The Washington Post, Jeff Leen, Gary Webb and Killing Messengers

The Washington Post: Western Outpost of Journalistic Bamboozling?

 By Winsip Custer CPW News Service

      Shortly before his death, David Carr, the outspoken and fiery reporter for the New York Times who adamantly defended Gary Webb’s investigation of the CIA following the publication of his book Dark Alliance in 1996 defended the 2014 film Kill The Messenger, the story of Webb’s life.

      Unlike David Carr, Jeff Leen,  who had debated Webb in 1997 in a debate organized and moderated by University of Missouri’s Dr. Steve Weinberg, was not so affirming.  Following the release of Kill the Messenger, Leen wrote the Washington Post article “Gary Webb Was No Journalistic Hero.”

      In 1992 a book by the Houston Post reporter, Peter Brewton, titled The Mafia, CIA and George Bush was scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster.   Brewton’s editor had been assigned Alice Mayhew.  Mayhew was the editor of the Washington Post’s celebrated Watergate investigators Woodward & Bernstein whose  book ultimately cost Nixon his Presidency, All The President’s Men.   Their story was covered in the movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, the film of the same name.    Redford will be seen again on October 16, 2015 in another political drama about a journalist, Dan Rather, in the film adaptation of Mary Mape’s book Truth and Duty. 
     Journalists are waiting with baited breath to see just how this film about Rather's 2004 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard memos handles the fact that this story was known to Mapes and Rather in 2000, in fact, earlier.   Some are wondering just how the film handles the place of Mrs. Marian Carr Knox who typed the original memos and her son Patrick Carr who affirmed his mother’s testimony even after a visit to his mother from former U.S. Attorney General for Reagan and Bush, Dick Thornburgh from Pennsylvania.   Thornburgh as Attorney General under Reagan and Bush was no stranger to memos, having created the "Thornburgh Memo" that essentially violated long held Constitutional safeguards in the U.S..  Thornburgh's attack on Knox essentially matched that of Leen against Webb's credibility in 1997 and 2014.  As the Bush family consigliore Thornburgh would go on from his task of discrediting Marian Carr Knox to discrediting former FBI Director Louis Freeh in his investigation into the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State, a role that now has Thornburgh on a Paterno family web-site with a non-delineating attack of the flaws in Freeh's Penn State investigation for the University Board.  Coach Joe Paterno had delivered a key note address at the same 1988 Republican National Convention where Larry King, another ringleader of a child-abuse scandal in Omaha, Nebraska, literally sang the National Anthem.  Much has been made of the connections between the Sandusky scandal and the King scandal in Omaha known as "The Franklin Coverup."  Not ironically, it was the week of the Penn State-Nebraska game, the second week of November, 2011, that the Sandusky story broke.

      CIA agent and National Security Council advisor under Stanfield Turner, John Stockwell, was in charge of three secret wars of the CIA including Angola and has been an outspoken critic of the Washington Post.  Stockwell noted well the role that the Washington Post held in the bamboozling of the nation through media maniplation long before its Metro Editor, Vernon Loeb, approved the compromised stories of Pat Tillman’s death, Jessica Lynch’s rescue and before Loeb wrote with Paula Broadwell All In:  The Education of General David Petraeus.   Loeb’s arrival in Houston where he became the Managing Editor for the Houston Chronicle on the heels of Michael Bromwich’s departure from his task of “cleaning up” the corruption at the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office where Bromwich was paid from a fund built from confiscated drug money to the tune of several million dollars. Bromwich had been the lead prosecutor in the Iran-Contra scandal who insured that the indictments based on the violation of the Boland Amendment went no higher than Weinberger, Poindexter, North and Abrams.   John Stockwell said of  the CIA’s view of Watergate, a story among all the possibilities that had the Washington Post taking the lead on targeting a President who had pulled the plug on the Vietnam war and who had criticized the power elites who gather annually at the Bohemian Grove.  “We were mortified and terrified," said Stockwell,  "because here’s some guys being on trial, a President was being thrown out of office, eighteen members of his staff went to jail including the Attorney General for a little breaking and entering operation and covering it up.  I mean, you know, you’re suppose to do three of those before breakfast.” (CSPAN, John Stockwell, “Secret Wars of the CIA”, at 2:44:10).

      Simon and Shuster Publishers and Alice Mayhew essentially stalled the 1992 Brewton book, a story he covers in the introduction that linked Iran-Contra to the nation's S&L scandal.    By 1996 the San Jose Mercury News’ reporter, Gary Webb, was in conversation with Brewton (at 42:40 of IRE debate) who had made the connections between the CIA’s secret war in Nicaragua and showing that the criminal bankers overlapped like the lapstrake hull of an unseaworthy wooden tender.  Webb will reference this conversation with Brewton in his debate with Jeff Leen in 1997.  The Washington Post’s hitman, Leen, who becomes his most transparent in the IRE debate with Gary Webb after Webb uses the testimony of the U.S. General Accounting Office and Dick Thronburgh as evidence of his Dark Alliance thesis (IRE Webb/Leen debate at 34:32 following).  Leen whose boss became, to David Carr’s amazement, the “new Dumbledore” at Columbia University as the Henry Luce Professor of Journalism and head of the Journalism School, Steve Coll, has been relentless in his attack on Webb’s work.

