KILL THE MESSENGER - Official Trailer (2014) [HD] Jeremy Renner
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=168802#168802
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0gbQk38F0g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0gbQk38F0g
Release Date: October 10, 2014 (limited; expansions: Oct. 17 & 24)
Studio: Focus Features
Director: Michael Cuesta
Screenwriter: Peter Landesman
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray
Liotta, Tim Blake Nelson, Barry Pepper, Oliver
Platt, Michael Sheen, Paz Vega, Michael Kenneth
Williams, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Andy Garcia
Genre: Drama, Thriller
MPAA Rating: Not Available
Official Websites: http://focusfeatures.com/kill_the_messenger/
Plot Summary:
Two-time Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner
("The Bourne Legacy") leads an all-star cast in a
dramatic thriller based on the remarkable true
story of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary
Webb. Webb stumbles onto a story which leads to
allegations that the CIA was aware of major
dealers who were smuggling cocaine into the U.S.,
and using the profits to arm rebels fighting in
Nicaragua. Webb keeps digging to uncover a
conspiracy with explosive implications -- and
draws the kind of attention that threatens not
just his career, but his family and his life.
Resurrecting a Disgraced Reporter
‘Kill the Messenger’ Recalls a Reporter Wrongly Disgraced
By DAVID CARROCT. 2, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/movies/kill-the-messenger-recalls-a-reporter-wrongly-disgraced.html?_r=0
If someone told you today that there was strong
evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency
once turned a blind eye to accusations of drug
dealing by operatives it worked with, it might
ring some distant, skeptical bell. Did that really happen?
That really happened. As part of their insurgency
against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua,
some of the C.I.A.-backed contras made money
through drug smuggling, transgressions noted in a
little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report.
Gary Webb, a journalist at The San Jose Mercury
News, thought it was a far-fetched story to begin
with, but in 1995 and 1996, he dug in and
produced a deeply reported and deeply flawed
three-part series called “Dark Alliance.”
That groundbreaking series was among the first to
blow up on the nascent web, and he was initially
celebrated, then investigated and finally
discredited. Pushed out of journalism in
disgrace, he committed suicide in 2004. “Kill the
Messenger,” a movie starring Jeremy Renner due
Oct. 10, examines how much of the story he told
was true and what happened after he wrote it.
“Kill the Messenger” decidedly remains in Mr.
Webb’s corner, perhaps because most of the rest
of the world was against him while he was alive.
Rival newspapers blew holes in his story,
government officials derided him as a nut case
and his own newspaper, after initially basking in
the scoop, threw him under a bus. Mr. Webb was
open to attack in part because of the lurid
presentation of the story and his willingness to
draw causality based on very thin sourcing and
evidence. He wrote past what he knew, but the
movie suggests that he told a truth others were
unwilling to. Sometimes, when David takes on
Goliath, David is the one who ends up getting defeated.
“There were flaws in his writing and flaws in his
life,” Mr. Renner, who plays Webb in the film,
said in a phone interview. “But that doesn’t mean
he was wrong, and it certainly doesn’t mean he deserved what he got.”
The film argues that the same reflexes in the
newspaper business that hold others to account
can become just as merciless when the guns are
pointed inside the corral. Big news organization
like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times
and The Washington Post tore the arms and legs
off his work. Despite suggestions that their zeal
was driven by professional jealousy, some of the
journalists who re-reported the story said they
had little choice, given the deep flaws. Tim
Golden in The New York Times and others wrote
that Mr. Webb overestimated his subjects’ ties to
the contras as well as the amount of drugs sold
and money that actually went to finance the war in Nicaragua.
But Mr. Webb had many supporters who suggested
that he was right in the main. In retrospect, his
broader suggestion that the C.I.A. knew or should
have known that some of its allies were accused
of being in the drug business remains
unchallenged. The government’s casting of a blind
eye while also fighting a war on drugs remains a
shadowy part of American history.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Webb eventually wrote his own book, “Dark
Alliance: The C.I.A., The Contras and the Crack
Cocaine Explosion,” and Nick Schou, a journalist
who covered significant parts of Webb’s downfall,
wrote “Kill the Messenger: How the C.I.A.’s Crack
Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary
Webb.” Both books deeply inform the movie, making
the argument that journalism more or less ate
itself while the government mostly skipped away with its secret doings intact.
Mr. Webb was a talented investigative reporter
who concentrated on local corruption when he
worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer and then The
San Jose Mercury News. When he was first
approached about C.I.A. duplicity, he was deeply
skeptical. But when the tipster, the girlfriend
of a drug dealer on trial, said her boyfriend had
ties to the C.I.A., she had enough evidence to
convince him to read that 1988 report from a
special Senate subcommittee documenting instances
in which drug dealing by crucial allies,
including some in Nicaragua, was tolerated in the
name of national security. Major news outlets
gave scant attention to the report.
