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VINCE FOSTER

Table of Contents:

Allegations Regarding Vince Foster, the NSA, and Banking Transactions Spying, by J. Orlin Grabbe

America's Dreyfus Affair, The Case of the Death of Vince Foster, by David Martin

Deposition of Confidential Witness In Regards To the Discovery Of Vince Foster's Body on July 20, 1993

Final Report on the Death of Vinscent Foster, Jr., by Robert B. Fiske, Jr., Independent Counsel.

Interview with Patrick Knowlton, by the Washington Weekly

Patrick Knowlton v. Robert Edwards, et al.

Picture Points Finger at Whitehouse, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Electronic Telegraph

The Suicide NoteAMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 1 by David Martin (all rights reserved)

Table of Contents:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4 page 1


Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

--Abraham Lincoln

But the Dreyfus Affair...is not fixed in space and time. The combat of the individual against society, truth against deception, is specific neither to France nor to the end of the nineteenth century.

--Jean-Denis Bredin [1]

With the study of history in America's schools and universities being replaced with "social studies", "multiculturalism", and other pseudo-scientific and "sensitive" approaches to the study of the human condition, one of the time-honored features of the traditional history course is also likely to go out the window, and it will be a pity. That is the challenging "compare and contrast" essay question that we never had enough time to do full justice to on final exams. A well- crafted "c&c" allowed us to show what we did or didn't know about at least two historical events and, at the same time, forced us to think and to put things into perspective. Our only regret is that our professors seemed to leave almost all such analysis to callow students, engaging in much too little of it in their all-too-linear lectures.

To demonstrate the strength of the "compare and contrast" method in elucidating history, I propose herewith to apply it to the Dreyfus Affair, which began with the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France on suspicion of treason in October of

1894, and the Vincent Foster case, which began with the discovery of the deputy White House counsel's body almost a hundred years later, on July 20, 1993. As the Dreyfus Affair disrupted France, the Foster death, and its handling by the authorities, has shown signs that it will haunt the U.S. government into the next century.

Perhaps too much has been made of the relationship between the official framing of Captain Dreyfus and French anti-

Semitism. By regarding it so, we are able to distance ourselves from it, treating it as just one more example of the irrational behavior that mindless bigotry can engender or, alternatively, we are tempted to dismiss it as an episode which has been kept alive in history by the same powerful and influential people who keep reminding us of our collective guilt for allowing the

Holocaust.

In either case we would be greatly in error. It is indeed true that Dreyfus was a relatively low-level, anonymous officer in the

French army, and mistakes and miscarriages in the imperfect world of jurisprudence, especially military jurisprudence, happen all the time. But the way in which the case unfolded--and unraveled--did in fact almost tear France apart, actively polarizing virtually the entire society in ways seldom experienced in any country except on occasion during the prosecution of an unpopular war. It may have started as a relatively small case, but it grew into a gigantic affair, "one of the great commotions of history," [2] for the same reason that the Foster case has the potential to do the same. The French government, and virtually the entire French ruling establishment, including the press, put its prestige on the line in defense of a blatant injustice, an eventually provable lie.

The fact that Dreyfus was Jewish was no more than incidental to the original suspicion. An act of treason had demonstrably taken place. Pressure mounted quickly to find the guilty party. German espionage success had been a major contributing factor in the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The country was already beset with a general paranoia. The stabin-the-back explanation for military defeat after World War I was not original with the Germans. Now, a document divulging military secrets was discovered en route to the traditional enemy. Dreyfus was in a position, or at least almost so, to have been the sender, and he seemed just the right type of quiet, unsociable, stiff, cold, generally disliked person to be capable of the dastardly deed. That he was of an ethnic group generally suspected of being insufficiently loyal to Mother

France was just one more factor persuading the military accusers of Dreyfus' guilt, and some of his key accusers were indeed openly and fiercely anti-Semitic. We can best relate to the situation, however, by recognizing that Jews in France at the time were among the demons du jour, along with Germans, foreigners in general, and Freemasons, much like our current ruling establishment has its militia members, far-right Christian extremists, and even angry white males. page 2


Convinced though they were of his guilt, they were not convinced they could convict him in an open court with the evidence in hand. But too much political capital had already been invested, partly on the basis of strategic leaks to a sympathetic press who puffed the story up, for an innocent verdict to be permitted. A trial was held in secret before five military judges, and a unanimous verdict of guilty was duly rendered upon the basis of a dossier assembled, and to a degree, manufactured, by the prosecution. The defense was, quite illegally, never permitted to see--in fact, was at the time unaware of--the essential evidence against the accused. The death penalty for political crimes having been abolished in 1848, Dreyfus was condemned to life imprisonment on Devil's Island off the coast of South America. Newspapers across the political spectrum all hailed the swift guilty verdict.

Further nailing down the case, the false story that Dreyfus had actually confessed was soon published, and reprinted, in various organs sympathetic to the government. That, the unanimous verdict of the military panel, the opinion of the newspapers, and the natural tendency of the populace to accept the word of authority, was enough to satisfy almost the entire country, at least initially.

For the next three years, the case stayed largely out of the public eye, though a few individuals, uneasy about the closed trial and the excessive zeal with which it had to be sold to the public, began probing into the matter, discovering some of the weakness of the case against Dreyfus and uncovering evidence that pointed to another officer by the name of Major

Ferdinand Walsin- Esterhazy, a bon vivant of dubious character who was unmistakably a gentile.

Ironically, in his memoirs published in 1930, German Military Attache Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen revealed that the traitorous major's first overture was made on July 20, 1894, ninety-nine years to the day before the Foster death. Other parallels to the case are striking. One of the largest is the similarity of the national mood. As it neared the end of the century,

France was having trouble coping with what was perceived as the decline of traditional values. The following quote refers to the election of 1893:

Above all, one ought to note the troubling lassitude of the voters--out of ten and a half million who were registered, fewer than seven and a half million votes were cast. Do the abstentions indicate that the regime was perceived as a system of impotence and corruption by a segment of the population? [3]

And a contemporary observer, Jacques Chastenet, wrote, "The French malaise is above all moral." [4]

Foster More Serious

At the same stage in the developments, the Foster death would seem to be relatively more important and the official findings at least as dubious. Foster, though little known to the public, was the second ranking person in the White House legal office and a long-time associate of the First Lady, Hillary Clinton. He is also often described as a life-long close friend of Bill

Clinton because he was born and raised in Clinton's home town of Hope, Arkansas. This is not quite accurate because Bill moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, when he was five years old, and they did not stay in touch.

According to the official record, Foster was last seen leaving his office at about 1:00 pm on a Tuesday before his body was found at around 6:00 pm by an unlikely anonymous passerby in a hidden corner of a small, preserved Civil War relic known as Fort Marcy Park across the Potomac River in Virginia, a place a few miles from his Georgetown home that Foster, a newcomer to Washington, was never known to have visited. A revolver was reportedly in his hand (though the passerby would eventually surface with the claim that he got a clear look at the hands, and the palms were up and nothing was in them.).

From the beginning the newspapers and the government described the death as an "apparent suicide" though there seemed to be little about even the circumstances known at the time for suicide to be at all apparent. The only thing the authorities really had was the gun in the hand, but it's not that hard for murderers to put a gun in the hand of their victim, and the untraceable

1913 vintage revolver, made up of parts of two guns, found in Foster's hand bore all the earmarks of the typical planted weapon. Furthermore, since the recoil of a powerful weapon such as the .38 caliber on the scene almost always causes the gun to fly out of the hand of one who fatally shoots himself, the fact that the gun was still in the hand is, in itself, a page 3

WACKENHUT CORPORATION suspicious circumstance.

The haste of the snap judgment alone also should have been enough to generate suspicion. Initially, there was no hint of a motive for the "suicide". Foster was described as the White House's "Rock of Gibraltar". Friends and colleagues in Arkansas expressed astonishment that such a solid, stable, even-tempered and responsible person would take such a drastic and ultimately irresponsible action. Both President Bill Clinton and his spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers, told us that Foster's suicide was just one of life's mysteries for which there could never be an answer, and Clinton, in a eulogy to Foster asked us to "remember him for how he lived, not for how he died." In so doing he was at the same time telling us that, yes, the death was by Foster's own hand and that it is the sort of ignoble deed that is best not dwelt upon. Some White House reporters privately expressed a concern over the President's apparent readiness to accept the verdict of suicide of a close friend and associate instead of placing the full powers of his office behind a thorough investigation, but none of the reporters' doubts found their way into print. That the Park Police instead of the FBI were permitted to handle the case also raised some eyebrows, but not in public.

In slow and awkward stages the story of the mysterious, motiveless suicide began to change. The first attempt at changing the story amounted to something of a false start. The little-read Washington Times of Saturday, July 24, four days after

Foster's death, carried an inside article about depression in which Ms. Myers was quoted as saying of Foster, "His family says with certainty that he'd never been treated (for depression)." But on the front page was a story based upon information from an anonymous "source close to the Foster family" who said that Foster was, indeed, experiencing emotional problems and had turned to other family members for psychiatric recommendations. Among the family members mentioned to the reporter was brother-in-law, former Arkansas Congressman Beryl Anthony. The reporter had telephoned Anthony and asked him about the allegation and Anthony had responded, "That's a bunch of crap. There's not a damn thing to it," and angrily hung up the phone. (I wrote a short letter to the Washington Times on July 26 wondering aloud who this anonymous source might be and what he might be up to and concluding that from all we were being told about Foster, in the existing moral climate, he seemed a better candidate for murder than for suicide. The letter was not printed. It was the first of several that I have written to the Washington Times on the Foster case. None have been printed.)

The next significant contribution to the theory that Foster was experiencing psychological problems came four days later in the Washington Post Wednesday, July 28, on page A8. The first sentence bears quoting in its entirety:

White House officials searching the office of Vincent Foster, Jr. last week found a note indicating the 48 year- old deputy

White House counsel may have considered psychiatric help shortly before he died July 20 in what investigators have concluded was a suicide, federal officials said yesterday.

The full quote is important because two days later, as part of a much longer article on the ongoing investigation, the Post said that the note had been found by the Park Police in Foster's automobile at Fort Marcy Park, which was eventually in the report released by the Park Police almost a year later. (The July 30 Post article said, however, that the list contained the names of two psychiatrists, both of whom were named and one of whom was interviewed. Neither had been contacted by

Foster. The problem here is that when the police report was released, three names were on the list and the names were blacked out as though to protect their confidentiality. The blackouts were missing in a version of the police report released some time later, and the first name on the list, the one not named in the Post article, looked as though it had been written in a different hand.)

It is also interesting to observe that mention of the list of psychiatrists does not turn up in police records until July 27, though the police had all evidence from the car in hand the night of the 20th.

The observation that investigators had concluded the death was a suicide is also not correct, at least not in any official sense.

That conclusion was officially made by the Park Police on August 10.

For the eventual official story that Vincent Foster committed suicide because of clinical depression, July 29, 1993, was a banner news day. The Washington Post headlined its scoop this way, "Note Supports Idea that Foster Committed Suicide".

What followed was the revelation that another note, this one written on yellow legal paper and torn into 27 pieces, had been found in Foster's briefcase, a briefcase which had been searched on July 22 and had "all" its contents removed by Chief

White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum in the presence of witnesses. The discovery had been made by attorney Stephen

Neuwirth of the White House Counsel's Office on July 26, but the investigative authorities had not been told about it for page 4

WACKENHUT CORPORATION around thirty hours, or, at least, so we were told in the story. A seemingly critical news story line was begun, which has continued to the present, over the possibly "unwarranted delay" in reporting the discovery of the note, but the actual text of the note was not released, allowing the suspense to build for another twelve days while, in the meantime, the headline characterization of the mystery note imprinted itself on the consciousness of the public.

For its part, the New York Times on July 29 had a major story which began this way:

In contrast to White House assertions that there had been no signs of trouble, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., the longtime friend of

President Clinton who apparently committed suicide last week, had displayed signs of depression in the final month of his life according to Federal officials and people close to Mr. Foster.

A "close associate" had told of Foster's depression having been so bad that on one recent weekend he had spent the whole time in bed with the blinds drawn. The article also contained the first mention of the prescription of an anti-depressant by an

Arkansas doctor, and a "person close to the family" told us that he had just begun to take it.

If the anonymous "Federal officials" and "people close to the family" were employed by the White House, they apparently had not yet let their official spokesperson in on everything. Here is an excerpt from Dee Dee Myers' press briefing on the same day:

Q: You asked the family what, Dee Dee?

A: Whether he had been taking any medication. And I didn't confirm it. And they made some point and I, you know--

__________

Q: And what can you tell us about the anti-depressant medication?

A: Nothing.

Q: Had he taken any of it?

A: I don't know.

Q: Do you know what it was?

A: No. I don't even know--The only thing I know about that is what I read in the New York Times. I don't have it confirmed from another source.

Jumping ahead in our chronology quite a bit, it should be noted that neither Foster's widow Lisa nor anyone else on the record has ever confirmed the "lost weekend" that Foster spent at home in bed with the blinds drawn as related to the New

York Times by unattributed sources. The authenticity of the note was also later called into very serious question, about which we will have much more to say later, but for the moment, America's two leading newspapers had succeeded in establishing in the public mind the rationale for Foster's suicide. He was "depressed".

Media Similarities and Differences

Even in the early stages of the scandal the similarities in the use made of the major media by the respective governments can page 5

WACKENHUT CORPORATION be seen. The use of anonymous sources which propagate the government line in the Foster case is of a piece with the early leaks whipping up animosity toward Dreyfus and the ill-founded French reports after the trial that he had confessed. On the other hand, if the Foster case has not, and perhaps never will, escalate into the sort of national blow up that the Dreyfus

Affair did, it will likely be because of the differences, not the similarities, in the press. Here's how it was then in France:

Each time the Dreyfusards brought forward new evidence which they were certain this time must force a retrial, it was quashed, suppressed, thrown out or matched by new fabrications by the Army, supported by the Government, by all the bienpensants or right-thinking communicants of the Church, and by the screams and thunders of four- fifths of the press. It was the press which created the Affair and made truce impossible.

Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless, and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and most important element in public life. The dailies numbered between twenty-five and thirty-five at a given time. They represented every conceivable shade of opinion....

Newspapers could be founded overnight by anyone with energy, financial support and a set of opinions to plead. Writing talent was hardly a special requirement, because everyone in the politico-literary world of Paris could write--and did, instantly, speedily, voluminously. Columns of opinion, criticism, controversy poured out like water. [5]

When it comes to having access to news and information, we residents of this country reputedly by, of, and for the people can only feel extremely deprived by comparison. Whether one gets his news from newspapers, magazines, or the television, all he encounters is a drab uniformity, especially when it comes to questions of serious misdeeds by the government.

Particularly perceptive people may have an inkling that something just doesn't smell right, but they are given very little help by the increasingly lock-step press in determining what it is that's wrong. In the case of the Foster death, as we have seen, from the very beginning the smell was particularly pungent, but anyone looking for reporting and analysis to satisfy his curiosity found... nothing, absolutely nothing. Rather than four fifths of the press being on the side of the government, in the

Foster case, initially, exactly 100 percent lined up behind the Foster suicide verdict, even, as we have seen, before anything like an official finding was announced. But, come to think of it, that's how it was, initially, with the Dreyfus verdict.

Most of the nations' columnists, editorial writers, and other opinion molders rendered their support for the government position by simply ignoring the Foster death. The apparent intended impression to be created was that the evidence for suicide was so persuasive that the matter was unworthy of their comment, but they left open the opposite interpretation of their silence, that is, that there was no way that they could marshal the evidence to make a persuasive case for the government. At any rate, by their silence they tacitly gave consent to the government's words and actions.

Actually, William Safire, token conservative columnist at the New York Times, but somewhat tainted by his former employment as speech writer for the disgraced Richard Nixon, did write a few early articles giving voice to his skepticism about the rush to the suicide conclusion, but he did not persist. Similarly, the conservative Wall Street Journal expressed some misgivings editorially and predicted that the Clinton administration would bear a stain that would not go away by allowing the Park Police to do only a cursory investigation of the Foster death rather than having a full-scale, open FBI investigation. They also picked up on the little noted Washington Times article in which Foster's brother-in-law refuted the allegations of the anonymous source that Foster was seeking psychiatric help, concluding that certainly something seemed to be amiss. But, even though ensuing revelations made the government position ever less tenable, the Journal, like Safire, lacked staying power on the issue and eventually fell into the habit of referring to the “Foster suicide”, which, as the routine practice of all the other news organs, was the most powerful reifier of the government's “suicide-from-depression” position.

Returning to the Foster case chronology, on August 10 the Park Police and the Justice Department held a news conference at which they announced their official finding of suicide in the case. The fact that they were most unforthcoming with substantive answers to questions at the lightly-covered conference and did not at the same time release their report on their investigation was given little attention by the press because the Justice Department, instead, used the occasion to release the text of the by-now celebrated note. Again, of the major national newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal expressed any semblance of an objection to the stated requirement that, if they wanted to see the police report, they would have to go through the drawn out, cumbersome, and ultimately uncertain procedure of submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Their rivals devoted their attention mainly to analyzing and commenting upon the newly-revealed contents of the note, treating it, for lack of anything better, as a suicide note. page 6


With the note taking center stage, it is important that we take a critical look at its contents as well as the circumstances surrounding its reported discovery and unveiling. As observed before, it was hand-written on a sheet of yellow legal paper which had been torn, actually, into 28 pieces (intentionally mutilated to make handwriting analysis difficult?) with one piece, where initials and date might be expected, strangely missing. The act of tearing had produced no fingerprints on the document. The briefcase in which it supposedly turned up, as noted earlier, had been previously inventoried, after which it had been left "empty" on the floor of the office. Foster had been known for his gentlemanly nature and the grace and clarity of his writing in his legal briefs, but here is what the nation was told he penned and then curiously tore up and saved in his briefcase:

I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork

I did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conduct

No one in The White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group

The FBI lied in their report to the AG

The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff

The GOP has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigation

The Ushers Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC

The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport

To call this collection of random jottings sophomoric and peevish and wholly out of character for a man of Foster's caliber is to understate the case. From its text alone, the reassembled note virtually screamed "fake". One could easily interpret it as a construction whose deceptive purpose was to persuade the public that Foster did, indeed, commit suicide, but not over anything very serious. What personal "mistakes" could the man have been talking about anyway, and what "lies" by his antagonists? He didn't say. Furthermore, if his performance, and that of his cohorts, was as blameless as he goes on to say it was, what was the problem? What was ultimately so serious that he should feel compelled to abandon his family, his loved ones, and his responsibilities by taking his own life?

