the Times (New York or Los Angeles) or the Post managed to do that. And though there were problems with Webb's work, it is a pity that he was so brutally hounded.

Corn's earlier comments on Webb's Dark Alliance work are included at the column's bottom.