December 14, 2004

Dear Mr. Chang;

On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your letter about Iraq. We appreciate learning your views.

In Iraq, the United States and our coalition partners removed a threat to our security and freed the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein't oppressive regime. Our Nation is more secure because a dangerous tyrant with a history of aggression and links to terrorists is no longer in power. American and coalition forces are helping to restore civil order and providing humanitarian aid, and the Iraqi people have regained control of their own country and future.

(...blah blah blah blah blah blah...)

As the war on terror continues, we look to members of our Nation's Armed Forces as examples of courage, dedication, and sacrifice. Their service in defense of our founding ideals makes our country safer and makes the President proud to be their Commander in Chief. We appreciate their families for their support and sacrifice.

Thank you again for writing. For additional detials about the successful transition to Iraqi self-government, you may wish to visit the White House website, www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq. Best wishes.

Sincerely,

Heidi Marquez
Special Assistant to the President
and Director of Presidential Correspondence

SACRAMENTO - Gary Webb, a prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote a controversial series of stories linking the CIA to crack cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles, has died at age 49.

Webb was found Friday morning in his home in Sacramento County's Carmichael area, dead of an apparent suicide. Moving company workers called authorities after discovering a note posted on his front door that read 'Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.'

He was killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to Sacramento County Deputy Coroner Bill Guillot. Authorities are treating the death as a suicide, Guillot told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Webb's 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News concluded that a San Francisco Bay area drug ring sold cocaine in South Los Angeles and then funneled millions of dollars in profits to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s. The articles did not accuse the CIA of directly aiding drug-dealing to raise money for the Contras, but implied that agency was aware of the activity.

Major parts of his reporting were later discredited by other newspaper investigations. A CIA probe found no evidence of CIA drug trafficking with Contras, but said the agency had continued to work with Contras suspected of trafficking.


Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos eventually backed away from the series, saying 'we fell short at every step of our process.' Webb was transferred to one of the paper's suburban bureaus.

'This is just harassment,' Webb said after his demotion. 'This isn't the first time that a reporter went after the CIA and lost his job over it.'

After quitting the newspaper in December 1997, Webb continued to defend his reporting with his 1999 book 'Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.'

Born in Corona to a military family, he moved around the country frequently. He dropped out of journalism school and went to work for the Kentucky Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer before landing at the Mercury News.

There, Webb was part of reporting team that won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of a Loma Prieta earthquake.

He later worked in state government, most prominently as a member of an audit committee investigating former Gov. Gray Davis' controversial award of a $95 million no-bid contract to Oracle Corp. in 2001.

'The guy had a fierce commitment to justice and truth. He cared deeply about the people who are forgotten, that we try to shove into the dark recesses of our minds and world,' Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for the California attorney general's office, told the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this year, Webb was one of a group of employees fired from the Assembly speaker's Office of Member Services for failing to show up for work. He continued writing occasionally for a various of publications. He recently covered government and politics for the weekly Sacramento News and Review.

'All he ever wanted to do was write,' said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell, who met him when they were both high school students in Indiana.

Webb is survived by two sons and a daughter. Services were pending.

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

This fit nicely with the beat aesthetic, and indeed with the whole mythology of modern art. While Shakespeare had been a favorite playwright of the Elizabethan court, and Rembrandt had been portraitist to wealthy Amsterdam, the more recent idols were celebrated for their rejections: Van Gogh had barely sold a painting in his lifetime, The Rite of Spring had caused a riot, Jack Kerouac's On The Road had been turned down by a long string of publishers. Where jazz had once been regarded as a popular style, a new generation of fans applauded Miles Davis for turning his back on the audience and insisting that his music speak for itself, while deriding Louis Armstrong as a grinning Uncle Tom. On the folk-blues scene, Van Ronk and his peers regarded anything that smacked of showmanship as a betrayal of the true tradition, a lapse into the crowd-pleasing fakery of the Weavers and Josh White. As he would later recall with some amusement, "If you weren't staring into the sound-hole of your instrument, we thought you should at least have the decency and self-respect to start at your shoes."

As in John Hammond's Carnegie Hall (Ed. note: a concert called Spirituals to Swing that packaged a grand narrative of black music), art was opposed to entertainment...

...Clapton and the Stones were the first pop stars ever to insist that they were playing blues...that was the sound they loved: no horns, no string sections, no girls going "oo-wah"--just slashing guitars and wailing harmonica.

Then the English kids flew across the Atlantic, bringing the gospel home. And they did something unprecedented: Unlike the hundres of white blues singers before them...they took it upon themselves to edcated their audience. "Our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters," Keith Richards would later say. "We were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: There's no way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to..."

"We're used to hearing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld answer questions about things that went wrong in Iraq by saying they went right. When he does that to reporters, it's annoying. When he does it to troops risking their lives in his failed test of bargain-basement warfare, it's outrageous."

"On the eve of war in mid-March, Rumsfeld was ready to fire White but was dissuaded because of poor timing. The war would be short enough for him to wait."

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?'' Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.