A detached, objective press would have to be wondering aloud if this could really be the writing, or the thinking, or the actions of the man Vincent Foster was known to be? Yet, with virtual unanimity, they ignored all the textual problems and bizarre circumstances surrounding the note's discovery and seized upon the squalidly self-pitying last item, trumpeting it as the note's main message. Here, obviously, was a poor, weak wretch about to slink off to the Washington area's most out-ofthe-way place and end it all with suicide.

One reporter at the press conference did ask Chief Robert Langston of the Park Police if the note had been authenticated.

The chief responded that a "handwriting expert" had reviewed it and told them that it had been written by Foster, and so did the widow, Lisa (who claimed no particular expertise in recognizing forgeries, we might add). He did not say who the expert was nor what means of authentication he had used, and there was no follow-up question. The gathered scribes should have been made a bit uneasy by the fact that no photocopies of the note were released, "at the very strong urging of the family of

Vince Foster", according to Deputy Attorney General Philip B. Heyman. No explanation was given for the odd family plea, and one can think of no innocent reason for it.

The truly unsatisfactory, and unsatisfying nature of this historic news conference is well summed up with this concluding exchange between Justice Department spokesman, Carl Stern, and Sarah McClendon of the tiny, obscure McClendon News

Service:

MR. STERN: Sarah, if you put in a Freedom of Information Act request, we'll make sure that it's handled.

Q: (off mike)-- Freedom of Information Act--(off mike). I want to know what--

MR. STERN: Okay, Sarah.

Q:-- (off mike)--of things we should know now. Are you going to give it to us or are you not? page 7


MR. STERN: Sarah, I don't think we have that available at this--at this point.

Q: Well, why don't you?

MR. STERN: You want some special servicing? Is that it? You're not content to wait and do it the normal way, through a

Freedom of Information Act request?

Q: No. Hell, no. I'm not--

MR. STERN: Okay.

Q: --going to wait on that.

MR. STERN: Thank you very much.

END

Thus were the reporters, and the nation, left hanging. A commitment had been made eventually to tell all about the police investigation when the first FOIA request was finally answered, but not just now. The secret case against Dreyfus for treason had been matched by the secret-for-now case against Foster for self-murder.

Defending the Government

Unwilling to share with the public the facts behind their case against Dreyfus, the government and its defenders made their argument principally over the motivation of the protagonists. From this standpoint alone, they would appear to have been on firmer ground than either their opponents at the time or those who have used a similar defense of the government in the

Foster matter. What rationale could have possibly been strong enough for France's generally apolitical Army to fabricate an elaborate case against one of its own? Who could possibly let himself believe such a thing, that the honorable men entrusted with the defense of the nation against their immediate, and very threatening enemies, the Germans, could be capable of such an outrage? Had not the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, assured the military editor of the influential newspaper

Figaro that, from the beginning they had "proofs that cried aloud the treason of Dreyfus" and that his "guilt was absolutely certain"? [6]

Mercier's parliamentary aide, General Riu, put it this way, "Today one must be either for Mercier or for Dreyfus; I am for

Mercier." "If Dreyfus is acquitted, Mercier goes," said the royalist-leaning l'Autorite, and a military colleague demonstrated his grasp of what was at stake by noting that, if in a retrial "Captain Dreyfus is acquitted, it is General Mercier who becomes the traitor." L'Autorite raised the stakes one step higher by observing that, since Mercier was a member of the government,

"If Dreyfus is not guilty then the Government is." [7]

At least in the early stages of the Foster matter, no one making the case for the government had the stature of the distinguished, upright warrior , Mercier, around whom it could be personified. Certainly, the virtually-anonymous Chief

Langston of the Park Police did not qualify, and from his indifferent performance during his one moment on center stage it was clear that he was not bucking for the job. Neither were the possible fabricators of evidence as apparently free of motive or as impeccable of reputation as were General Mercier and his staff. It was known that Foster's office had not been immediately sealed off as requested by the Park Police and that the police were, in fact, not even allowed into the White

House until a day's delay. When they did arrive, they were not permitted to examine the possible evidence within Foster's office directly. Rather, they were required simply to take down the information that was provided them by the White House legal office staff, or more precisely, by Chief White House Counsel Nussbaum as he went through Foster's papers. This was the appointee of a president already wracked with scandal barely into the first year of his office. Foster, though a government page 8

WACKENHUT CORPORATION employee, was said to have been assigned the task of putting the financial property of the Clintons into a blind trust (and who knows what else?). In that capacity he would have known more about the Clinton family finances than any man alive, and his death had rendered him safely beyond any future subpoena.

Those people who eventually materialized to suggest skullduggery in the Dreyfus Affair also were more vulnerable to having their motives impugned, at least in the popular imagination, than are the Foster case critics. Since the original

Dreyfusard, the journalist Bernard Lazare, was himself Jewish as were many others who in due time rose to his defense, it was easy to believe that they were just sticking up for a co-religionist regardless of the man's likely guilt. But the insinuations went much deeper. There was already profound suspicion in France of the growing power and influence of the new money represented by Jewish finance capital, and anti-Semitism had not yet had itself discredited by the excesses of

Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Though the three thousand copies of Lazare's pamphlet on the case were largely ignored by the influential people to whom he had it distributed, eventually, through sheer force of argument and the inherent and growing strength of his case, he began to pick up allies. As he did, a powerful counter reaction was generated.

In due time, all new evidence dug up by those favoring a new trial for Dreyfus was laid by the Nationalists in the lap of a sinister conspiracy called the "Syndicate". The Syndicate was not only said to include Jewish bankers, politicians, and journalists but also such enemies of traditional France as Freemasons, Socialists, and foreigners in general, particularly

Germans. The great majority of the French populace found it easy to believe, and they were helped along in that direction by the lion's share of the press, that the entire purpose of questioning the Dreyfus verdict was to embarrass and undermine the state, and that those who were doing it were just the sort of people that one would normally suspect of such a thing.

One could hardly deny that Jews like Lazare were leaders of the Dreyfus cause, and that it took money, of which Jews had a large and growing sum, to publicize it. Had Dreyfus not been Jewish and with a strong, well-off family behind him, had he been just an average French captain with the same personality in the same situation, one might seriously question whether anyone with any real clout would have taken up his cause in the first place. The eventual exoneration of Dreyfus, to take a novel approach, might be seen as a sign of the first tiny glimmering of Jewish media power in the West, but they were as yet too weak to have pulled it off without truth, and certain key, brave adherents to truth on their side.

Defenders of the government in the Foster case have hardly been above attacking the motives of the skeptics, either.

Unwilling as they are to examine publicly the particulars of the matter, belittling the critics and attacking their motives is all that is left to them. An interesting contrast with the Dreyfus Affair here is the near reversal of roles. To be sure, those raising questions are being accused of wanting to bring down the government, but in this instance they are precisely those nationalist, traditionalist, Christian conservative, anti- internationalist types who so staunchly defended the government in the Dreyfus Affair. The defenders of the government, on the other hand, are the "liberals", "progressives", "internationalists", and in another irony, they are backed up in the media, at least in such outstanding examples as the New York Times, the

Washington Post, and the weekly magazine, the New Yorker, by the same sort of finance capital that was said by their opponents to be behind the Dreyfusard "Syndicate."

The Role of the Intellectuals

The Dreyfus Affair is also duly famous for the role played in working for justice for the falsely convicted man by France's famous intellectual class. Most notable of them all was France's preeminent writer, Emile Zola, who, at the height of the uproar, wrote a letter to the influential newspaper, l'Aurore, given the title J'Accuse by editor (and future Premier) Georges

Clemenceau, which accepted the challenge of the Nationalists who said that proclaiming Dreyfus' innocence was to imply the government's guilt. Indeed they were guilty, said Zola eloquently, and he called the roll of the guilty parties, detailing their crimes. The evidence would admit no other conclusion. For his trouble he was tried and sentenced to a year in prison for libel.

Watching the performance of America's intellectuals in the Foster case, one could easily become disappointed and even disillusioned. People who make their living with their wits, with their critical faculties, seem to have abdicated all responsibility to bring them to bear here. More even than the general public, who polls show have a healthy skepticism about the official line on the Foster death, they appear eager simply to believe what they are told, what it is most comfortable to believe. But there is precedent for this greater credulousness of the intellectuals, so there is no real reason for disillusionment. No group of Americans swallowed more uncritically the gigantic lies of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union than did our leftist intellectuals, continuing to believe in the "workers' paradise" even at the height of the Stalin purges, the show trials, and the Great Terror. Nothing seems to paralyze their discerning powers so much as the pronouncements of page 9

WACKENHUT CORPORATION those who demonstrate good intentions toward society's less fortunate. A Democratic President, just like a brutal but distant communist dictator, is simply given a great deal more slack by these people than anyone perceived as being "conservative".

America's high-brow, general interest magazines, identifiable by the fact that they publish a poem or two here or there, have all had articles making small of any and all allegations of scandal related to the Clinton White House, reserving their most scornful tone for the suggestion that Vincent Foster might not have committed suicide. These magazines include Harper's,

The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. Perhaps fittingly, the most intellectually snobbish and the one which publishes the most poetry, the New Yorker, has been the most active in espousing the government's case, weighing in with an article on Foster's suicidal "depression" even before the August 10,

1993, official suicide “verdict” was rendered and again with an article in September 11, 1995, based upon an exclusive interview with the reclusive widow, Lisa. Both articles are emotional, impressionistic, and superficial, whose scarce supply of hard facts does as much to undermine as to support the official suicide verdict, at least for one who reads carefully and can look past the loaded language. No major magazine has attempted anything resembling its own, independent analysis of the Foster death case.

If the government protagonists in the Foster case have lacked their General Mercier, so too have the critics lacked their

Emile Zola. Actually, it is a commentary on the state of letters in modern America that no one would really expect a prominent writer to adopt a high profile challenging the government in a case such as this. In the first place, one would be hard pressed to think of any current literary figure with anything like the stature, the eloquence, the moral authority of a

Zola. America's literary community likes to think that it is above such mundane matters as politics, and its contempt for the everyday concerns of the average person is generally reciprocated by the latter.

But one prominent literary figure did offer his opinion on the case in a national magazine. Using the occasion of the shot-gun suicide of drug-ridden rock performer Kurt Cobain, on April 18, 1993, Newsweek had William Styron, most noted as the author of the fictionalized memoirs of the leader of a 19th century Virginia slave rebellion, The Confessions of Nat Turner, reflect for its readers on Vince Foster's presumed depression. Styron's qualification for the assignment was that he claimed some expertise on depression, having suffered from it himself and having written a book on his experience. His authority for

Foster's case were the questionable newspaper accounts already mentioned and an anonymous "close friend" of Foster's-much like the New York and Washington Times anonymous sources-- who noted that Foster was "clearly depressed". He would not identify the anonymous close friend when called on the phone and later queried by mail. One can't help but wonder if the source was the same one who told Sidney Blumenthal for his August 9, 1993, New Yorker article that Foster had lost 15 pounds (a "fact" which Styron duly repeats). Later, official records revealed that Foster had weighed 194 pounds during a December 1992 physical exam in Little Rock and at the autopsy his corpse weighed 197 pounds (more on this later).

In sum, Styron's performance for Newsweek was truly a sad one, and would have been very disappointing to anyone still harboring the notion that our "serious" writers are serious seekers after truth.

Enter Christopher Ruddy

Perhaps the weight of Mr. Styron's dubious authority was felt necessary by mid-April of 1994 because, earlier in the year the

Foster case had produced its potential Bernard Lazare in the person of New York Post reporter, Christopher Ruddy. Ruddy, the 29-year-old Irish Catholic son of a New York policeman, on January 27 produced his first shower of new information as a part of what would become a veritable flood in the months and years ahead (Lazare, by the way, was barely 30 years old when Alfred Dreyfus' older brother, Mathieu, induced him to take up the cause). Here, remarkably, it would appear, was the first American reporter who didn't rely primarily upon the government for his information on the case. Rather, he was able to interview actual witnesses to the body discovery scene, two of whom among the emergency workers were willing to be quoted upon what they had seen. And their accounts much more seriously than before called into question the official suicide story.

What they said they saw was a body lying perfectly straight with the arms against the body and a revolver still in the hand.

One of the workers who helped put the corpse in a body bag said he didn't recall seeing any blood or an exit wound. The scene, in sum, was altogether different from what these experienced emergency workers would have expected from a man having blown out his brains with a .38 caliber revolver. It also conflicted with the experience of the New York homicide experts with whom Ruddy consulted, according to his report. page 10


This was news which could not be ignored, though it was by the major news networks and the New York Times. The

Washington Times played it straight with a front page article on the Ruddy revelations the next day along with a chronology of the main developments in the case. The Washington Post remained silent until the next day, January 29, 1994, which was a Saturday, and buried the article away at the very bottom of page 2 of their Metro or local news section. Because of its importance the story is presented here in its entirety, complete with heading and the commentary that I wrote on it at the time, that is, without the benefit of the considerable hindsight that we have acquired as new evidence has surfaced. To get the impression that the Post intended to convey, and probably did to those who depend on it and other mainstream sources for all their news, the reader should make a serious effort to skip over my commentary--the part in italics--the first time through. After having read it with the commentary, one might consider reading it one more time a la Post reader after having completed reading this entire paper to get a more thorough appreciation of its conscious deceitfulness.

Doubts on Clinton Aide's Death Silenced

It is not the doubts which have been silenced. They have been magnified. The witnesses have been temporarily muzzled, but they did get their stories out, which is a great credit to their courage and integrity. One should be able to say as much for the

Post.

Two Fairfax County emergency workers who have questioned whether the death of White House aide Vincent Foster Jr. was a suicide have been asked by county officials not to discuss their suspicions publicly, a fire department spokesman said yesterday.

The suspicions, the doubts, the questions of the witnesses are not at issue here. What they report they saw is what is at issue.

Paramedic George Gonzalez and emergency worker Kory (sic, it's Cory) Ashford, who were among the first people to see the body of the deputy chief counsel at Fort Marcy Park last July, have told county officials that the scene seemed unusually tidy for a suicide to have taken place there.

Gonzalez and Ashford said they thought it strange that Foster, who died from a gunshot wound to the head, had little blood on his clothing and was still holding a .38- caliber pistol in his right hand.

Gonzalez and Ashford said that in similar cases they had seen, the force of the gunshot had caused the person to drop the weapon, a county source said.

In the case of Gonzalez we are fortunate to have both an expert witness and an eyewitness together in one person. Gonzalez, the New York Post reported, has had 13 years experience as a rescue worker and has seen the results of numerous hand-gun suicides. But the New York Post did not rely solely on his experience. They also talked to numerous homicide experts in

New York City who agreed that the scene was highly unusual for a suicide.

The fact that Foster was stretched out neatly on his back also made the emergency workers wonder about the circumstances of his death, the county sources said.

Also with his arms straight by his side. How did he get into that position after he had blown his brains out with the gun in the mouth? Why was there no blood or tissue on the gun, as is common in these cases?

Several forensic experts, however, said yesterday that the lack of blood on Foster and the position of his body were consistent with federal authorities' ruling that the death was a suicide, even though such deaths often are more gruesome.

Notice the strategic "however." The New York Post also talked to experts. This article suggests a false conflict, the amateur witness versus the "experts." Though by great happenstance the condition of the body may be "consistent with" the official declaration, it is statistically a great deal more consistent with murder staged to look like suicide, which New York officials page 11

WACKENHUT CORPORATION say is a relatively common occurrence.

"There's a lot of variability, depending on the gun and the type of ammunition used," said Michael Baden, director of forensic science for the New York State Police.

But we know that this was a .38 revolver, and we know the ammunition that was used. The "variability" observation is irrelevant. Thirty-eights of this type make a big, bloody mess.

"The bullet wound in the mouth does not necessarily cause blood to come out of the mouth."

Blood out of the mouth is not in question here. The mouth is the only place anyone saw blood, oozing from the corner. If he died on the spot there should have been a big pool of blood around the body. There was none.

Gonzalez and Ashford have consistently described the scene of Foster's death as tidy, but only recently indicated their suspicions that his death might not have been a suicide.

But only this week have their observations, or anything like them, appeared in print anywhere, and they are highly significant. If Washington Post reporters had heard of such descriptions, as they imply, they are guilty of journalistic malpractice, or worse, for not reporting them.

After reports of their concerns appeared in the New York Post, the workers scheduled a news conference yesterday to respond to a barrage of media questions.

But Sgt. Blount, a spokesman for the county's Fire and Rescue Department, said yesterday that Fairfax officials ruled out a

“statement and question” session because of the possibility that inquiries into Foster's death could become a part of a federal investigation into President Clinton's ties to a failed Arkansas savings and loan. Foster, who had been treated for depression before his death, handled some of the Clintons' affairs in Arkansas, including their investment in the defunct Whitewater

Development Corp.

The mention of treatment for depression is entirely gratuitous, thrown in to reinforce the judgment of suicide. Four days after the death, on July 24, 1993, the Washington Times quoted White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers as follows: "His family says with certainty that he'd never been treated (for depression)." Foster's immediate family, to date, has never publicly confirmed such treatment nor has any doctor. No record was ever produced to confirm the Post's earlier assertion that he had a prescription for an anti-depressant filled. The Post's assertion that he took that anti-depressant the night before he died is contradicted by what little has been released from the autopsy report, which said that no drugs were found in his system.*

Special Counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr., who is investigating the Clintons' ties to Whitewater and the Madison Guaranty Savings

& Loan, has said he will examine the Foster suicide to determine whether there are any ties to his work on Whitewater

Development. But Fiske has given no indication that he believes the official finding of suicide should be reviewed.

He has given no indication that it should not be, either. And is it not prejudicial and nonsensical for the Post to write that

Fiske probably won't look into "the Foster suicide" because "he has given no indication that he believes the official finding of suicide should be reviewed"? Should they not say "the Foster death" in this instance?

U.S. Park Police officials said yesterday that there is "no doubt" that Foster committed suicide.

Maj. Robert Hines, the Park Police spokesman, said no ballistic test was performed on the antique 1913 revolver found in

Foster's hand because a bullet was never found. page 12


But Hines said an examination performed by federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that residue in the bullet chamber during a test firing was identical to the residue in Foster's hand, indicating that Foster had fired the gun.

Surely they must know that it indicates no such thing. Gunpowder residue is gunpowder residue. It is not unique to a particular gun or particular ammunition except in exceptional cases such as a black powder muzzle loader. Even if the hand and the gun residue could be positively linked, so what? A corpse offers little resistance to the firing of a gun in the hand or to smudging with residue swabbed out of a gun barrel.

The conclusion was further supported by the autopsy, which found gun residue in Foster's palm.

If Foster fired the gun, how did residue get on his palm? Wouldn't it be on the back of his hand, if anywhere at all?