      The father of a boy whose name matched that of the son of the key witness in the Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ story of GWB’s Ellington Field Texas Air National Guard memo’s wrote to the University of Missouri’s Professor Emeritus, Dr. Steve Weinberg, and asked about his memories of the debate between Webb and Leen.   “Leen was one of my students,” said Weinberg who recently suffered a stoke.  “I disagreed with Leen on the Webb assessment,” he said.   His writings confirm his position while the University of Missouri which produced the wife of CBS icon and predecessor of Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, helped underwrite the work of Investigative Reporters and Investigators or IRE that hosted the Webb/Leen debate in 1997. 

      It would be incorrect to say that IRE’s voices all sing in the same choir.  T. Christian Miller whose book Blood Money begins with the chapter on Col. Theodore “Ted” Westhusing, whose alleged suicide in the Iraqi Green Zone following a bitter confrontation with General David Petraeus, may serve to underscore the breadth of IRE’s representation, but so does Westhusing’s questionable death serve to shine a light on the death of Gary Webb, not to mention the 2000 suicide by hanging in Brooklyn of Mark Lombardi following his disclosure of the Iran-Contra flow chart in artwork that became an exhibit at the Whitney Museum.  Webb died on the day that he resigned from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997, December 10, 2004 shortly after the Bush victory over John Kerry whose investigation into Iran-Contra confirmed Webb’s book and research, a fact that Leen does not mention. 

      Steve Weinberg was contacted by the father of the 23 year old whose body was found on December 10, 2000 near Elllington Field who had recently moved to Houston from Austin where he had worked with the niece of Dan Rather.  In Houston he stayed with his uncle, the fishing partner of William E. King, the attorney and business partner of James R. Bath, GWB’s Texas Air National Guard roommate, the focus of the FinCEN investigation into Saudi influence peddling that received a “standdown” order in 1992 during the Bush/Clinton/Perot election.  Mary Mapes discloses in Truth and Duty that the GWB memo story was known to her first in 1999, but was not covered by 60 Minutes until the 2004 Rather report.  Two days before the 2000 Presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court, this young man, Patrick Carr, died.   His name matched that of the son of Rather and Mape’s key witness who would defend his mother's assertions even after a visit from Bush attorney Dick Thornburgh and the Associated Press’ head, Louis Boccardi.  The Patrick Carr who had worked in Austin with Rebecca Rather’s company spent 1977-1980 at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, the alma mater of Peter Brewton’s father, where Patrick Carr’s father had been the student assistant of Dr. Robert S. Paul, a church history professor and authority on the Westminster Confession of Faith who in 1950 had been at New Haven, Connecticut and was credited by William Barnett Benton for his political victory over GWB’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, in the U.S. Senate race that featured a brutal assault on Benton, reminiscent of the Willie Horton campaign by Senator Joseph McCarthy against which Robert S. Paul had defended Benton.  "I didn't know any of this before my son's death," said the father who agrees that Webb's connections to Brewton in a city where Mark Lombardi had painted a clear picture of the claims that Leen and the Washington Post denied ..."puts decent citizens in incredible danger from a class of classless cowards," said the young man's father, who agrees that the Fourth Estate is sleeping in the U.S.A. and that the Washington Post appears to be the training base for all reporters wishing to become Mr. Sandman.

      Jeff Leen was contacted by the father of the other Patrick Carr just as he had contacted Steve Weinberg.   His letters to and from follow:

From: William Carr
To: "jeff.leen@washpost.com" <jeff.leen@washpost.com>; Pete Brewton <pete.brewton@ttu.edu>;
 "Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2015 12:30 AM
Subject: Gary Webb and WP redemption.....an alternative

Dear Mr. Leen,
 

There is another option.  I could come to Washington to meet you eyeball to eyeball.  There I could hand deliver 1200 pages of documentation that will provide you with the evidence you say isn't there.
 

Alternatively, you could fly to Houston.  I could introduce to you the private investigator, Gregory Howard Walker, the U.S. Postal Inspector turned lawyer and security expert recommended to us by Bronislaw Mogenis, Lockheed Martin's security advisor, and his daughter to find for us the last person our son saw that night.....Careen.....which Walker took six months to find, was not the right one, charged us thousands and then became the head of airport security for Bush International, Hobby and Ellington Airports.  Julie Mogenis, a Houston judge and former FBI agent like her father was nearly killed in a rare hunting accident in Utopia, Texas....no Utopia here, my friend.
 

We can visit the Fire Department that responded to the call on December 10, 2000 and ask William E. King, Jim Bath's lawyer and partner in Southwest Airport Services just why he and his associates at Bracewell & Giuliani are seeking to privatize the fireman's pension fund.
 