Mr. Webb was not the first journalist to come
across what seemed more like an airport thriller
novel. Way back in December 1985, The Associated
Press reported that three contra groups had
“engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help
finance their war against Nicaragua.” In 1986,
The San Francisco Examiner ran a large exposé
covering similar terrain. Again, major news
outlets mostly gave the issue a pass.
It was only when Mr. Webb, writing 10 years
later, tried to tie cocaine imports from people
connected to the contras to the domestic crisis
of crack cocaine in large cities, particularly
Los Angeles, that the story took off. Mr. Webb
zeroed in on “Freeway” Ricky Ross, a
gang-affiliated drug boss in Los Angeles, who
flooded streets with crack. He then drew a line
from Mr. Ross to the C.I.A.-backed contras,
writing, “The cash Ross paid for the cocaine,
court records show, was then used to buy weapons
and equipment for a guerrilla army named the
Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense,” or the FDN, one of several contra groups.
The headline, graphic and summary language of
“Dark Alliance” was lurid and overheated, showing
a photo of a crack-pipe smoker embedded in the
seal of the C.I.A. The three-part series would,
the summary promised, reveal, among other things,
how “a drug network opened the first pipeline
between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black
neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as
the ‘crack’ capital of the world.”
But if the series was oversold, it certainly
delivered on the promise of what the web could do
for journalism. A pioneering effort in
transparency, the report was accompanied by a
digital library of source documents, a timeline
of events and a list of characters, among other
web-only features that have now become
commonplace. It was, by most accounts, the first
newspaper series to go viral before there were
even words to describe the phenomenon.
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading
the main storyContinue reading the main story
At first, major news outlets shrugged. But
leaders of the drug-ridden communities did not,
drawing a line that Mr. Webb had not by
suggesting that the C.I.A. had deliberately set
out to addict urban black populations.
Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of
California, led protests by the Congressional
Black Caucus, and the comedian Dick Gregory was
arrested after trying to put crime tape at the
entrance to the C.I.A. headquarters.
But Mr. Webb’s victory lap was short lived, as
other news organizations responded with
significant stories, and his editors at The
Mercury News backed away slowly, then all at
once. The paper walked back the findings in a
1997 letter to readers signed by the executive
editor at the time, Jerry Ceppos. “I feel that we
did not have proof that top C.I.A. officials knew
of the relationship” between members of a drug
ring and contra leaders paid by the C.I.A., he
wrote, adding that the series “erroneously
implied” that the connection between Mr. Ross and
Nicaraguan traffickers “was the pivotal force in
the crack epidemic in the United States.”
In a phone call, Mr. Ceppos said good news
organizations should hold themselves accountable
to the same degree they do others.
“We re-reported the series, and I don’t know of
too many publications that have done that,” he
said. “We couldn’t support some of the statements
that had been made. It was our re-reporting that influenced me the most.”
He added that he had no regrets about that open letter to Mercury readers.
“I would do exactly the same thing 18 years later
that I did then, and that is to say that I think we overreached,” he said.
Peter Landesman, an investigative journalist who
wrote the screenplay, was struck by the reflex to go after Mr. Webb.
“Planeloads of weapons were sent south from the
U.S., and everyone knows that those planes didn’t
come back empty, but the C.I.A. made sure that
they never knew for sure what was in those
planes,” he said. “But instead of going after
that, they went after Webb, who didn’t really
know what he had gotten into or where he was. The
most surprising thing in doing the work to write
this movie is how easy it was to destroy Gary Webb.”
Even at the time, some thought the backlash against Mr. Webb was misplaced.
Geneva Overholser, then the ombudsman of The
Washington Post, wrote that the newspaper “showed
more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San
Jose’s answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves.”
Mr. Golden, who had an extensive background
covering the C.I.A. and Central America, said the
hand that struck Mr. Webb was mostly his own.
“Webb made some big allegations that he didn’t
back up, and then the story just exploded,
especially in California,” he said in an email.
“You can find some fault with the follow-up
stories, but mostly what they did was to show what Webb got wrong.”
The director of “Kill the Messenger,” Michael
Cuesta, has also directed several episodes of
“Homeland” and knows the C.I.A. has many faces.
He said he worked to shrink a sprawling story
with global dimensions by showing how it landed on one man.
“There were many things that went wrong,” he
added, “the packaging of the story, how it was
received and grew, the fact that he was not
backed up by his editors. But I was struck by the
fact that journalism, which had been the source
of his purpose, his bliss, turned on him. It’s tragic.”
While Mr. Webb died alone, after two
self-inflicted gunshots, he lived long enough to
know that he did not make the whole thing up.
In 1998, Frederick P. Hitz, the C.I.A. inspector
general, testified before the House Intelligence
Committee that after looking into the matter at
length, he believed the C.I.A. was a bystander —
or worse — in the war on drugs.
“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” he
said. “There are instances where C.I.A. did not,
in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off
relationships with individuals supporting the
contra program who were alleged to have engaged
in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”
However dark or extensive, the alliance Mr. Webb wrote about was a real one.
Mikaela Lefrak contributed reporting.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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