The Park Police report on Foster was due to be released, but sources said it is being delayed because of concerns that Fiske will want to review it.

Until the Washington Times reported on December 20, 1993, that among the things secretly removed from Foster's office the night he died were files related to Whitewater Development Corporation, the White House was effectively resisting the call for a special prosecutor. Why has the police report, including the autopsy, been kept secret all these months?

*A good deal of evidence related to Foster's "depression" did come to light after January 29, 1994, but the case for it remains as weak, if not weaker, than ever. The family doctor in Little Rock was interviewed by members of Fiske's team and he claims to have talked with Foster by phone and to have prescribed an anti-depressant by calling it in to the Morgan

Pharmacy in Georgetown, which supposedly delivered it to his home the day before he died. However, it is indeed curious that Foster was able to make connection directly with the doctor, talking to no one else in the office. No mention is made in the official record, which was released in two large volumes after Senate hearings in the summer of 1994 (more about those later), of billing records, copies of the prescription, or, most importantly, of long-distance telephone records of the call by

Foster to Little Rock or the call from the doctor to Georgetown. Furthermore, the level of the dosage is much too low for the treatment of clinical depression (50 milligram tablets of trazadone). At that level of dosage it is no more than an antiinsomnia medicine. So whatever one is to believe about the medication, the Post is wrong to state categorically that Foster

"had been treated for depression."

There is more reason to doubt whether any consumption of medication ever took place. Fiske, in his report, says confidently that, "Lisa Foster saw Foster take one tablet during that evening." We learn from the Senate hearing documents, however, that when lead investigator Sgt. John Rolla of the Park Police asked Lisa at her home the night of the death if Foster had been taking any medication, she responded "no". He also concluded in his written report on that evening that none of the family members present could think of any reason why Foster would have taken his own life. Those family members included, in addition to the widow, his daughter and both of his sisters.

The FBI lab, working for Fiske, also claims to have detected the traces of trazadone in Foster's blood which the original toxicologist missed, though one of his specific tests was for anti-depressants. The probity of the FBI lab, however, in 1996 came under fire from one of its own chemists, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who accused them of misreading evidence to benefit the prosecution in a number of cases, most notably in the prosecution of those accused of the World Trade Center bombing in New York City. In the Foster case, as well, the truthfulness of the FBI has been called into serious question. In the Fiske

Report the claim is made that an FBI team visited the site where Foster's body was discovered and excavated to a depth of 18 inches in search of bone fragments or any other residue beneath where Foster's head had lain. Reporter Ruddy talked to an archaeologist from the Smithsonian Institution who was present and he says no such digging was done. I also talked with a regular visitor to the park who is quite familiar with the site. He was there only a few days after the date of the claimed excavation and saw "no signs of digging."

Government Salesmen

The essential sales role of the Washington Post for the government's conclusions could have hardly been more evident than page 13

WACKENHUT CORPORATION it was at this crucial juncture in the Foster case. The Post had gone to great lengths to create the impression that Ruddy's revelations really amounted to not very much. One would be hard pressed to imagine how it would have reported on the revelations any differently had its editors and reporters been employed directly by the White House.

Before continuing with the chronological narrative, a couple of other Post contributions to the government's suicide case should be mentioned. On Sunday, August 1, 1993, twelve days after Foster's body was discovered and nine days before the announcement of the first official conclusion of suicide, the Post's lead reporter on the Foster death, David Von Drehle, wrote a rare column on the subject. The column must have been several days in gestation because, in it, Von Drehle reverted to the original non-explanation for the "suicide", that it was just one of those things that we can never understand. His means of doing so was to disinter a familiar old poem by the early 20th-century writer, Edward Arlington Robinson, entitled

Richard Cory about a rich, slender, handsome and widely-envied fellow who seemed to have everything, yet "one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet in his head."

Concluded Von Drehle, "Thousands of lines of newspaper type have been spent on Vincent Foster's tragic death. I don't think any of us put it any clearer."

We stress that the author, Robinson, offers absolutely no explanation for the fictional Richard Cory's drastic deed, though he does provide some verisimilitude by having his character kill himself at home at night, not in the middle of a work day in a hidden corner of an obscure park distant from home and work. More even than Cory's death itself, Foster's death in Von

Drehle's exposition fits the definition of what we may call the "Richard Cory Effect", that is, a mysterious happening for which there is no plausible explanation. If we only think about it a little, we can see that this would-be press investigator of

Foster's death didn't get nearly as much mileage out of the Richard Cory Effect as he might have. He could, in due time, also have invoked it to explain a number of other obvious anomalies in the case for Foster's suicide:

Why Foster's fingerprints weren't on the gun in his hand

Why no bullets to the gun could be found in Foster's possession other than the spent one and the unspent one in the revolver's cylinder

Why the Park Police would officially conclude suicide, carried out with the gun found in Foster's hand, two days before they sent the gun to be tested to see not just if it had been fired or if it would produce powder smudges, but even if it was actually operative

Why no family members could positively identify the gun as belonging to Foster

How Foster's body came to be lying so curiously straight

Why there was none of the blood and gore at the site which is typical of such suicides

Why Foster chose such an odd place for the deed

Why Foster chose such a bad time. His sister Sharon was arriving from Little Rock that day, with her daughter, and they were going to have lunch in the White House the next day. In his last conversation with the younger of his two sons he had discussed plans to buy a boat.

Why Foster even bothered to come to work that day if he was planning to kill himself

How Foster could eat a hefty meal shortly before taking his own life from depression

Why the fatal bullet could not be located

Why Foster's teeth were not chipped from the recoil of a revolver which has a high front sight

Why the police concluded suicide so readily

Why the police apparently took none of the steps to rule out homicide typically required in such violent death cases

Why the police assigned as lead investigator someone who had never before conducted a homicide investigation

Why President Clinton concluded suicide so readily

Why the president saw fit the day after the death, July 21, to retain expensive criminal lawyer, David Kendall, who has the

Washington Post as another of his clients

Why there were no Foster fingerprints on the note that had been torn into 28 pieces

How those who initially searched Foster's briefcase and proclaimed it empty could have overlooked every one of the pieces of paper that later came tumbling out when the briefcase was turned on its end

Why no one at the Foster house the night he died could think of any reason he would have committed suicide

Why Lisa Foster told the investigating officer he had not been taking any medication

Why the family would have said with certainty that Foster was not being treated for depression

Why the toxicologist found no drugs in his system

Why the note sounded so much more like the work of a high school sophomore than it did like the writing of a polished litigator

Why the family would be so concerned that the general public not see a photocopy of the note, as opposed to the text of the note

Why the police made no serious, objective effort to authenticate the note, though they claimed they did

Why no one saw Foster in the five hours between his departure from the White House building proper (not the enclosed, page 14

WACKENHUT CORPORATION secured White House compound) and the discovery of his body

Why there is no video record of Foster's departure from the White House compound considering the extreme securityconsciousness of the Secret Service protectors of the facility

Why the authorities could produce no records of the required long-distance calls for the prescription of the anti-depressant

Why the family doctor did not come forward immediately to tell of his prescribing of the medication

Why all the sources telling reporters of Foster's “depression” requested anonymity

Why the Washington Post said initially that the list of psychiatrists was found in Foster's office, but later said it was found in his wallet when, each time, it was relying upon "official" sources

Why it took several days for the existence of the list of psychiatrists to be made public if it had been among the items found in Foster's car at Fort Marcy Park that night. Weren't they expressly looking for indications of a motive for suicide?

Why the Post initially said there were two psychiatrists on the list, which later turned into three

Why the Post reported that police were turned away from the Foster house the night of the death and were not able to interview the widow until nine days later, when it was revealed almost a year later that the police were not turned away and actually spent more than an hour interviewing family members and White House staff members who were present

Why the Post did not report what rescue workers saw when they discovered the body

Why no Foster schedule of appointments ever turned up

Why Foster's personal telephone log never turned up

Why the White House vigorously obstructed the death investigation by failing to seal Foster's office, removing things from the office, and not allowing police investigators even limited access to the office for more than a day

Why the White House attempted to justify these actions by invoking both lawyer-client privilege and executive privilege even though Foster was not the Clintons' personal attorney and the U.S. Park Police is in the executive branch of government under the Department of Interior

Why the press did not report this extraordinary invocation even though it was made before the entire White House press corps by spokesperson Dee Dee Myers on July 29, 1993

The only explanation that holds good for every one of them, and a like number of anomalies which developed, as we shall see, as the case progressed, would seem to be reporter Von Drehle's Richard Cory Effect, that is, once again, "a mysterious happening for which there is no plausible explanation."

Another Post reporter stepped out of character into the columnist's role four days later, on August 5. This time it was Walter

Pincus from the regular CIA beat who produced an article entitled "Vincent Foster: Out of His Element". The title strongly conveys the column's flavor, which is actually pretty much all it had. Hard facts were noticeably absent. The article is particularly significant because it was the first instance of anyone publicly saying that he noticed any behavior in Foster that one might describe as, at most, agitated. He does not go so far as to use the word "depressed". Pincus claims to have had breakfast with Foster several times since his arrival from Washington, having gotten to know him since both of their wives were from Little Rock. He begins his article on the premise that, of course, Foster took his own life:

Like others, I have been haunted by the question of why Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster Jr. would drive out to

Fort Marcy Park in Virginia, walk to a lonely spot, put a gun to his head and shoot himself.

He doesn't take long to get to his purely speculative answer to his question, though he doesn't label it as such. We pick up with the article's second paragraph:

Foster was not a veteran of Clinton's past political battles or his statehouse service. If his name ever appeared in public print in Little Rock, it was for legal cases won or honors received. In Washington, he was clearly a man out of his element.

He arrived in January without a thick hide for the rough and tumble that one develops by participating in a national political campaign or even in a state legislative session.

There it is. But he was, after all, the Rose Law Firm's head litigator making $295,000 a year in low-rent Little Rock. People with thin skins don't last very long in that rough-and- tumble business, much less rise to the top, but Foster, we are to believe, had an extraordinarily thin one. And how did this handicap eventually prove to be fatal?

When the (Wall Street) Journal took aim at him in a lead editorial titled "Who is Vince Foster?" he suddenly and surprisingly found himself considered a questionable man of mystery in Washington, a "crony" whose very reluctance at immediately handing out a picture of himself to an editorial page implied he had something to hide. page 15


His composure sometimes broke when he would discuss what he considered wild assertions in one paper that would be denied but then picked up blindly by others. He would have been amazed and extremely disturbed by the rumors that have accompanied his own suicide and found their way into print.

What, specifically, is Mr. Pincus talking about? There were no wild assertions in the Wall Street Journal's editorial, and nobody picked up on their charges, which were actually quite mild. And as of July 20, 1993, press treatment of the Clinton

White House in general was extremely forbearing, especially in light of the corruption we have since discovered, much of which Foster must have known about. And yet, Foster's "composure broke" when he spoke of it. One would have liked a little more elaboration. Did he cry? Did he curse? Did he rend his garments? How, exactly, did his broken composure manifest itself? This is material testimony that virtually cries out for cross-examination.

Pincus's theme of Foster as fragile victim of the merciless press was picked up on by Sidney Blumenthal in his August 9

New Yorker article:

Foster sought perspective through a number of conversations with Walter Pincus, a reporter for the Washington Post, whose wife is from Little Rock. "He couldn't understand why the press was the way it was," Pincus said. "It was a sense that people would print something that was wrong, and that other people would repeat it. I'd say, 'You can't let the press get your goat; you have to go on. This is how the game is played.' He'd say, 'Fine.' "

We return to the Pincus narrative for his conclusion:

Near midnight that Tuesday at the Foster home in Georgetown, I sat in the garden with a few of his Arkansas friends for half an hour. They had stories about his remarkable life in Little Rock. We then all talked -- with hindsight--about how he had taken on everyone else's problems in Washington. Each of us recalled how we had seen the little ways the pressures on him had shown through. But none saw any sign that he would take his own life because of them and so--much too late--each voiced his own guilt about having failed Vince when he most needed help.

What he is telling us is that he was at the Foster home the night of the death talking with the White House crowd ("Arkansas friends"). In so doing, he inadvertently reveals his cozy relationship with the people that the public expects him to report upon objectively. He also could not have failed to know that the police had come and spent more than an hour questioning the family. Yet his newspaper had reported on July 30 that the police had been turned away, and it left the country with that false impression for almost a year. And if he and the Arkansas crowd were so perceptive in noticing "the little ways the pressures on him had shown through," why would the police conclude from their family interviews that night that no one present could think of any reason why he would take his own life? Perhaps the best question to be asked is if this man and his newspaper have given you sufficient reason to believe that they would tell you the truth in this matter.

The Search for a Mercier

As noted in the Washington Post spin article on the shocking revelations by the emergency workers, an “independent counsel” had been appointed by the Clinton Justice Department earlier in the month to look into the scandal involving

Clinton business partner Jim McDougal, his failed savings and loan and the Whitewater Development Corporation, jointly owned by McDougal, his wife at the time, Susan, and the Clintons. No announcement had yet been made as to whether the counsel's duties would involve reexamining the Foster death.

There really was no reason for suspense. Until the ostensibly conservative, Clinton-opposing Washington Times revealed in a front page article on December 20, 1993, that among the items removed from the Foster office the night he died were

Whitewater documents, the White House and its Justice Department had been successfully resisting calls for an independent counsel. The stated source for the new scuttlebutt was anonymous Park Police investigators, but, in reality, there was no way for them to have known for sure what was or wasn't removed from the office because they were never given free access to it.

On the other hand, as we have seen, there were a host of other highly suspicious things associated with the Foster death that these anonymous Park Police leakers had to have known about but did not share with the Times, or if they did, the Times chose not to print it. Even on things missing from the office they might have been more enlightening. We know from page 16

WACKENHUT CORPORATION subsequent official documents that they inquired, as they should have, about an appointments calendar and a personal log of telephone calls. As we noted earlier, neither, apparently, ever turned up. Is it not, then, safe to assume that this material evidence of far more importance than any Whitewater documents was among the things illegally removed from the office?

It would appear that the decision had been made in the White House that a Mercier-like figure was needed to put his personal stamp upon the suicide-from-depression story, and who would be better for that than an "independent counsel"? His primary attention would be devoted to the safer and much more difficult to understand "Whitewater Affair." That would be the magician's hand that would receive the main notice of the press. A connection had to be made to the Foster death, however, so the counsel's true principal duty could be justified. So the Whitewater leak was made to the Washington Times, and the appointment of putative- Republican New York lawyer, Robert B. Fiske, Jr., followed closely in its wake.

It can't be said that Fiske was a well-known public figure with great moral authority. It is perhaps the greatest indictment of the United States as it approaches the 21st century that it is very difficult, indeed, to think of anyone who might fit that description. But, at least, the press was able to make much of the fact that Fiske was a member of the principal opposition party to the president. Little noted was the fact that he had also been a defense counsel for former Democratic Secretary of

Defense, Clark Clifford, in the case involving the fraudulent takeover of First American Bank in Washington, DC, by the

Pakistan- based Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). BCCI was the much under-publicized largest criminal conspiracy in history involving the theft of billions of dollars of depositors' money around the world and massive laundering of illegal drug money, among other things. According to the definitive book on BCCI, False Profits, by Peter Truell and

Larry Gurwin, the man most responsible for getting BCCI involved in the United States was Jackson Stephens of the brokerage firm of Jackson Stephens Associates of Little Rock, Arkansas. To close the circle, according to a Wall Street

Journal report in the wake of Foster's death, Stephens was the largest single client of Little Rock's Rose Law Firm, and the man who had been in charge of the Stephens account before he left for his government job was none other than the Rose firm's top attorney, Vincent W. Foster, Jr.

Shortly after Chris Ruddy's first Foster story appeared, Fiske announced that former New York City prosecutor, Roderick C.

Lankler, would focus exclusively on the Foster case. Soon after that, leaks helpful to the government's original case began to trickle out of the Fiske shop. Thus began a persistent pattern which, in effect, allowed the government to have its cake and eat it, too. Those who wanted to hear more from witnesses or, at least, to get a look at the evidence which the police had used to conclude suicide, were put off by being told that nothing could be let out because it might interfere with Fiske's ongoing investigation. On the other hand, the press didn't stop referring routinely to Foster's "suicide", as though the fact that the case had been reopened made no difference. On top of that, Fiske, with his leaks could actually reinforce the suicide verdict well in advance of officially rendering one which he would then have to defend. Eventually, enough time might be bought that they could start dismissing the whole matter as "old news".

Let us illustrate the usefulness of the strategic Fiske leak. In one of his follow-up stories in the New York Post reporter

Ruddy made a mistake and invested too much confidence in the veracity of one of his sources within the Park Police who had originally established his credibility by confirming what the emergency workers had said about the tidy body discovery scene. According to the source, the police had not even taken the most basic crime scene photographs, and this is how Ruddy reported it. Very quickly ABC Television News made public a single leaked photograph which showed a hand grasping a revolver backwards with the thumb on the trigger. The hand with its long, slender fingers looks like Foster's as does the pinstriped pants almost under which the barrel of the gun rests. Behind the hand is a bed of brown leaves. The photo was quickly reproduced in Newsweek and other publications.

There was a "gotcha" quality to the ABC and Newsweek reports. Ruddy has been shown up as an irresponsible rumormonger in contrast to the official authorities who had been performing their duties properly all along while under fire from partisan political snipers. No one ever asked how reporter Jim Wooten was chosen to get this one leaked photograph or why he was satisfied with just the one photograph, if, indeed, that was all he was given. He also reported that the photo contradicted the reports by Ruddy that there was little blood in evidence. The viewer had to take the reporter's word for it, however, because blood in any quantity was far from obvious in what was flashed up on the screen, nor could any be clearly seen in the Newsweek reproduction. If the doubts were to be laid to rest, the full collection of crime scene photographs, if they existed, was called for.

At any rate, the release of the photograph seemed to have given the government a small victory over the pesky Ruddy, but it might have done more harm than good to the government's case over the long haul, as did the stories leaked out in March to the New York Daily News and in early April to the Wall Street Journal that Fiske had already reached the conclusion that

Foster committed suicide, though he didn't render a report until the last day in June.

In the FBI report of the interview of Foster's widow, done pursuant to the Fiske inquiry, the following statement appears: page 17


"LISA FOSTER believes that the gun found at Fort Marcy Park may be the silver gun which she brought up with her other belongings when she permanently moved to Washington." Later in the same report we find this: "SHARON BOWMAN

(one of Foster's two sisters) told LISA FOSTER that FOSTER's father kept a gun by his bed while he was still living, and

LISA FOSTER believes that that gun may be the same revolver she was shown by the interviewing agents." (emphasis added) Drawing upon the implications of these statements and similar statements by Lisa in an August 1995 issue of the

New Yorker, James Stewart, the author of Blood Sport, goes a bit farther than the Fiske Report and strongly implies that this silver gun was the gun that Foster used to kill himself (Fiske only weakly implies it for the careless reader.) But there was that one released crime-scene photo. The gun was clearly thoroughly black, not silver.