I can take you to visit the boat that our son was on that night....a boat owned by Halliburton executive William R. Breland, sold to his son-in-law, Thomas Hajecate, who was indicted and convicted in Operation Lone Star that had been used in money laundering and capital flight.....in the textbook by Professor Ingo at Columbia University.  I can show you the Bin Laden's airport site that is now a subdivision and the house along the tarmac I tracked to parties from the boat that night.  We can go to Dallas and put to Buck Revell why the FINCEN investigation went dormant in 1991-92!

I can show you the photos of Patrick's uncle fishing with William E. King in Alaska and his denials that he knows him!

 

I can show you.....well....there's so much.....you'll be writing a corrective to your article on Webb and praying to whatever journalistic deity you worship for less transparency or forgiveness!

This may well give you and the WP the story you need to regain your credibility! 

WHC

 
From: "Weinberg, Steve"
To: William Carr
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2015 4:32 PM
Subject: RE: Truth Score Card and Letter to Jeff Leen

As a parent myself, I understand your quest for answers. But my brain, perhaps compromised by the May 16 stroke that  left me partially paralyzed, cannot track the connections you allege. I'm sorry. 

Steve Weinberg

http://www.steveweinbergauthor.com

 

To: Prof. Steve Weinberg, University of Missouri

 

Dear Professor Weinberg,

I fully understand.  I am sorry about the stroke and wish you nothing, but the best.

 

Here is my assessment of Peter Brewton's book which Gary Webb referenced in his debate with Jeff Leen.  Peter's father and I went to the same seminary where I was the student assistant to Robert S. Paul who in 1950 was credited by William Barnett Benton for his victory over Prescott Bush in the Conn. Senate race for his defense of Benton against the attack of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.  Didn't now that until after Patrick's death.

 

Sincerely,

WHC

With 2016 Approaching A MUST READ!, April 10, 2015

By 

Willhcarr

This review is from: The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (Hardcover)

I first read Peter Brewton's book in 2001 after the death of my 23 year old son whose body was found near Ellington Field, Houston in his burned out Ford Bronco two days before the Supreme Court decided the hanging chad debate in Florida and when any derogatory information about GWB could have swayed the court's decision. Had the world shifted under new U.S. leadership away from the fossil fuel cartel focused in Houston, the Vatican, Mecca and Medina of fossil fuel production, it would have been a very different world and Middle-East. In 1992 Brewton's book was purposely stalled to prevent its influence on that election...the GHWB, Clinton, Perot battle. Brewton was originally contracted with publisher Simon & Schuster which had provided Alice Mayhew, Woodward and Bernstein's editor on ALL THE PREDISENT'S MEN, as Pete's editor. Watergate was child's play compared to what this book accurately depicts and the S&L situation that Peter uncovered in Houston connected directly these bandits with the Iran-Contra network....the same one that Gary Webb had uncovered in Los Angeles. They were with the same players. In 2000/2001 a string of deaths and corporate scandals like Enron revealed even more....with Enron, WorldCom and other scandals made possible by Bill Clinton's 11th hour repeal of Glass-Steagall Act. That action was as telling as Clinton's compliance in the Arkansas-based Barry Seal program at Mena, all covered in another book titled COMPROMISED by Terry Reed.

I have talked with Peter numerous times and have taken great interest in his work and that of Gary Webb, author of DARK ALLIANCE. In Webb's debate with Jeff Leen of The Washington Post, Leen throws Webb under the bus not only then, but also after the release of the 2014 film, KILL THE MESSENGER. In his debate with Leen, Webb referred specifically to Pete Brewton's book. That was the explosive connection that could NOT come out. Gary Webb died on the same day, December 10th in 2004 that he resigned from his position at the San Jose Mercury News in 1997 and on the same day as Patrick Carr's death in 2000, December 10th. The medical examiner's report on Webb's death was as unbelievable as that of my son's whose name matched the name that of Patrick Carr, son of Marian Carr Knox, the Ellington Field secretary who would recant her story costing in 2004 Dan Rather and Mary Mapes their jobs at CBS. Our son found himself in an unbelievable convergence of dark alliances at a place and time of incredible danger....the lead up to a bitterly contested U.S. Presidential election. The dark alliances that Peter Brewton and Gary Webb disclose in two seemingly unconnected locations....Texas and California....are not unconnected at all. That is precisely what made anyone close to these two live wires and the stories they had uncovered in danger of a serious jolt.

In fact, the Bush crime family saga is much older than the Bush crime family saga. It is covered in the 2015 book SULFUR, LEAD and POPPIES. As Peter's book shows and as CIA Director Allan Dulles said "Americans don't read." If we did things would be much different and we would likely get the leadership we really need and that the republic and world deserves. With 2016 approaching and another Bush circling the drain, its good to read this book again or for the first time. Eye-opening!
 

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