Ruddy would also later claim that based upon his interviews with witnesses, the body was not at the site where the police claimed it was. This is not something he would be likely to fabricate because what it means is that all of the Park Police witnesses who said publicly that the body was at a different site would have to be consciously in on a major coverup and obstruction of justice. (Rescue workers who, on the record, describe a site consistent with Ruddy's location would have to be somewhat complicit themselves, too, because they have certainly not publicly attacked the Park Police on this matter.) And what plausible motive could they have to misidentify the site of the body? To maintain that they nevertheless did so obviously makes Ruddy's task of selling his story more difficult. Might he have been intentionally misinformed by his sources so that he would end up looking bad? Well, once again, there's the photograph of the hand with the gun. The body is obviously resting on a bed of brown leaves. At the site where the police tell us the body was found the ground is barren and the leaves that fell there the previous autumn had long since been washed to the bottom of the steeply sloping berm by late

July. The background at the Ruddy site matches the photograph exactly while the official site looks nothing like it.

When Fiske's report was released on June 30, 1994, it was accompanied by a number of FBI lab reports which have dates of

May and June. Mention was made of an expedition out to the park in early April to look for skull fragments or any other organic residue from Foster having shot himself there. The discoveries, as we shall see, don't clearly and obviously support the conclusion of suicide. In large measure they greatly undermine it. We also later discover that Fiske's FBI people made none of their key interviews until May. But the leaks of March and April tell us that Fiske had already reached a suicide conclusion. Indeed, it seems he had, regardless of what the evidence showed.

Fiske Weighs in and Falls Down

Fiske's report is most noteworthy for the startling contrast between its merit, or, rather, its lack of merit and the unanimous acclaim with which it was received by the American news media. This striking unanimity, which included the Wall Street

Journal and the Washington Times, was possible because Christopher Ruddy had been dismissed from his reporter's job at the New York Post and had not yet been hired by the small, suburban Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Fiske summarized his conclusions as follows:

On the afternoon of July 20, 1993, in Fort Marcy Park, Fairfax County, Virginia, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. committed suicide by firing a bullet from a .38 caliber revolver into his mouth. As discussed below, the evidence overwhelmingly supports this conclusion, and there is no evidence to the contrary. This conclusion is endorsed by all participants in the investigation, including each member of the Pathologist Panel. [8]

Those who would question Fiske's conclusions were said to be indulging in "conspiracy theories" or "talk show fantasies" according to the Washington Post's "news" story, and in its editorial it declared that the report should "satisfy all but the most cynical partisans." Thus did the Post, speaking for the American press in general, foreclose honest debate. Anyone who might not be satisfied with the 58 double-spaced pages of report, accompanied by 91 pages of the resumes of the pathologists, was labeled in advance not just a cynical partisan, but one of the most cynical partisans. Yet, I am writing these words exactly two years and four months after Fiske pronounced his conclusion, and the case of the death of Vincent Foster is still open and ongoing in the federal government's Office of the Independent Counsel. Fiske's conclusions, as it turned out, were not all that definite and final. It's enough to make one wonder if all those reporters who so praised the Fiske Report had actually bothered to read it.

There were three obvious reasons why Fiske's report should not have been immediately embraced as the final word on

Foster's death. First, he separated his investigation into two parts. The second part was to be addressed to the actions of the

White House staff in the hours and days after the death. Did those actions constitute obstruction of justice, and if so, for what purpose? The report that Fiske released did not deal with that question. Second, apart from the FBI lab reports already mentioned and the autopsy report, Fiske gave us very little supporting documentation for his conclusions. The Park Police report was still held back. Fiske talked of conducting 125 interviews, but there were no transcripts of the interviews. What is at least as bad, in contrast to the Whitewater part of his investigation, he had not convened a grand jury to hear the Foster witnesses and none of the testimony had been made under oath. The absence of the threat of a perjury charge seriously weakened the credibility of the testimony. Fiske also told us what a number of Polaroid photographs of the crime scene showed, but the one leaked to ABC remains the only one that the public has been permitted to see. And, in a confessed Park

Police “blunder” that should have raised eyebrows, he admitted to the kernel of truth in Chris Ruddy's charge about the crime scene photographs. The 35 mm photos taken by the Park Police crime scene photographer were said to have been page 18

WACKENHUT CORPORATION spoiled from under- exposure. In light of such a curious development, a critical reader had to wonder if the evidence we weren't shown really did support Fiske's conclusions.

Which brings us to the third reason for skepticism. The new evidence that was revealed by Fiske undermined more than it supported the verdict of suicide. In fact, the appendices to Fiske's 58-pager contained some startling new revelations which somehow managed to escape the notice of every single reporter and every single news agency in the United States.

AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 2

The blood pattern evidence showed quite clearly that Foster's head had been in different positions post mortem from the almost straight, upright position in which it was found. There was a smudge stain on the right cheek matching a stain on the right shoulder of his shirt which the FBI lab technicians said strongly suggested that, at some point, the cheek had rested upon the shoulder. There were also two narrow tracks of blood, one from the right nostril to above the right ear, in the temple area, and another from the right corner of the mouth to just below the right ear. With Foster's body lying head-high on a slope, blood would have had to flow uphill to make those tracks. In fact, Fiske says the steepness of the slope explains why no pool of blood was seen above or beside the massive exit wound in the back of the head. All the blood had flowed down the body in the back. Fiske's pathologists could conclude, only, that someone must have moved the head before the photographs were taken. From the blood evidence, alone, it appears they would have had to move the head at least twice, but no was identified as the tamperer with the potential crime scene.

Foster's glasses were said to have been found 13 feet below his feet at the bottom of the hill, and, according to the FBI lab, they had traces of gunpowder on them. Fiske said they "bounced down the hill." But the force of the blast initially would have carried them in the opposite direction. They would have had to change directions and make their way over rough terrain and through heavy foliage to get where they were found. Gravity might do the trick on a round ball, or a liquid, but not eyeglasses, of all things.

Carpet type fibers of various colors were discovered on Foster's jacket, tie, shirt, undershorts, pants, belt, socks, shoes, and two of the papers on which the clothes had been placed to dry. Blond to light brown hairs, not from Foster, were found on his undershirt, pants, belt, socks, and shoes. Officially, no attempt was made to match either the hairs or the fibers with known people or places, which makes one wonder why they bothered to look for these things in the first place. Was this one of those trails chosen not to go down for fear of where it might lead?

Most of the 200 yards-plus route that Foster would have had to walk from the parking lot to the body site is either dirt or grass. Yet there was no dirt nor were there grass stains on his shoes. The site where they said the body was found is barren ground, but there was no dirt on his clothes, either. There were flecks of mica, which Fiske makes much of, but casual inspection when a direct sun is shining reveals that all of the vegetation in the park, including the dried leaves, is covered with tiny, sparkling bits of mica.

The Fiske Report has a number of other weaknesses, most of which, as could be expected in such a brief effort, could be categorized as sins of omission. For instance, the work of the Park Police was not reviewed. Most fundamentally, we were not told why the Park Police so readily concluded suicide nor what steps, if any, they might have taken to rule out homicide.

We have to read between the lines to figure out that the police did very little. The police had clearly made no effort to check

Foster's clothing for things like carpet fibers. They had not discovered any bone, scalp, or other human tissue on the ground beneath Foster's head or an FBI expedition would not have been sent out looking for it nine months later. They reported nothing about any check on Foster's car for fingerprints or the area around his body for footprints. We are told that the FBI lab found one fingerprint on the revolver found in Foster's hand, but it wasn't his. The impression left is that the Park Police did not check the gun for prints and the FBI made no effort to determine who was responsible for the print that was found.

We are not even told if the police made any systematic effort to determine what Foster's scheduled plans were for the remainder of the day. In fact, what Fiske has to say about the work of the Park Police is so brief that we might as well repeat it here.

In the weeks following Foster's death, the Park Police conducted a number of interviews with family members, White House staff, and others; reviewed documents obtained from the White House and from Foster's personal belongings; and took other investigative steps including fingerprint analyses and an unsuccessful search in Fort Marcy Park for the bullet fired from the gun. The Park Police concluded that Foster's death was a suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the mouth. [9]

Those who were expecting that Fiske's work would represent something of a critique of what the Park Police did had to have been disappointed. page 19


One other glaring inconsistency bears mentioning. It is one that could hardly have been overlooked by any conscientious reporter, but no one in the press said a thing about it. Fiske, in a footnote, tells us that the autopsy doctor took no X-rays because his X-ray machine was broken. This is unfortunate for anyone wanting to resolve conflicts because Dr. James

Beyer's autopsy diagram showing a 1" by 1.25" exit wound differs from what emergency worker Cory Ashford had to say.

He said there was no exit wound at all, or at least there was none that he saw. When we turn to the last page of the autopsy report, the gunshot wound chart, we see that Dr. Beyer has checked that he did take X-rays.

After Fiske

With the Fiske Report providing cover, a collection of documents totaling some 100 pages was quietly released shortly afterward by the Park Police. It did not include all of the paperwork accompanying the original police inquiry, and numerous parts of the documents were inexplicably "redacted" or blacked out, but in the absence of anything better, this would have to serve as the longawaited "Police Report." At any rate, not just the new anomalies it revealed, but news of the release itself, was blacked out by the American press.

Of the new anomalies, two stand out. We learn for the first time, from the very sketchy, one-page report of primary investigator, Sgt. John Rolla, that the police were not turned away from the Foster home the night of his death and that he and Sgt. Cheryl Braun were able to interview not just the widow Lisa but also Foster's daughter and both of his sisters, and some White House staff members. We also get to see Rolla's conclusion that no one present could think of any reason why

Foster would have taken his own life. Second, we get to read the report of Detective James G. Morrissette who was one of four Park Policemen to attend Dr. James Beyer's autopsy of Foster. In his report Morrissette notes that Dr. Beyer said that the X-rays showed no bullet fragments in the head, which comes pretty close to confirming completely that Dr. Beyer did indeed take X-rays, as he had checked on the Gunshot Wound Chart, though they are now missing and said by Fiske never to have been taken.

Considering all the things that were redacted, one can't help wondering how these latest tantalizing tidbits got out but, as we have noted, they didn't get out very far, the press having ignored completely the release of the police documents.

A Senate Endorsement

On July 29, 1994, a month after the release of the Fiske Report, the United States Senate showed that it, too, could enjoy the indulgence of having its cake and eating it, too. It would like to show that it was taking heed of the public concern over the smell of cover-up surrounding the Foster death, but an actual, full-scale Senate investigation could only cause problems. If it were to produce a report that concluded that there was, indeed, a cover-up, it would have fostered a major national crisis.

Covering up a murder is serious business. On the other hand, if it were to conclude that it was, indeed, suicide, the Senate would have to lay out its evidence in writing, and we have already seen a little of how Fiske's partial effort could be so easily picked apart. What was done was to let the Senate Banking and Urban Affairs Committee hold a half day of show-and-tell featuring some of the players in the Park Police/Fiske investigations (Remember, Foster's death had been tied to the

Whitewater Development Corporation which was, in turn, connected to Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. Hence, the

Banking Committee had jurisdiction.) The opening statements of the chairman and the members would make it clear that they were not there to question whether or not Foster committed suicide. As a group they had no quibble with Fiske's firm conclusions. What they were there for, in fact, was to lend their authority to the official suicide line, but in the unlikely event it were to blow up in their face, they could always say truthfully that they never really investigated it.

Though the committee made it quite clear that they were not doing their own investigation of Foster's death, that has not stopped media defenders of the government line from referring to the numerous "investigations" that have all come to the conclusion of suicide. In reality, to date, there has not been even one death investigation worthy of the name. As we have seen, just as the Senate did nothing to second guess Fiske, Fiske did very little to second guess the Park Police. He never told us what the Park Police did to rule out murder. His strongest evidence of suicide came from the findings of the original autopsy doctor which conflicted with what other witnesses saw. He could have resolved the conflict by exhuming the body and having another autopsy performed, but he did not. In short, Fiske invested the utmost confidence in the efforts of the

Park Police, but what he tells us of those efforts comes to a scant six and one half lines of type, and when the FBI lab came up with new avenues of inquiry for him, he failed to go down them. page 20


So, the "Senate investigation" actually rests upon the "Fiske investigation" which, in turn, rests upon the "Park Police investigation." So, what might we say of the Park Police investigation? The daily press briefing of White House spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers for July 22, 1993, is very revealing in that regard. Recall that this is less than two full days after the discovery of the body:

Q: Can you tell us if a search has been conducted in Vince's office and if anything was found...?

A: ...the Park Service Police were in this morning. They've interviewed a number of staff members about Vince's last day, and will be sort of, I think, finishing up with their look at it today here in terms of Vince's office. They're simply trying to confirm their preliminary notion that it was, in fact, a suicide.

--------

Q: Has a note been found to the best of your knowledge?

A: To the best of my knowledge no note has been found. That's sort of what they're looking for just to confirm their observation that this was, in fact, a suicide.

Q: Is the President getting any routine briefing on this from them? One would think that he would be, you know, wanting to monitor this very closely in terms of whether there was anything here that happened that could have in any way contributed.

A: Well, just to be clear, what they're really looking for is just anything that would confirm that it was a suicide, such as a note. I think the President is certainly being kept abreast of what's happening, although there hasn't been a lot of movement today. The Park Service has talked to a number of people, but simply to determine his schedule on Tuesday.

--------

Q: What specifically did the Park Police do besides interviewing people who talked to Vince on Tuesday?

A: That's all they had done as of half an hour ago.

Q: Did they check through his office at all?

A: As of a little while ago, I don't believe that they had, but I think they expected to go in and look for signs of a note or some other evidence that he might have taken his own life.

Q: How does the President's attorney-client relationship protected (sic) when they do that phase of the investigation?

A: Again, the Park Police are simply trying to establish that this was, in fact, a suicide. It is a fairly limited investigation.

Q: I mean, do they go through computer files or does someone else--

A: I think they may go through --they may take a look to see if there's a note, something that is specifically a suicide note. I don't think they have any intentions of evaluating the contents of the other documents.

----- page 21


Q: So, what you're essentially saying is that the only thing being looked into is whether or not there was like a suicide note, something that would confirm this. Not whether or not there was some other reason unknown by anybody at the White

House now that might be evident in papers or computers or any other--

A: Yes. At this point the Park Service is just looking into--again to establish--to confirm what they believe was a suicide.

-----

Q: Is there any inquiry beyond the Park Police to try to determine why he died, as opposed to just whether it was a suicide or not?

A: No, not at this time. And I'm not sure any investigation could ever determine why. These things are mysteries.

Q: Dee Dee, you mentioned that he had lunch alone and just had a sandwich at his desk. Is there any way of checking the phone log during that period of time when he was alone to see who might have called him and perhaps might have called him away?

A: At this point, I don't know that there's any move afoot to do that. Again, the Park Service Police's role in this is the cause of death.

Q: Did he have an assistant, a secretary anywhere?

A: Yes.

Q: Who?

A: I'm not sure what her name is.

Q: Could you get it?

A: Sure.

-----

Q: Considering Mr. Foster's position and his status, isn't it reasonable to assume that law enforcement agencies are at least going to make some attempt to determine a motive here? For example, if you don't do that, you'll leave open wild possibilities, such as that he may have been being blackmailed or anything like that--just to rule those things out? Don't you think it's reasonable that a law enforcement agency will attempt to establish a motive?

A: My only point is that at this point, the Park Service Police is the only agency that's investigating, and that the objective of their search is simply to determine that it was a suicide. There's no other federal agencies that are investigating at this point, but--

Q: But that means there will be no attempt--are you saying that the Park Service was making no attempt-- page 22


A: I don't think that's within their purview. I mean, this is--

Q: They're clearly the investigating agency, aren't they?

A: I don't think that they haven't been here (sic), but they would again contact the Justice Department if they wanted to come here for some reason. I don't believe that they are involved.

Q: Let's assume that the Park Service Police determine to its satisfaction that, in fact, this was, as everyone thinks, a suicide.

From the White House perspective, does this simply end there in terms of further examining what the circumstances might have been, or whether this was related to work or whatever? Does that--

A: I think it's been our position that it's impossible to know what--

-----

Q: But it does leave that question open, and all I can say to you is, this is a question that is going to be asked, and is going to be asked again and again. And from what you are saying, I take it, no one is trying to answer it.

A: All I've said and what I'll say again is, at this point, there are no other investigations.

Q: How about his phone logs?

A: At this point, there are no other investigations.

Q: Have his phone calls been checked?

A: At this point there are no other investigations.

Q: But that would be included in the Park Service's look at the office, et cetera, wouldn't it?

A: I don't know what the details of their investigation are. They don't necessarily have to tell us what--

-----

Q: But is there any desire to learn? I guess that's the bottom line here.

A: At this point, all I can tell you is there are no other--the Park Service is doing its thing. There are no other investigations.

Q: Nobody has any questions that this might have been foul play?

A: I don't think there's any evidence to suggest foul play. Obviously, the Park Service is going to finish up its investigation to determine exactly that. I think they will give a final--their final cause of death when they finish this investigation. I don't think there's any evidence--at this point there's no evidence to suggest anything other than suicide. page 23


Q: You're convinced there was a reason, aren't you? A reason you don't know?

A: Oh, of course. There's always a reason I would think.

Q: There is a tendency, though, for the various agencies which could take an interest in this not to want to upset anybody at the White House. And they may in fact stay out--if they are in any way encouraged. So all I'm asking in a mild way is wouldn't it be worth the effort to have someone with a practiced eye to go over phone logs, correspondence and recent contacts, looking for anything that might have contributed?

A: All I can is what I've already said. I don't know where this is going to go.

Q: Has the family asked that this kind of investigation not be undertaken?

A: No, no.

Q: Dee Dee, it seemed from yours and other peoples comments yesterday in terms of this is a mystery, it's ultimately unknowable that you've already decided that further investigations are not necessary?

A: No, I think yesterday's comments were dedicated to the larger spiritual questions: people ask you, do you know why, and

I think everybody--there's nobody in the White House that pretends to know why or would presume to know why.

Q: What I'm asking is--

A: You're asking the same question that's been asked 20 times. I don't have any more to say about it.

And she didn't. This was the end of questions related to Foster's death that day, though the press briefing went on for many more minutes.

What is clear from this briefing, taking Ms. Myers at her word, is that no death investigation worthy of the name ever took place and responsibility for that fact rests clearly, not with the Park Police, but with the White House. The only purpose the police were expected to serve was to lend their authority to the "suicide" conclusion that had already been reached by some mystical means.

Ms. Myers' performance, with her repeated insistence that no actual death investigation was taking place, looks as though it had been scripted by the office legal staff. They knew that in the case of a suspected assassination of a ranking member of the White House staff such as Foster, the law (18 U.S.C. Section 1751) required that the FBI be the principal investigator.

Director William Sessions had been fired for what seemed like trivial reasons on the day before the death, and President

Clinton had appointed his man, the as-yet-unconfirmed Louis Freeh, on the day of the death to replace him, so the FBI was not permitted to do the investigation. To admit that the Park Police were doing the death investigation in its place would be to admit to clear violation of federal law. Furthermore, if the Park Police was conducting a real death investigation, what the

White House was doing, keeping the police away from Foster's office for more than a day and continuing to deny them free access to his office and the potential evidence it contained, was obstruction of justice on its face, a felony which long predates 18 U.S.C. 1751. The White House was in a box. No real investigation could be permitted, or admitted to, for legal reasons, but only a real investigation could clear the administration of suspicion.

Even a generally credulous White House press corps couldn't seem to believe its own ears at what it was being told. Even they knew that light might be shed on the “unknowable mystery” of Foster's death by his phone log and appointments calendar, and, in a White House attorneys' document dated May 15, 1996 prepared pursuant to Congressional testimony we have the following statement with respect to the observations of White House lawyer Stephen Neuwirth on July 22, 1993: page 24


"He recalls a request that they (the Park Police) review what was on VF computer and that they asked for phone logs and calendars." [10] Later, copies of phone messages are shown in the Senate documents, but there is no record of Foster's personal phone log and desk calendar ever having turned up.

The record will also show that the newspapers of the next day, and the days following, failed to convey to their readers the brusque and dismissive nature of Ms. Myers' responses. Either the reporters present did not faithfully report what they were being told, or their editors, who usually act as though the world revolves around the White House, did not deem their reports newsworthy.

It is also truly remarkable that with all efforts mobilized only toward finding a suicide note on the 22nd, the famous torn-up note was somehow missed. We now have available an FBI report which describes how, in the presence of representatives from the FBI, the Justice Department, the Park Police, and the White House, Bernard Nussbaum systematically took out all the contents of Foster's briefcase and after stacking the contents in three piles on Foster's desk, declared the briefcase empty.

He then placed the empty briefcase on the floor against the back wall (Notice that Ms. Myers was not quite accurate when she characterized the Foster office search as an all-Park-Police affair.).

Finally, we see quite clearly from Ms. Myers' responses that as of July 22nd, the suicide-from-obvious-depression theory had not yet been formulated.

Returning to the brief Senate hearing/Fiske-Report endorsement, we did learn for the first time some of the remarkable things that went on at the Foster house on the fateful night of his death. We learned from Detective Cheryl Braun that

Assistant Attorney General Webster Hubbell physically and forcefully intervened as she tried to question Foster's sister,

Sheila Anthony, who happened to be Hubbell's Justice Department subordinate. And we learned from Braun's partner, lead investigator Sgt. John Rolla, that President Bill Clinton himself arrived at the house about an hour after the police did and, by his presence, essentially shut down their inquiries for the night.

The next day the Washington Post treated these revelations as basically old news although it was exactly one year to the day after the Post had reported that the police were "turned away" from the Foster home that night, and it had not corrected the story since.

Robert Fiske had held no news conference when he released his report, and he was not, upon this occasion, summoned before the Senate to defend it, nor was Roderick Lankler, the man responsible for the Foster- death phase of his investigation. Instead we were treated to two FBI agents who worked with Fiske, one of the four consulting pathologists who contributed three and one half pages of derivative and speculative analysis in Fiske's report to go along with their 91 pages of resumes, and Dr. James Beyer, the autopsy doctor. All were questioned most gently, even deferentially, by the assembled

Senators. One could not help wishing for the presence of someone who would assume the mantle of a tough, cross- examining counsel who would defend the dead and defenseless Vincent Foster against the charge of self- murder. The closest anyone came was freshman Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina in his questioning of Dr. Beyer, who was testifying under oath:

Q: Dr. Beyer, your autopsy report indicates you took X- rays of Mr. Foster.

A: I had anticipated taking them and I so stated on one of my reports.

Q: Your autopsy report says you took X-rays of Mr. Foster. Did you?

A: No sir.

Q: Why did you say you did if you didn't?

A: As I indicated, I had made out that report prior to actually performing the autopsy. We'd been having difficulty with our page 25

WACKENHUT CORPORATION equipment. We'd been having difficulty getting readable X-rays. Therefore one was not taken. (emphasis added)

----omitted exchange over rationale for writing in advance that X-rays would be taken when the machine was known to be malfunctioning----

Q: Is it your standard procedure to make out an autopsy report before you do the autopsy?

A: I don't complete the autopsy report. I complete papers that I'm going to use.

Q: The papers are the autopsy report, aren't they?

A: To me the autopsy report is the first and second page which include my findings.

Q: But you make this out before you do the autopsy?

A: This particular form I did, yes. (emphasis added)

"That report," "papers," and "this particular form" all refer, ostensibly, to a very useful, pre-printed, one-page form called a

"Gunshot Wound Chart." The form that Dr. Beyer would apparently want us to believe he filled out in advance is reproduced as it appeared in the Fiske Report at the end of this paper. You will notice that it includes such things as the direction of the bullet through the body, the size of the wounds, the location of the wounds, and the location of any powder burns. Dr. Beyer has even noted that there were powder burns on Foster's soft palate which is located in the back of the mouth.

It's a close call as to which is worse, to falsely claim that you did not take X-rays or to employ the guesswork necessary to fill out such a form prior to actually conducting an autopsy. Senator Faircloth was absolutely right: With this page, no less than with the others, the completed papers are the autopsy.

Relevant to his performance in this case is the fact that the elderly former military doctor's competence, if not his probity, has come under great question for two separate cases involving the deaths of 21-year-old men in Fairfax County, Virginia. In the first, that of Timothy Easley of Centreville in 1989, Beyer in his autopsy neglected to note the obvious defense wound in the victim's right hand, and the police concluded that Easley had stabbed himself to death in the heart. Easley's family continued to pursue the case and eventually his girlfriend was charged with his murder, confessed, and was convicted.

The second death, that of Tommy Burkett of Chantilly Highlands in 1991, has political corruption overtones that rival those of the Foster death. His parents discovered after his death that Tommy had been induced--if not entrapped--to work as a paid informant for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. He had been previously beaten up and further threatened by a fellow student at Marymount University, the same student who was mysteriously in possession of Tommy's wallet after his death. Neighbors saw other people driving Tommy's car around the time of his death, and some heard several gunshots in the

Burkett home. The parents have also confirmed that Tommy made two 911 telephone pleas for assistance shortly before he died. The police, as in the Foster case, concluded suicide before even viewing the body. They never bothered to remove the bullet from the wall behind Tommy's head nor did they test the blood found on walls in the house outside the bedroom in which Tommy was found. Here, too, Dr. Beyer concluded that Tommy, like Foster, died of a gunshot wound to the mouth and through the head.

When the parents had the body exhumed for a second autopsy, they discovered that Tommy had a broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous contusions, all indicating that he had been beaten to death. None of these injuries were mentioned in Dr.

Beyer's autopsy report. Might he have completed the written part before actually examining the body?

After Tommy's case, which has never once been mentioned in the Washington Post although he lived in suburban

Washington, was featured on NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries" in November of 1994 the FBI began its own investigation. Their page 26

WACKENHUT CORPORATION representative told the parents repeatedly that they were not attempting to determine cause of death but only whether or not

Tommy's civil rights had been violated. However, early this year they announced that they had prepared a 1,800-page report which concludes that the Fairfax County Police were right from the beginning and it was a simple case of suicide. They did not speculate publicly about a motive. In fact, they didn't do anything publicly. The public--which includes the parents and the press-- has not been permitted to see their voluminous report.

One may only speculate that if this report were to be forced out into the open, Dr. Beyer's credibility could well be destroyed once and for all. As long as all the local media, with the exception of the limited-circulation Chantilly Times, however, continues to black the story out-- taking their cue from the Washington Post-- and the Congress remains inert, the report will never be made public. In the meantime the parents continue to plead with the Congress for public hearings and have founded an organization called Parents against Corruption and Coverup. They publish a periodic newsletter about their son's and similar cases, and they have begun collecting commemorative sewn squares from close relatives of dozens of other questionable "suicide" or "accident" cases around the country for a "coverup quilt", which they plan to display in our nation's capital.

General Mercier Number Two

If Robert Fiske was wary about defending his report or about proceeding with the White House phase of his Foster investigation, he needn't have worried because shortly after the Senate hearings a three-judge panel had ushered him back into the private sector. Earlier in the year the expired law providing for ostensibly truly independent prosecutors, that is, for those not appointed by the Attorney General, had been renewed by the Congress. The expectation was that the three judges upon whom the law vests the appointment power would simply give Fiske the new label and let him continue his work. For whatever reason, it was not to be. Kenneth Starr, the Solicitor General in the administration of George Bush, was chosen for the new Independent Counsel's job, which superseded that of Mr. Fiske.

If his real purpose was to keep the lid on the Foster case, Starr was even better suited than Fiske. A cry rose up from the

Democrats akin to Br'er Rabbit's protestation against being thrown into the briar patch. One of the three federal judges was said to be especially close to arch- conservative, Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Starr himself, having served in such a high- level political position, was characterized as simply too partisan, though many newspapers not noted for their Republican leanings spoke of his fine reputation and his integrity. Starr, unlike Fiske, did not shrink from public appearances and on such occasions was not reticent about flaunting his devotion to his Christian faith and using such pious expressions as "civic virtue."

Like France's General Mercier, he was also known as a man of high ambition, which was attested to by his having risen to prominence at a relatively early age. His economic ambition, as well as his energy, seemed to match his political ambition, because, upon leaving public service, he quickly garnered a number of large corporate clients which he continued to represent while serving as the new Independent Counsel. In due time his ambition and his reputation for integrity, and whether they could coexist, would be put to the test.

Initial indications he would pass the test were not good, but before we explore that question we turn our attention to new developments which would enormously complicate the task of anyone bent upon making the suicide story stick.

Document Hound

Unreported to the public was the fact that the Senate Banking Committee had done more than one brief public hearing on the

Foster death. In addition, members of the committee staff had conducted their own interviews of various people involved in the case and they compiled the results of their work, along with the Fiske Report and its supporting interviews, and the police documents, minus some of the redactions into two large volumes totaling 2,726 pages. From this massive, and very disorganized and often repetitious, collection of information, they drew no conclusions of their own.

Here, now was a veritable gold mine of new evidence which one could use to see how well Fiske's conclusions stood up, but as with a gold mine, a good bit of digging was required to get at the more valuable nuggets. Since his conclusions had not been very well supported by the evidence that accompanied his report, one would not have expected that they would have done much better by the initially suppressed evidence. The expectations, as it turned out, were realized, in spades. page 27


Determined excavation by some new hands revealed a whole new collection of inconsistencies and anomalies in the government "suicide" case.

As luck would have it, the release of the volumes coincided with mushrooming growth in a new medium of communication that, as a freewheeling forum, bids fair to outdo the turn-of- the-century newspapers of Paris. I refer to the Internet.

Understandably already under attack by the clearly threatened conventional press as a cesspool of hate and rumormongering and as a convenient form of communication for assorted terrorists, child pornographers, and sexual deviants, the Net is also quickly proving out as a rapid alternative disseminator and sifter of news. Defenders of the conventional media argue for the need for "gatekeepers" who, upholding what they claim are the high standards of our journalistic community as they have almost eugenically evolved, weed out the chaff of rumor and misinformation. As an interactive medium, however, the

Internet permits each person to be not only his own reporter but also his own gatekeeper. Newspapers and magazines only present the illusion of a democratic forum with their letters section, as anyone who has ever tried to take issue with their reporting of, say, the Kennedy assassination knows only too well, and anyone who has read this essay up to this point knows that a lot of what gets weeded out is not chaff but is the purest of freedom-nourishing grain, instead. Radio talk show hosts can and do readily cut off people imparting unapproved information, and the ownership of radio stations like the ownership of newspapers is becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer corporate conglomerates.

Nowhere has the Internet as a true democratic forum been better illustrated than in the treatment the new official Foster evidence has received at the hands of two Internet contributors with the e-mail addresses of HSprunt@aol.com and hughie2u@aol.com. The former stands for self-employed tax attorney and accountant Hugh Sprunt of Farmers Branch,

Texas, and the latter for a Washington, DC area resident who prefers to remain anonymous. Each, in spite of the latter's anonymity, has established a credibility, nay, even a moral authority on the Foster death case that surpasses that of almost anyone in the conventional media because they freely defend their Internet postings on the subject against all critics, sometimes incorporating valid criticism into their arguments, and they don't pretend, like so many of the conventional media pundits, to be experts on everything. Credibility on the Net is at a greater premium than it is with the local monopoly newspaper or the evening network news because of the mind-boggling choices that the consumer of Internet news has. He simply hasn't the time to read the works of someone he does not trust implicitly. Unfounded rumors don't get spread far because every posting comes with an e-mail name, and anyone who gets a name for irresponsible, unsupportable rumorspreading loses his credibility and doesn't get his postings read. This is the fairly efficient manner in which everyone, most democratically, gets to be his own gatekeeper on the Internet.

Trading on their Internet credibility and with no evident partisan political or economic motivation the two, with Sprunt as principal author, employed the two volumes of Senate-published evidence almost exclusively to pick apart the Fiske Report in what eventually became an imposing 300-page volume of their own entitled the Citizens Independent Report. So that our paper does not run to a like number of pages, we shall summarize only the most important discoveries:

Fiske states blandly in his report that Foster's car keys were discovered in his pants pocket. Talk about a half truth! What he doesn't say is that the “discovery” was made at the morgue of Fairfax County hospital and that not one but two sets of keys were found at the time. Police were unable to locate them in the park, though they searched the car and Foster's pants pockets. At the point they realized they had no car keys, the initial suicide assumption should have gone out the window, because Foster would have had no way to transport himself and his car there. At the very least, an extensive search of the park using metal detectors was in order. Instead, we are told that the presumption was quickly made that the keys must have been somehow missed (!) when the pants pockets were searched (The pants pockets were searched not just for keys, mind you, but for any evidence, no matter how small, such as a folded suicide note.). Coincidentally, Officer Rolla had received a call from the White House asking where the body was being taken so William Kennedy III from the counsel's office and security chief Craig Livingstone could go identify it. Even Rolla thought that a curious request since the photo ID they had discovered and the presence of Foster's automobile left no doubt of the identity of the corpse and, when necessary, immediate family members are the ones usually required for such chores. The record does not show at whose behest the

White House pair performed their strange task. At any rate, they did gain access to the body at the morgue and investigators

Rolla and Braun did subsequently go there and find the missing keys, though, in their statements, they amazingly differ on whether they went there before or after they went to Foster's house in Georgetown.

Embellishing the "depression" thesis, Fiske states that it was "obvious to many" that Foster "had lost weight. Numerous press accounts from those mysterious unattributed sources, a couple of which we have already mentioned, had given the weight loss as exactly 15 pounds. Sprunt made the discovery noted earlier, however, that Foster had had a physical page 28

WACKENHUT CORPORATION examination upon leaving Little Rock in December of 1992, at which time he weighed 194 pounds and that the autopsy report showed Foster's weight to be 197 pounds. Considering that he was probably clothed at the time he was weighed for his physical exam and the body would have lost weight from blood loss and from evaporation on that hot July afternoon, his actual weight gain in Washington was probably enough that his sister, Sharon, flying up from Little Rock to visit with him on what turned out to be the day of his death, would have noticed it. This would have been consistent with the unanimous testimony of Foster's White House co-workers on the record and the earliest, spontaneous, official reaction to the death which the reader will recall, that Foster had seemed perfectly normal.

Speaking of two witnesses, a man and a woman, who had driven into the Fort Marcy parking lot shortly before the arrival of the police, Fiske in his report stated that "Neither individual heard a gunshot while in the park or saw anything unusual."

However, the female witness said she noticed a man, possibly bare-chested, seated in a Honda which matched the description of Foster's car. The man was not Foster, whom he did not resemble and should have already been dead by that time. I'd say that this was unusual. The male witness described a middle- aged male jogger that he had seen running through the park. The Fiske Report says that everyone known to have been at the park that night was interviewed. This jogger is only one of several people who were at the park, according to Sprunt's researches, who were not interviewed. This witness statement misrepresentation by Fiske or by his FBI interviewers is part of a consistent pattern detailed in Sprunt's report.

Another consistent pattern is the omission of pertinent evidence. Five witnesses claim to have seen a briefcase in the Honda that the FBI concluded was Foster's in the Fort Marcy parking lot. However, no briefcase is in the inventory of things taken from Foster's car. Could this be the same briefcase that turned up back in Foster's office in which the curious note was eventually found?

Not only did all the 35-mm crime scene photographs fail to come out but all of the Polaroids taken by the first police officer disappeared and many of those taken by two other officers are nowhere to be found. Vital evidence like this doesn't just vanish into thin air. What did those Polaroids show? Someone had to have been responsible for their safekeeping..and for their disappearance. Fiske told us nothing of this.

Fiske also said nothing about Foster's mysterious financial liquidity problems. He had visited the White House credit union the day before his death and they had agreed to "work with him" on his overdrafts. He was living modestly in a rented townhouse and had been able to rent out his house in Little Rock. Prior to his White House employment he had been earning almost $300,000 a year. What could have been the reason for his financial pinch? The interviewers exhibited no curiosity, or at least none that was recorded.

Also, the day before he died Foster had a closed-door one to two hour meeting with Arkansas White House insider Marsha

Scott. His secretary said that both the length of the meeting and the fact of the closed door were out of character for Foster.

Ms. Scott, in another recurring pattern on the record, can't remember what they talked about.

Fairfax County emergency worker, Richard Arthur, in a deposition taken by the committee staff, clearly and distinctly remembered seeing an automatic pistol instead of a revolver in Foster's hand. He was so sure, and his listeners were so puzzled, that they had him draw a picture of the pistol, which does, indeed, look like an automatic instead of a .38 colt revolver.

The times given for events on the evening of July 20, 1996, by Fiske are all out of whack, and the purpose seems to be to lend credence to the implausible claim of the White House that they weren't made aware of the death until 8:30 pm. Hospital records show that the ambulance arrived at the hospital at 8:30 pm (less five seconds), yet Fiske says the body was not put in a bag in the park until 8:45 pm. Chief Medical Examiner for Fairfax County, Dr. Donald Haut, told the FBI that he arrived at the park at 6:45 and by the time he left at 7:15 he, like the emergency workers, knew of Foster's White House connection.

Fiske has him arriving at 7:40 and leaving at 8:30. Even emergency workers who left as early as 6:37 knew that the body was that of a White House official. Most tellingly, the name and phone number of Lt. Walter appear in police inspector page 29


Rolla's note pad for the evening in a chronological sequence which would have placed the entry at around 6:40 pm. Lt.

Danny Walter works at the White House for the Secret Service. Rolla claims to have had no contact with the Secret Service that evening, and if he called Lt. Walter at the time it appears that he did, it means that the White House would have learned of the death almost two hours before they claim.

As we said, we have given you only a small sample of the anomalies, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies that Sprunt and his collaborator have come up with in the official version of events. He has made the report available for the cost of printing to anyone who wants it and, at his own expense, has furnished copies to well over 200 government officials and opinion molders, but, to date, no mention of his efforts has appeared in the mainstream press nor have any newspaper stories come out based upon the fruits of his labors, except in London.

The View from Abroad

This last observation suggests another comparison we might make to the Dreyfus Affair. At a time when public opinion, led by the press, still overwhelmingly was on the side of Captain Dreyfus' accusers, newspapers in other major countries were beginning to doubt the collective sanity of France. The prosecution and conviction for libel of Zola brought them out. "In

Brussels, Saint-Petersburg, Warsaw, London, and New York, the press was unanimous the day after the verdict in deploring the French madness." From The Times of London to Le Genevois of Switzerland, eloquent denunciations of this strange new

French concept of justice poured forth, "But who read those newspapers in France, and who listened to those writers?" [11]

The full passage gets us a little ahead of ourselves in the Dreyfus case, but the following quote from William Shirer is too appropriate to this section to pass up:

"Where is France? What became of the French?" Clemenceau would soon lament. Where indeed, when, as the jailed Colonel

Picquart now publicly swore, a man had been convicted of treason on evidence that had been forged, and presented illegally to boot; where an Esterhazy could be whitewashed by a military court and a Zola found guilty by a civilian one; where a colonel who had confessed to faking evidence against the Jewish captain and who had killed himself rather than face the consequences could be hailed as a martyr to truth. A foreigner, confused by such a topsy-turvy world, asked a young French journalist, Paul Brulat: "Where are the honest men in this country?" And the reply was: "They are frightened." [12]

We observed earlier that, because Christopher Ruddy was between jobs at the time, no newspapers had anything critical to say about the Fiske Report upon its release. Actually, the Sunday Telegraph of London had a scorching critique, pointing out many of the pre-Sprunt weaknesses that we have detailed. Their Washington- based reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, has regularly kept England's readers apprised of scandals related to the U.S. federal government that can't penetrate the

American wall of press silence. The Telegraph is available for sale in Americas's major cities and also has an Internet web site, but "Who reads it?" we might ask, and are they not frightened?

America's Almost-Picquart

Anyone wanting to capture the multifaceted and protracted drama of the Dreyfus Affair for stage or screen could do worse than to make his main character neither Captain Dreyfus nor Bernard Lazare nor Emile Zola, but Lieutenant Colonel

Georges Picquart. In fact, the essential role that Picquart was to play in the Affair had already been prefigured on the stage by the title character in an 1882 play by the great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. The play is An Enemy of the People and the character is Dr. Thomas Stockmann. Stockmann, a medical doctor with a scientific bent, worked in a town whose economy was based on two industries, tourism derived from the region's natural mineral springs and a tannery. In an era in which the connection between microbes and disease was still not widely understood, he made the discovery that a number of mysterious deaths among the tourists had obviously (to him) resulted from pollution of the mineral springs by the tannery.

The amazing power of the human mind to rationalize when objective truth and naked self-interest come into conflict furnish the wellspring, as it were, for the subsequent dramatic tension, leading up to the title label that is ultimately affixed upon the good doctor. Modern readers, or at least, moviegoers, will recognize that the role was reprised, and somewhat vulgarized by the Chief Brody character in Peter Benchley's Jaws (who, in the exciting climax, teamed up with a Captain-Ahab-like character pilfered from Herman Melville).

Lt. Col. Picquart had served as observer of the original Dreyfus trial for General Mercier's Ministry of War. He was a soldier through and through, embodying all the qualities of bravery and stubborn rectitude that can be most admirable in the breed. page 30


His superiors had consistently recognized him for his competence, his intelligence, and his devotion. He had never doubted

Dreyfus' guilt, and, as a thoroughgoing Army man, he had no particular political or social affinity for the cosmopolitans and intellectuals who were beginning to take up the Dreyfus cause.

Some two years after the framing and conviction, Picquart found himself promoted to the top of the Army's Section of

Statistics, as the office of counterespionage was euphemistically called. These were precisely the people who had framed

Dreyfus. He quickly set about improving their legitimate operations and, as often before in his career, was recognized and appreciated for it. Then, in his new capacity, he made some unsettling discoveries. The treason for which the distantlyimprisoned Dreyfus had been convicted was continuing. A new communication to the Germans had been intercepted. Good detective work directed suspicion toward the well- connected Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Picquart retrieved the original note (dubbed the bordereau, or "manifest" because it contained an itemized list of things) which had been attributed to Dreyfus and saw immediately that the handwriting matched precisely that of Esterhazy. Next, he requested to see the secret file which had been used to persuade the judges further of Dreyfus' guilt. He found, to his surprise, in light of his recent discovery that, even with its embellishments, the secret file added up to very little to incriminate Dreyfus. “He was certain of a judicial error. His conscience, the elevated idea of the Army he held, and reason as well--for inevitably the truth would eventually out--dictated his duty. He would never waver from it." [13] He took the matter directly to the Army's top man, General Raoul de Boisdeffre.

The general listened to him impassively, barely surprised. When the colonel referred to the secret file, de Boisdeffre seemed startled. "Why was it not burned as had been agreed?" That was the sole point on which he became moved. Picquart expected a reaction, orders, congratulations, the indignation of the chief of the General Staff upon discovering that an innocent man had been convicted. But de Boisdeffre said nothing. [14]

Returning to de Boisdeffre's office the next day hoping for decisive action, Picquart found, instead, that the question had been bucked down the chain of command, to Deputy Chief of Staff General Charles Arthur Gonse.

In a state of astonishment, since de Boisdeffre had never demanded such scrupulous respect for the hierarchy, Picquart went to see General Gonse, who was then on sick leave at Cormeilles-en-Parisis. He presented the matter during a long two-hour meeting with Gonse, who also listened without responding, with the exception of the comment, "So we must have been wrong?" Gonse gave Picquart a single recommendation. "Keep the two affairs separate." Picquart wondered how he could keep them separate. "I did not see how, in focusing on Esterhazy, we could not focus on the bordereau...and the bordereau, in a word, was the Dreyfus Affair." De Boisdeffre, however, confirmed Gonse's instructions. "Keep them separate." Plainly

Picquart and his superiors did not see their duty in the same light. [15]

Picquart's devotion to duty as he saw it would lead to his being vilified by the nation's press as a paid agent of the hated

Syndicate and as a disloyal Frenchman. First transferred to the colonies to get him out of the picture, and ideally killed in battle, he would eventually be court martialed and drummed out of the Army, spending more than a year in jail on trumpedup charges.

Miquel Rodriguez, an assistant U.S. attorney from Sacramento, California, joined the staff of Independent Counsel Kenneth

Starr in the early fall of 1994, that is, shortly after Starr set up shop. He was put in charge of the Foster death investigation.

In contrast to the unsworn testimony taken by the Fiske team, Rodriguez convened a grand jury and began to make some progress taking sworn testimony. Press reports quickly began to undermine him, however. In January of 1995 the Associated

Press reported that police witnesses had been angered over the tone and extensiveness of his questioning. They didn't take well to his repeated reminders of the penalty for perjury. On the very day that the grand jury hearings began Scripps-Howard reported that Starr had already concluded that Foster's death was a suicide and would soon close the case. "Informed sources" on Capitol Hill were saying the same thing.

At least superficial similarities in character between Rodriguez and Picquart could hardly be missed:

Rodriguez, who is in his mid-30s, has approximately seven years' experience as a prosecutor and had gained a reputation as a hard-nosed, diligent prosecutor, especially on civil rights cases, said an FBI agent in California familiar with his work.

"He's the perfect lawyer for a case like this," the agent said, suggesting that if any cover-up existed, Rodriguez's crosspage 31

WACKENHUT CORPORATION examination skills would be well suited for ferreting out the truth.

The agent also described Rodriguez as a "guy with a conscience. He could never play Pontius Pilate." [16]

On April 6, 1995, Christopher Ruddy, and only Ruddy in the nations' media, reported that Rodriguez had resigned "because he believed the grand jury process was being thwarted by his superior," [17] according to one of Ruddy's "key sources" close to Starr's investigation.

At this point one finds it very tempting to conclude that someone who could play Pontius Pilate was exactly the sort of person who was required for the job, and Miquel Rodriguez and Kenneth Starr saw "civic virtue" in an entirely different light.

Rodriguez, though, apparently has no intention of becoming truly another Picquart nor even a Chief Brody. In today's

America, people like that apparently can only be found in the movies. Had there been no Picquart, following his conscience and bravely doing his duty from the inside and then continuing to speak up for justice when he was no longer inside, regardless of the consequences for himself, there is a good chance that Dreyfus would have lived out the rest of his days in the torrid, oppressive isolation of Devil's Island, and the truth would never have come to light. Rodriguez didn't get himself thrown entirely out of the government. Instead, he went quietly back to his job in Sacramento and now refers all questions about the Foster case back to Kenneth Starr. He is getting on with his career, having had his brief brush with history. The man from the FBI apparently had him a little bit wrong.

The Forgery

Georges Picquart was not the only government man in France, however, who did the right thing. The conscientious work of three other key people was also crucial for the eventual victory of truth and justice and the exoneration of Dreyfus. Godefrey

Cavaignac, the new Minister of War, was one of the staunchest defenders of the Army and opponents of the Dreyfusards in the Chamber of Deputies. In the ongoing contest over public opinion he had scored a coup by reading in the Chamber the contents of a letter from the Italian Military Attaché, Alessandro Panizzardi to the German, Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen, the addressee of the bordereau. The name of Dreyfus actually appeared in the letter along with the passage, "I will say that I never had any relations with the Jew."

Challenged publicly on the authenticity of his evidence by Picquart, to be completely certain that he was on sound footing,

Cavaignac requested that the Section of Statistics carefully check all the documents once again. Picquart, himself, had long been dismissed from the leadership of that office, and the review task fell to Captain Louis Cuignet. Examining the original torn-and-reassembled Panizzardi letter by lamplight, he noticed that the color of the rules of paper on which the heading and the signature appeared did not match the faint lined rules of the body of the letter. The letter was an obvious forgery.

Captain Cuignet took his discovery directly to General Gaudérique Roget, Cavaignac's top assistant and the lamplight experiment was repeated. Roget was convinced. They brought in Cavaignac and he, too, saw the evidence of forgery clearly.

"It was to the credit of those three men, all committed to the struggle against revision (as a new trial for Dreyfus was called), to have not for a moment thought of quashing their discovery. On that occasion there was no one to repeat General Gonse's words to Colonel Picquart: ‘If you do not say anything, no one will know.'" [18]

The Affair would drag on for several more years, but the corner had been turned. News of the forgery spread quickly. What had first seemed like a victory in the battle for public opinion had been turned into a crushing, eventually decisive defeat.

Confronted with the evidence, under strong interrogation, the clumsy forger, Lt. Col. Hubert Henry, tried first to deny his handiwork, then finally, haltingly owned up. Within a few days he would take his own life by cutting his throat with a razor

(Though some of the Dreyfusards would suspect that the Army had killed him to prevent his spilling the beans further, and the most confirmed opponents of the Dreyfusards would blame the death on Henry's Jewish doctor, neither had very good evidence.).

In the Foster case, the New York Daily News, using its leaked copy of the Park Police findings, had first disclosed on March

14, 1994, that the authentication of the torn-up note belatedly found in Foster's briefcase had been performed by Sgt. Larry page 32


Lockhart of the U.S. Capitol Police. No explanation would be given as to why he was chosen for the task, but the Senate documents would reveal that he had used only one document purportedly written by Foster for comparison purposes, which is a violation of the most basic standards of authentication because the "known" document might itself be a forgery and because several writing samples better allow the examiner to recognize patterns and tendencies and mutual consistency. It was later learned, further, that Sgt. Lockhart had no formal qualifications as a handwriting examiner. Robert Fiske sent the note, with the same known sample that Lockhart had used, along with several canceled checks bearing Foster's signature, to the FBI lab. Since the one thing that was missing from the questioned torn note was a signature, it is difficult to see what was added for comparison purposes by the checks. The Senate documents revealed a number of different writings from Foster that Fiske chose not to send to the FBI lab, and the latter made no effort to ferret out any on their own. Using only the scant evidence at hand, the FBI lab had, nevertheless, gone ahead and pronounced the note authentic, but with no accompanying explanation.

All the while a heroic effort had been made to keep any copies of the note out of the hands of the public, an effort that failed when on August 2, 1995, the Wall Street Journal under the heading "The Note that Won't Go Away," published a pirated copy on its editorial page. They said only that it had been floating around Capitol Hill. The editors of the Anglo-American newsletter, Strategic Investment, then made copies from the Wall Street Journal which they sent independently to three recognized handwriting experts along with a minimum of 12 documents each, which were attributed to Foster, for comparison. On October 25, 1995, they rented the ballroom of the historic Willard Hotel, across the street from the National

Press Club, to announce their findings.

Professor Reginald Alton, thirty years a lecturer on handwriting, manuscript authentication, and forgery at Oxford

University, perhaps the world's top authority on literary manuscripts, Ronald Rice of Boston, who wrote the course on handwriting examination for the American Board of Forensic Examiners, and retired police detective Vincent Scalice of

New York, a certified member of that board who, like the other two has given expert handwriting testimony in numerous court cases, agreed that the note was not even a particularly good forgery. Each gave the reasons for his conclusions in considerable detail, both orally and in writing. Rice, in particular, with his blow-ups and pointer, gave the impression that he was making a courtroom presentation, at one point slipping up and addressing the audience as the "jury".

The next day, October 26, the Times had a major story about the findings of the handwriting experts, but it was the Times of

London, along with the Telegraph and the Observer of that city. The New York Times and the Washington Post, the two newspapers which had given the biggest play to the discovery of the note in the first place, were now utterly silent, as were the TV and radio networks, the news magazines, and virtually every newspaper in our once free country, with the exception of the Washington Times. The Washington Times carried a small item on an inside page from the Reuters news service about the press conference and the findings, but it was strictly a one-time thing. Afterwards, they continued to write about the Foster case as though the handwriting experts had never told us that the primary piece of evidence suggesting suicide, which emanated from the White House, is a second-rate forgery, according to the best-qualified analysts and most thorough analysis so far available.

The Dreyfus Affair has been called, first and foremost, an affair of the press. The press pushed for the initial conviction and then became the battleground upon which the struggle to right the wrong was waged. No single act of the French press in the

Dreyfus case, not even the publication of Zola's famous letter, however, quite compares in importance to the collective decision of the American media not to tell the American people of the independent discovery that the “ruining-people-forsport”, torn-up but fingerprintless note "found" in Vincent Foster's briefcase was, in all likelihood, a White House- concocted forgery.

Perhaps we take our news organs too much for granted. Just as we expect the highway authorities to keep traffic flowing and the power companies to provide us with electricity, we expect those huge and powerful organizations which collect information to share with us the most important things they have learned. That they do their job properly is as important to the functioning of our republic as are the operations of those other agencies to the smooth working of the economy. Their importance to our political health was recognized by the Founding Fathers in the great legal protection they were given by the First Amendment. But what happens when they break faith with the American people, when they violate the trust with which they have been invested and do not report the news? Imagine how the political landscape would have changed had the newspapers and TV networks simply done their job and reported the news on October 25 and 26, 1995, and the days that followed (Admittedly, this would have been quite difficult considering the deep commitment they had already made to the government version of the truth.).

The Congress and the Independent Counsel, for starters, could hardly have continued to ignore the most suspicious aspects page 33

WACKENHUT CORPORATION of the Foster case. Handwriting experts would have had to be called before public hearings to tell us why the note was or was not authentic. The conflict between Dr. Beyer and everyone else who saw the body would have to be resolved by exhumation of the body and a new autopsy performed under the strictest independent public scrutiny. Telephone records would have to be subpoenaed to determine if Foster really did order medication through his doctor in Arkansas and, concerning another inconsistency we have not previously discussed, whether Helen Dickey of the White House staff did really wait until after 10:00 pm on July 20, 1993, to call the Arkansas governor's mansion with news of Foster's death as she told the Congress, or before 8:00 pm as state troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson have said in sworn affidavits.

Considering the gravity of the possible offense, it is hard to imagine that these inquiries would not have been part of an impeachment proceeding.

On the public relations front, had news of the forgery been properly reported, James Stewart could hardly have written his book, Blood Sport, the title of which is taken from that press-ballyhooed last line of the questionable note. Stewart pushes the suicide-from-depression argument by leaning heavily on the text of the note, as though we didn't know that the current best evidence available tells us that the note was written, with malice aforethought, by a party or parties other than Vincent

Foster. Had the press done the most basic job we have every right to expect of them and not betrayed us instead, Stewart's book would have been a laughingstock, which he is no doubt astute enough to know. We can say the same thing for recent books by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich (less the astuteness acknowledgment), who also parrots the suicide-fromdepression line using the note in his shoddy, semi-literate little work, Unlimited Access, as does conservative-defector David

Brock in The Seduction of Hillary Clinton.

In fact, because news of the forgery finding was essentially not reported, things have been permitted to proceed exactly as though it did not happen. No one uttered a word about it in the presidential campaign. The nation's editorial writers, columnists, and TV pundits have been utterly silent on the matter. That they chose to ignore the findings rather than to take the alternative tack of questioning the validity of the experts' findings, in the final analysis, is but one more of the many factors which force the objective observer to conclude that this crucial note must be bogus.

Actually, at the risk of gilding the lily, there is one last pertinent factor that we feel we must share with the reader. On

August 25, 1993, high-priced white collar crime legal specialist, James Hamilton of the Washington law firm of Swidler and

Berlin who has been presented to the public as the "Foster family lawyer" but seems to have been picked for the job by the

White House's Bernard Nussbaum, wrote the following letter which was delivered by hand to Janet Reno:

Re: Vince Foster Note

Dear Madam Attorney General:

As counsel for the family of Vince Foster and in particular Mrs. Lisa Foster, I am writing to renew the family's strongly-felt request that the original torn pieces of Vince's note be returned to her.

In the family's view, this was a very personal note. While it dealt with business matters, Vince obviously did not intend that the note be given or shown to anyone at work. As you know, he tore up the note, depositing the pieces at the bottom of an old briefcase he owned. He thus did not intend that the note be maintained as a part of White House files.

The family, of course, understood the need for the Park Police and the FBI to obtain and analyze the note. Now, however, the investigations into Vince's death are concluded and family members see no good reason why the note should not be returned to Mrs. Foster.

Vince did not leave any written communication to the family. The note is all there is that expresses his feelings during the last few days of his life. While his death always will remain inexplicable to the family, having the note in their possession will provide them great comfort. Please do not underestimate the depth of Mrs. Foster's feelings about this matter.

The family appreciates the manner in which the Department and you handled the note during the investigations and particularly thank you for your decision not to release a photograph of the actual note. That clearly was the correct decision for all concerned. So also would returning the note to the family be the correct decision. This would recognize the human page 34

WACKENHUT CORPORATION and family concerns involved, and would in no way interfere with the investigation of Vince's death, which are over (sic).

Mrs. Foster and the rest of Vince's family very much appreciate your personal attention to this renewed request.

Sincerely,

James Hamilton cc: Mrs. Lisa Foster

To her credit, Ms. Reno apparently ignored the original and the renewed request, and independent authentication of the suspect note eventually became possible.

A few more biographical notes on Mr. Hamilton are also in order. He served on the House Watergate Committee with

Bernard Nussbaum and Hillary Clinton. He was a member of the White House transition team and participated in the selection of the Attorney General and Supreme Court nominees. He was author of a memo to the President counseling

“stonewalling” over Whitewater and in a recently-released White House memo, he is referred to as a White House

"surrogate" handling the Foster death case, and, indeed, on CBS's 60 Minutes, he defended the suicide ruling. In 1996, he was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Mr. James Hamilton, Esq. is clearly a great deal more than the Foster family attorney.

The Cloudy Crystal Ball

Almost five years would elapse between the conviction and banishment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason and his release, on a pardon, from prison. It would take another seven years for him to clear his name completely and be reinstated into the Army.

On August 10, 1998, five years will have elapsed from the time of the initial official "suicide" ruling in the Foster case. As in the Dreyfus Affair, the drama has unfolded very slowly, but it has, up to now, in spite of the numerous parallels, unfolded quite differently, so we can expect its future course also to be different. Dreyfus received his pardon because the mood of the country had changed and, most importantly, the leadership had changed. The fact that the most recent, Republican- controlled Congress looked into the Foster matter even less than did their Democratic predecessors amply demonstrates that a change of government, even of the presidency, as long as the new president is either a Democrat or a Republican, will not be what makes the difference.

In contrast to the French government of a century ago, whose scandals came serially, the Clinton administration is mired, all at the same time, in almost too many scandals and apparent coverups to keep count of. It is possible that one of them could wound the administration or bring down the president and, in a sort of domino effect, weaken the forces of coverup sufficiently to permit a full and honest final reckoning. But one can't help thinking that at least some, if not most, of the scandals are little more than manufactured distractions which will work less like dominoes than like backfires, intentionally set to prevent the truly dangerous wildfire from sweeping over the house.

In spite of all that has transpired over the past three and a quarter years, the lack of real progress in the Foster case is what stands out. Originally, we were waiting for a determination by the Park Police. That lasted only fifteen days, but then we were told to wait for their report. Even before it came out, that wait was replaced by the wait for the Fiske Report. Now we have been told to wait for the upright, but partisan Republican, Kenneth Starr to render his verdict, and the wait has now gone on for two and a quarter years. With any kind of pressure from the press, the wait, itself, would be a major issue, but there has been none. In fact, over the entire unsatisfactory state of affairs, the press has voiced, when it has bothered to voice anything, virtually nothing but satisfaction.

Sometimes one wonders what wouldn't satisfy them, as long as it came from official government sources. The Clinton page 35

WACKENHUT CORPORATION administration seems to be testing their limits. On Friday, November 1, 1996, the Navy, in grudging response to a Freedom of Information Act request, released a report on another high level violent death that was quickly ruled a suicide, that of

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jeremy Boorda on May 16. Among other numerous things, the names of all the people interviewed, the text of two notes found with his body, and the entire autopsy report were "redacted" or blacked out. Not one murmur of complaint was heard from anyone, either in the press or the Congress. The Washington Times in its article on the release didn't even bother to mention the redactions while concluding that the report contained “no surprises.” How would they know?

Back on the Foster case, all eyes, when they can remain open, are on Kenneth Starr. As often as his name is invoked by establishment figures when the Foster case is brought up, it is abundantly clear that he is expected to lay the matter to rest by ruling, in his role of conservative Republican who would certainly nail Clinton if he could, that it was, indeed, a suicide.

Events keep popping up which make that increasingly difficult, such as the witness, Patrick Knowlton, who has testified that the FBI agents, who were working for Fiske at the time but have been retained by Starr, significantly changed his testimony about, among a number of things, the color and features of the car he saw in the Fort Marcy parking lot and his ability to recognize a menacing-looking man who eyed him as he sought a location to relieve himself. After his story was revealed by

Evans-Pritchard, he claims to have been harassed and followed by more than twenty men on the streets of Washington. On

November 12, Knowlton and his lawyer held a Washington press conference announcing his suit against the FBI for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Only the Washington Times had a small, somewhat skeptical article about it the next day. The other news organs, including the TV networks which had cameras there, continuing the familiar pattern, blacked it out.

In spite of the difficulties, we can be sure that one of these days, probably under the cover of a major news distraction that he, himself, might create, Starr will duly render his suicide ruling. Newsweek reported in a December 2, 1996 article on Starr and his investigation, in fact, that the Foster death case is one of the things he has already been able to lay to rest, concluding, based upon the forensic evidence, that Fiske was right and it was, indeed, a simple suicide. (It is of some interest that Michael Isikoff was the co-author of that Newsweek article. He is also the reporter who, while working for the

Washington Post, first erroneously (?)reported the discovery of the list of psychiatrists in Foster's office and co-authored the

July 30, 1993, article which erroneously stated that the police had been turned away from the Foster house when they went to make the death notification and interview family members. More recently, he declined to write about the harassment of the witness, Patrick Knowlton, telling Knowlton's lawyer in person that, though he believed Knowlton, neither he nor any other mainstream journalist would write about it because it "raises more questions than it answers.") After Starr makes it all official, future historians will, doubtless, be able to write of him what Barbara Tuchman wrote of General Auguste Mercier:

"All the strength, except truth, was on his side." [19]

It wasn't enough for Mercier. Will it be enough for Starr?

Notes

1. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair, The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986), p. 542.

2. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, a Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914, (New York: The McMillan

Company, 1962), p. 196.

3. Bredin, op. cit., p.39.

4. Ibid., p. 40.

5. Tuchman, op. cit., pp. 204-205.

6. Ibid., p. 204.

7. Ibid., all quotes in the paragraph.

8. Robert B. Fiske, Jr., "Report of the Independent Counsel, in re Vincent W. Foster, Jr." (Washington, D.C. June 30, 1994), p. 6.

9. Ibid., p. 40.

10. Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Investigation of the White House Travel Office Firings and Related

Matters (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, Sept. 26, 1996), p. 681.

11. Bredin, op. cit., p. 272.

12. William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, an Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), p. 63.


14. Ibid., p. 163.

15. Ibid. page 36


16. Christopher Ruddy, The Pittsburgh Tribune Review, April 6, 1995. Reprinted in Ruddy's compilation, Vincent Foster:

The Ruddy Investigation (Fair Oaks, CA: The Western Journalism Center, 1995), p. 87.

17. Ibid.


19. Tuchman, op.cit., p. 204.

Useful Sources of Hard-to-Get Information

[Note added March 14, 1999:

Part 1 of "America's Dreyfus Affair" was put on line by J. Orlin Grabbe, with my permission, before I myself was on line.

The Internet, I have found, opens up the opportunity for acquiring knowledge almost unimaginably. Upon discovering the

Internet I quickly realized how meager the following list is. I also realized, through new knowledge that I acquired, that my disclaimer at the end is not strong enough. Much of my newly-acquired knowledge is reflected in Parts 2 and 5 of Dreyfus, particularly about what I call the "fake right." No one should believe any one source implicitly. One must read as broadly as possible to get at the truth, and one should trust only ones own interpretation of the facts gathered. --DC Dave]

1. Vincent Foster: The Ruddy Investigation, can be obtained by calling 1-800-711-1968.

2. Hugh Sprunt's Citizen's Independent Report is available for the price of printing and mailing at (301) 937-6500, which is the number for the Bel Jean Print/Copy Shop in College Park, MD.

3. For information on the Tommy Burkett case, write Parents Against Corruption and Coverup, 13456 Muirkirk Lane,

Herndon, VA 20171 or e-mail to tburkett@clark.net. They also have a web site at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. Tel. (703) 435-3112.

4. Not mentioned in the paper is the fact that the conservative media-watchdog organization Accuracy in Media, has, since about the time Ruddy arrived upon the scene, been consistently critical of the government and the press in the Foster case.

The organization's chairman, Reed Irvine, is particularly well-informed and persuasive. One might look up his and several other letters to the editor that rather miraculously appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 11, 1995, to get a sample of his valuable work. You can also write for information directly to Accuracy in Media, 4455 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., #330,

Washington, DC 20008. Tel. (202) 364-4401. Request in particular Irvine's recent “Farce and Fraud in Foster Findings”. He also did an excellent contemporaneous analysis of the Fiske Report among his numerous works.

5. The web site for the Sunday Telegraph of London is http://www.telegraph.co.uk

6. Patrick Knowlton has prepared a witness-tampering report available from his lawyer, John H. Clarke at 720 7th Street,

N.W., Suite 304, Washington, DC 20001. Tel.(202) 332-3030.

7. Christopher Ruddy's articles appear regularly in a newsletter of the Western Journalism Center entitled Dispatches, P.O.

Box 2450, Fair Oaks, CA 95628-2450 Tel. 1-800-WJC-5595.

8. Talk show host Brian Wilson has an informative book putting the Foster case in the larger context of Clinton scandals entitled The Little Black Book on Whitewater. 1-800-862-1731. He has a web page at http://www.myrmidon.w1.com

9. Videos on the Foster case and other scandals related to the Clinton administration can be obtained from Citizens for

Honest Government, 611 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., Suite 1996, Washington, D.C. 20003. Tel. 1-800-251-8089.

10. Strategic Investment, the sponsor of the handwriting experts, has also prepared a video on the Foster case. Write 108 N.

Alfred Street, Suite 200, Alexandria, VA 22314. Tel. (703) 836-8250. page 37


11. My book, The New Moral Order, the Poems and Essays of David Martin has my letters to Washington Post reporter,

David Von Drehle, and to writer, William Styron, about their writings on the Foster case, referred to in the current monograph. It also contains poetic commentary, at length, on the Foster case, POW/MIA abandonment and coverup, the

Burkett case, the national abortion holocaust, corruption of the press, misinformation on the Oklahoma City bombing, wrongheadedness in pedagogy, the Kennedy assassination, and the national security state, among other things. It is available for $14.95 (which includes a $3.00 shipping and handling fee) from DCD Publishers, P.O. Box 222381, Chantilly, VA

20153.

12. The New Moral Order can also be obtained from The Free American, a monthly magazine. It's at US Highway 380, Box

2943, Bingham, New Mexico 87832. Tel. (505) 423-5250; Fax (505) 423-5258. E-mail freeamerican@etsc.net. The Free

American also sells Unlimited Access, the book by former FBI agent, Gary Aldrich, which is referred to unfavorably in my paper and The Murder of Vince Foster by Michael Kellett, as well as a number of other books and videos generally not available through conventional sources.

13. The United Broadcasting Network (formerly the For the People Network) also sells a similar collection of books and videos, including Christopher Ruddy's work. They have an easy to remember toll-free number, 1-800-888-9999.

14. America West Catalog, P.O. Box 3300, Bozeman, Montana 59772. Tel. 1-800-729-4131 gives prompt mail-order service for it's books on various “conspiracies”. Ask for free catalog.

15. Prevailing Winds Research, P.O. Box 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 93121. Tel. (805) 899-3433 has an extraordinary collection of books, videos, tapes, and articles on various alleged conspiracies. Their perspective is as much from the political left as Accuracy in Media is from the right. In fact, they sell a monograph that roundly attacks AIM. I increasingly find the tiresome right versus left dichotomy to be a hindrance to perceiving the more serious dichotomy between right and wrong, freedom and tyranny.

16. The monthly newspaper, The Jubilee, also sells political books and videos. They are at P.O. Box 310, Midpines, CA

95345. Tel. (209) 742-NEWS. They have had some of the best reporting on the apparent coverup in the Oklahoma City bombing case.

17. The magazine, The New American, has an on line bookstore at http://www.jbs.org. Their address is simply The New

American, Appleton, WI 54913-8040. Tel. (414)749-3783. They have also reported well on Oklahoma City.

Mention in this listing does not constitute an endorsement of everything the organization stands for nor does it bespeak a belief in everything contained in the materials sold (with the exception of The New Moral Order, of course.). There is some doubt, in fact, that some of the organizations or publications are what they purport to be, that is, genuine independent critics of governmental and journalistic corruption. One should beware “false fronts”. A responsible citizen can only read as broadly as possible and make up his own mind. One who confines himself to the “respectable mainstream” is not doing so.

Anyone absorbing the lessons of this essay should realize that the American informational mainstream of the late 20th century is exceedingly narrow, and it is anything but respectable.

David Martin

November 27, 1996 AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 3

Ask you what provocation I have had?

The strong antipathy of good to bad.

--Alexander Pope

In early July, 1997, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff once again reported that Kenneth Starr had wrapped up the Foster case and had agreed with Robert Fiske that Foster had killed himself. Finally, he was right, because on July 15 Starr's office did make page 38

WACKENHUT CORPORATION such an announcement. The conclusion was predictable. Indeed, it had been predicted by almost everyone, including this writer. What was unexpected was his brazenness in not giving one word of explanation of how he arrived at his conclusion.

If anyone ever had explaining to do, it was Kenneth Starr in this instance. Instead, the public was told by a spokesman that the long-delayed report on the underlying investigation had been duly submitted to the three-judge panel that appointed

Starr, and the Office of the Independent Counsel could not say when or if the report would be made public.

The American people have become more and more disaffected with their government and have come to expect magisterial behavior in which they are treated by their leaders more as subjects than as citizens of a free republic. But those two little words "or if" constituted very nearly the most regally contemptuous act yet:

"Yes, we know that any independent-minded person who has taken any time at all to look at the Foster death case knows full well that the suicide-in-Fort-Marcy Park conclusion is full of holes, and, yes, we know that the almost four years it has taken for us to arrive once and for all at this conclusion has only heightened suspicion and increased the need for full public disclosure, but, no, we just might never give you any sort of explanation. Now go away. You bother us."

And the men and the women of America's Fourth Estate, Thomas Jefferson's last line of defense against tyranny, did precisely that. They went meekly away. With the exception of the West Coast business newspaper, Investor's Business

Daily, no one noted that what Starr had really done was to turn back the clock to August 10, 1993, when the Chief of the

Park Police, flanked by representatives of the FBI and the Justice Department, had given us a conclusion with no supporting explanation. We were back to square one, as though Captain Dreyfus had been given another secret trial and convicted again on secret evidence, and Starr's protracted proceedings, it would appear, had been little better than a Star Chamber. But the nation's press took little note, with most not even bothering to make editorial comment. The Washington Times gave the story the most coverage and went so far as politely to urge prompt release of the report, but as the leading "opposition" daily, it was also the most disappointing. Virtually folding its tent of skepticism and forgetting completely that it had once reported that three respected experts had found the Foster "suicide" note to be a forgery, it bought into the official suicide-fromdepression theory using the text of the note, like James Stewart in Blood Sport, as major evidence of the depression, and expressed general satisfaction with Starr's work.

Left-Right Dichotomy Breaks Down

The Times' final cave-in was but one more indication that the complete role reversal from the Dreyfus Affair that I described earlier in the paper, with the left- internationalists now on the side of the government and the right-wing nationalists trying to expose the government scandal, was breaking down. While the right seemed to be losing its appetite for exposing the most serious of the misdeeds associated with the Clinton administration, there were signs that at least a few on the left were regaining their conscience. In the last year two writers of the left-liberal New York/Washington communities emerged as among the most prominent public doubters of the government's Foster-suicide case. Phillip Weiss, who regularly writes for the small-circulation but influential New York Observer, first appeared on the scene with a major article featuring Foster

"document hound" Hugh Sprunt on the cover with an article entitled "The Clinton Crazies" in the New York Times Sunday

Magazine. The usual reader of that newspaper would have been given the superficial impression that the suspicions of highlevel criminal conduct being expressed around the country were the product of little more than a deep-seated hatred of the

President and the First Lady grounded in ideological differences. But Weiss, in the process, allowed a lot more of the facts about the Foster case to get before the American public than they had previously been permitted to see, whatever the spin he and the editors put on them, and he quoted the eminently sane, sensible, and persuasive Sprunt at some length. Had his acquaintance with Sprunt and the facts of the Foster case turned him into a closet American "Dreyfusard"?

The apparent answer to that question was soon forthcoming when he produced a series of articles for the New York

Observer, each stronger than the one before, leaving the clear impression that he had lined himself up with the doubters of the government story. At the same time, a man well known and respected in Washington left-activist circles, the editor and publisher of the Progressive Review, Sam Smith, whose disillusionment with Clinton set in very early in the administration, began to add to his previously published bill of particulars against the President serious misgivings over the Foster case. The influence of his small-circulation magazine was magnified by the fact that he put out an on-line version of it that detailed many of the anomalies of the Foster case such as have been recounted in this article and elsewhere.

Most confounding of all to the thesis, heavily promoted in the press, that the most serious of the Clinton scandals were products of the fevered imaginations of ultra-right- wing, Clinton- hating partisans was perhaps the most devastating portrait yet in print of the first couple and their political milieu, Partners in Power, the Clintons and their America, by Roger Morris. page 39


Morris, respected liberal biographer of Richard Nixon and former member of the President's National Security Council under

President's Johnson and Nixon touches only lightly on the Foster case--his focus is earlier--, but when he mentions it he doesn't just routinely call it the "Foster suicide" as many others have done but acknowledges that it is an unsolved case in which many legitimate concerns have been raised. And well he should, considering the background of profound personal and political corruption that he paints in his book.

The William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe) of Partners in Power is the product of a hard-gambling, party-loving mother whose first two husbands were married to someone else when she began dating them and a natural father, a charming traveling salesman with a million-dollar smile, who was killed in an automobile accident shortly before

Bill was born. Bill's natural father met his glamorous nurse mother when he, a married man, took his sick girlfriend to the hospital where Bill's future mother worked, and she caught his roving eye. The mother was, herself, engaged to another man at the time. Young Bill's stepfather, Roger Clinton, Sr., was a ne'er-do- well alcoholic who abused Bill's mother, but the real power in young Bill's life was the stepfather's older brother, Raymond, who owned the Buick dealership in the wide open

Arkansas resort town of Hot Springs, to which Bill's mother Virginia moved before young Bill started to school. Raymond, according to Morris, was also heavily involved in the prevalent illegal gambling business in the city and was widely believed to be connected to organized crime. Chicago's top mobster himself, Al Capone, could often be seen in Hot Springs in the winter months surrounded by his coterie of bodyguards.

The bombshell revelation in Morris' book, mainly ignored by the nation's press, is that the notorious draft-evading, warprotesting young Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton was, according to sources in whom Morris has a great deal of confidence, actually working undercover at Oxford all along for the CIA and spying on the anti-war movement for his CIA benefactors.

That connection, Morris strongly implies, explains more than anything else young Bill's meteoric political rise, his charmed life with the nation's press, and his phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes after one disastrous revelation after another about his personal and political dealings. It is a connection that continued, according to Morris, when the tiny airport in the northwest Arkansas town of Mena was used as a surreptitious conduit for arms to the CIA-backed Contra guerrillas in

Nicaragua and cocaine was brought back on the return flight to help supply our nations's illegal users. Bill Clinton's continued political success, to Morris, is a sad commentary on what this country has become as we approach the 21st century, hence his book's subtitle, The Clintons and their America.

"Dreyfusards" Clash

If the left-right role reversal of the Foster case versus the Dreyfus Affair was breaking down, so, too, was the parallel between the dogged young reporter Christopher Ruddy, first of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and then of Richard

Mellon Scaife's less-well-known Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and the determined young reporter Bernard Lazare. Though there were many squabbles among the Dreyfusards--Emile Zola in particular was severely attacked when he exiled himself to England to avoid serving his one-year libel sentence--no one ever questioned the sincerity and dedication of Lazare to the cause of justice for Captain Alfred Dreyfus. After all, they were both Jews in a country in which solidarity against rampant anti- Semitism was very important, and Lazare was being financed by Alfred's dedicated older brother, Mathieu. But in 1997 serious questioning of Christopher Ruddy's motives was what was heard from within the heart of the American "Dreyfusard" camp.

The questioning, ironically, was set in motion by Ruddy's own questioning of the motives of John Clarke, the lawyer for the witness, Patrick Knowlton. Ruddy did not challenge the fact that Knowlton had been followed and harassed by a number of spooky and intimidating men on the streets of Washington, DC. He, in fact, was among those who had witnessed the intimidation and had reported on it (The remarkable and thoroughly depressing thing here for anyone who cares about freedom in America is that no one else reported on it. It was, however, well-reported in London.). But as the lawyer Clarke prepared a suit against the FBI (or, more precisely, individuals working for the FBI), whom he and Knowlton blamed primarily for the harassment (or were at least guilty as precipitators of a conspiracy to obstruct justice), Ruddy spread the word that Clarke was not to be trusted, making it very difficult for Knowlton to raise the funds necessary to push ahead with his suit. One of the people with whom Ruddy planted the seed of suspicion, in addition to this author, was the previouslymentioned document hound identified only by his E-mail address, hughie2u@aol.com (now "outed" in an electronic fit of pique by Ruddy as Hugh Turley).

Turley, though made wary by Ruddy's warning, was not deterred from lending assistance to Clarke and found to his satisfaction that Clarke's motives were pure, astonishingly so it would seem for a modern American lawyer. Turley found in

Clarke a bright and promising young attorney with the rare courage to do the unthinkable, to risk his career and stand up and

"fight City Hall." Having satisfied himself as to Clarke's motives, Turley then, quite naturally, turned a gimlet eye upon the page 40

WACKENHUT CORPORATION one who had mounted a whispering campaign against him, and decided that he did not like what he saw. What were Ruddy's motives, he wondered, in his trying to undercut Clarke, and what did that say about Ruddy's motives overall in being the only American journalist to pursue the Foster case on a regular basis?

Turley's first concern was that Ruddy, working first for the New York Post, owned by Australian media mogul, Rupert

Murdoch, and then for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, owned by Mellon heir Richard Mellon Scaife, had intentionally played into the hands of those who would paint the government critics in the case as mere political partisans. Scaife was a noted financier of "conservative" causes and organizations, perhaps the most notable of which is Reed Irvine's Accuracy in

Media (AIM). Irvine and AIM have taken the lead along with Ruddy in questioning the government's conclusions. Irvine is an unabashed partisan who had fiercely defended the Reagan and Bush administrations against almost all allegations of scandal, particularly those related to the Iran-Contra affair, and his organization continued to debunk any hint of government involvement in drug smuggling into Mena Airport in Arkansas. Ruddy did not help by implying that very nearly the worst thing about Kenneth Starr was that he had placed the Democrat, Mark Tuohey, in charge of the Washington Office of the

Independent Counsel, as though a Democrat were inherently incapable of finding another Democrat guilty of a crime.

More serious was Turley's criticism of Ruddy in the area of the case that involved the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawsuit against the FBI. Ruddy, in a number of public appearances, mentioned that Knowlton had been the first to see

Foster's car in the parking lot of Fort Marcy Park (He continues to do it in his book, but we'll have more about the book later.). The fact that the car was an older model Honda than Foster's and brown instead of silver-gray by Knowlton's very definite recollection meant that the car was not, in fact, Foster's. It was Knowlton's insistence on his recollection that, he is certain, got him harassed by people he feels he can prove were working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To downplay that fact is to cover for the FBI in Turley's view. Ruddy also continues to insist that the FBI as an organization was essentially kept out of the Foster death investigation, but it is a major contention of Knowlton's suit, which he supports with numerous documents from the record, that the FBI was, indeed, deeply involved in the investigation, which means it was involved in and very likely orchestrated the cover-up every step of the way.

Finally, Turley is concerned that Ruddy is giving too much attention to his assertion that Foster's body was really at an entirely different location from where the authorities said it was, a position he shares with no other serious student of the

Foster case (except this writer up until an extraordinary new revelation which we shall soon discuss ). Somewhere there must be a textbook dealing with the black art of propaganda in which the techniques are laid out for gathering opponents of the propagandist's position all into a common boat. The boat is then either put on a voyage to nowhere or simply sunk. High up on the list of sinking techniques would be, "make the strongest charge on the weakest evidence."

Turley firmly believes that, though they have long traveled in the same direction and often together, the cause of justice in the Foster case is now better served by his abandonment of the Ruddy ship. Pursuant to that belief he has peppered the

Internet with criticism of Ruddy, starting out with the observation that much of what Ruddy has concluded about the body site is based on something as elementary as his confusion over compass directions at Fort Marcy Park and following up with variations on the themes discussed above.

Finally, Ruddy responded, not with a direct posting to any of the public news groups to which Hughie has been sending his missives, but with E-mail messages to certain individuals interested in the Foster case (this writer was not one of them, but, of course, through the magic of electronic communication, a copy was not difficult to come by). After a point-by-point rebuttal to Hughie's charges, Ruddy concluded by revealing that "Hughie" is the professional "clown," Hugh Turley, and noting that he, as a journalist, had to adhere to higher standards of accuracy (Turley is, in fact, a very clever and successful children's entertainer). Turley quickly responded, congratulating Ruddy for that rarest of actions for an American journalist, defending his writings in a public forum; rebutting each of Ruddy's points in turn; and reminding him that in consideration of their performance with respect to the Foster case, America's journalists had earned for themselves a good deal less reason for respect than America's clowns. He closed with an invitation to Ruddy to keep up the public exchanges. That was some weeks ago, and Ruddy has had no further differences with Turley on the Net.

The other major document hound was busy as well. At the end of the same week in July in which Starr made his longawaited announcement, Hugh Sprunt and the aggrieved witness, Knowlton, paid a visit to the National Archives in

Washington to examine the latest hearing records of the Senate Whitewater Committee which were recently made available, and while they were at it, to see if there was anything that might have been missed in the earlier records of the Foster case.

And, as luck would have it, there was. Dr. Donald Haut, Chief Medical Examiner of the Northern Virginia District had already had his 15 minutes of fame when he appeared on the 60 Minutes episode in which he contradicted Ruddy with respect to the amount of blood he saw on and around Foster's body at Fort Marcy Park. What reporter Mike Wallace did not page 41

WACKENHUT CORPORATION say is that he also contradicted what he had previously said on the record and what he had told Ruddy in an interview that

Ruddy had recorded. The controversy over what Haut, the official medical recorder of the scene and the only physician at

Fort Marcy Park that night, did or did not see made it all the more noticeable that in the massive two volumes of Senate documents his official written incident report was missing. Well, Knowlton found it, and Sprunt, hesitant at first, quickly recognized its significance.

The first thing one would notice in reading the pre-printed form is that Haut hardly earned his money that night. In the 48 boxes under "Description of Body, " which includes spaces for noting incidence of blood, among a lot of other things, everything is blank. In the 10 blocks under "Fatal Wounds (Gunshot, Stab, etc.)," same thing. Finally, under "Manner of

Death: (check one only) we hit some pay dirt. The choices are "Accident," "Natural," "Suicide," "Homicide,"

"Undetermined," and "Pending." No doubt here. The block by "Suicide" has an "x" mark. And there beside it in the "Cause of Death" block is a short narrative in all capitals: PERFORATING GUNSHOT WOUND MOUTH- [space] HEAD. (The odd blank space is not exactly as I have shown it. It actually starts a second line.) Turning to the second page of the two-page form we find more blank spaces: "Found Dead By." nothing; "Last Seen Alive By," nothing; "Witnesses to Injury or Illness and Death," nothing. Then under the concluding "Narrative Summary of Circumstances Surrounding Death" we have this:

"JULY 20, 1993 After anonymous call was received at 18:04 hours US Park Police officers found 48 yrs Caucasian male with self-inflicted gunshot wound mouth to neck on a foot path in Marcey (sic) Park. His car was parked in the parking lot but no note was found. MEDICAL HISTORY Unknown."

Mouth to neck!?!? But didn't he say mouth-head on the first page? Yes, but there was that curious space between the words.

Oh, look! A four-letter word has been incompletely mechanically "lifted off" there, it would appear. Well, what do you know? The original word sure does look a lot like "NECK."

So there you have it. Kenneth Starr just got through telling us that the death was a suicide just like Robert Fiske said it was, and the autopsy doctor upon whom Fiske relied produced a diagram showing that the bullet came out through the crown of the head, but the doctor at the park saw a neck instead of a head wound. There's certainly no confusing the neck and the crown of the head. Somebody, to make the written record of the two doctors agree, went back and "corrected" "NECK" and put "HEAD" down beside it. But this was a government worker. He did a slovenly job on the first page and overlooked the words entirely on the second page.

Sprunt, as is usually the case when he is in the Washington area (It was often the case with reporter Ruddy, too.), was staying at Hugh Turley's home. Turley, who had actually organized and participated in the archives expedition that spanned several days, prepared a press release on the discovery and sent it around. As we have by now come to expect with any information that is particularly damning of the government, it was of course completely ignored by all the major news organs. Here is an excerpt from that press release:

The "Report of Investigation by Medical Examiner" authored by Donald Haut and available at the National Archives confirms that the Fiske Report was wrong and paramedic Richard Arthur was indeed right when he said under oath that there was a bullet wound to Vincent Foster's neck. This neck wound was absent from the official autopsy report. Dr. James C.

Beyer's "Report of Autopsy" states that Mr. Foster shot himself in the mouth and that the bullet exited from the back of

Foster's head. The bullet has never been found.

Paramedic Richard Arthur stated under oath that "...there was a bullet hole right here (in the neck)...right around the jaw line." The first Whitewater Counsel Robert B. Fiske in his report dismissed Arthur's testimony saying that "Arthur believed he saw a bullet wound in the right side of Foster's neck. These wounds did not exist. The autopsy results, the photographs taken at the scene...conclusively show these wounds did not exist." Much of the evidence, however, is inexplicably missing.

Park Police officers stated under oath that many of the body site Polaroid photos vanished and all the 35mm pictures taken of the body were underexposed. The autopsy doctor James C. Beyer claimed his X-ray machine did not work even though his report shows X-rays were taken. (ellipsis in the press release).

That the new evidence would cause one to go back and look more seriously at the previous work of Robert Fiske and Drs.

Haut and Beyer as well as at the autopsy and the curious missing evidence is certainly not surprising, but what's this about

Richard Arthur, who first turns up as a significant witness in Hugh Sprunt's Citizen's Independent Report as we noted back on page 43? Arthur takes on new importance, not only because, as we see, this very compelling new evidence seems to bear page 42

WACKENHUT CORPORATION out his sworn testimony about the neck wound, but also because it makes everything else he has said more credible, and that

"everything else" sounded pretty incredible at first. The "confidential witness" (identified as Centreville, VA, construction worker, Dale Kyle by the Washington Times in the wake of the Starr announcement) who supposedly discovered the body had made the "incredible" statement that he saw no gun in the hand. But he wavered over that under intense adversarial questioning by Fiske's FBI agents, and his story about walking almost 300 yards uphill on a hot day to find a private place for an emergency urination doesn't, as they say, hold a lot of water. The now more credible Arthur is the only witness on that fateful night to say--and he said it with great certainty--that the gun he saw in Foster's hand was an automatic and not the old black Colt .38 caliber revolver that is the official death weapon. Arthur was so sure that he drew a sketch of the weapon he saw for Senate investigators.

Arthur was one of the earliest witnesses. The absolutely earliest witness after Kyle, Park Police officer Kevin Fornshill, the first of the official searchers to come across the body has, most incredibly, said he never got a close enough look at the body to determine if there was a gun in the hand. What an incurious police officer! Also, the earliest set of Polaroid photos are among those that have turned up missing. What is beginning to appear ever more likely is that someone put an automatic pistol (perhaps a 9 mm carried by the Park Police) in Foster's hand as a sort of placeholder until the silver revolver that

Foster owned could be put there. Somewhere along the way the plan went awry, however, and somebody came up with the old drop gun as a sort of consolation.

A Richard Arthur who is thoroughly credible suggests a couple of more things, too. It suggests that the neck wound he saw was an entry wound and the killer came up behind Foster and popped him with a small-caliber weapon aimed up into his brain, gangland style. The bullet likely never exited. It would also mean that this writer was mistaken to support Christopher

Ruddy on the question of the body site. I had known for some time that Arthur places the body in front of the second cannon, which is where it was officially, but I doubted his overall credibility in spite of his steadfastness in sticking to his story. He had even accompanied the British reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard out to Fort Marcy Park and showed him where he saw the body. I had believed otherwise, not only because of my general faith in Ruddy, but also because the leafy background in the leaked hand-with-the-gun photo does not match the barren ground directly in front of the second cannon. However, upon my most recent visit to Fort Marcy Park I observed that if the body had been only a couple of feet farther down the berm and to the right, the scene would not conflict with the photo, and that body location seems the most likely possibility in light of all that we now know.

Christopher Ruddy is now farther out on a limb, and he is more lonesome out there, than he was before, which might explain how he has reacted to the neck-wound discovery. His public position is that it was not the neck wound that Arthur said in sworn testimony that he saw on the side of the neck. Nor was it the wound on the side of the neck that both Ruddy and

Evans- Pritchard had said they had seen in an enhanced Polaroid photograph shown to them by someone apparently connected to the Starr investigation. Rather, it was an exit wound in the back of the neck that Foster friend and fellow Little

Rock lawyer, Joe Purvis, had told Ruddy back in 1994 that an unidentified mortician in Little Rock told him he had seen.

This was what he was soon suggesting on radio talk shows and in his book, which came out not quite two months later, though both neck wounds are in the book, only in different places. As for Arthur's flat disagreement with him about the body site, in a section early in the book dealing with the body site question he has this to say: "Another Fairfax County rescuer,

Richard Arthur, had concerns about the body's position." Here he manages to leave an impression precisely the opposite of what is true.

The Ruddy Book

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we start picking around the details in Ruddy's book we should first introduce it to the reader. The title is The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, an Investigation. It is published by The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. This fact is interesting in itself because Simon and Schuster published Blood Sport by James Stewart which, in its treatment of the Foster case-- pretending that the torn-up "suicide" note was authentic by ignoring the findings of the three handwriting experts, strongly implying that Foster's silver revolver was the same as the unmistakably black gun found in Foster's hand at Fort Marcy Park, and shamelessly reporting an amazing account to him by Clinton adviser Susan

Thomases that the very private Foster had confided to her(of all people) in the evening privacy of her boudoir(of all times and places) that he was distraught over his being trapped in a marriage with a woman that he did not love, without telling us that it contradicted what she had told the FBI on the record--is easily qualified to be called America's leading Foster coverup book.

Also interesting is that the book was first mentioned nationally in the September issue of the magazine, Vanity Fair, in the form of a brief favorable review by controversial on-line reporter, Matt Drudge. Drudge seems to be in the business of page 43

WACKENHUT CORPORATION discrediting both himself and the Internet by reporting half-baked, gossipy rumors. Most recently he was sued for libel by new White House Assistant, Sidney Blumenthal. Before coming to the White House Blumenthal was a journalist for the

New Yorker, in which capacity, as I reported at the beginning of this paper, he wrote probably the earliest national magazine article on how Foster's fatally thin skin ultimately did him in. The New Yorker, which also produced the suicide-reinforcing article based on the rare interview with Lisa Foster referred to earlier, is owned by S.I. Newhouse. One might fairly wonder if it is only simple irony that Newhouse also owns Vanity Fair, which is now praising Ruddy's book, or if something deeper might be at work.

The dust jacket is surprisingly economical with information about Ruddy's background, saying under his photograph only that "Christopher Ruddy is a correspondent with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and a Media Fellow at the Hoover

Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University." The Hoover Institution is a noted conservative think tank.

Irony lovers will note that of all the colleges to which she could go, the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea, picked Stanford. The dust jacket does not tell us about Ruddy's previous employment with Murdoch's New York Post, that he has been the only

American reporter to write regularly and skeptically about the Foster case, nor that he is a college product of Morton

Blackwell's Leadership Institute of Arlington, Virginia (From their web site masthead: "The Leadership Institute has trained thousands of conservatives to be successful in politics. Now the Leadership Institute wants to train you.).

It is not clear who is intending to impart credibility to whom, here, and who needs it more, but Ruddy further wraps himself in establishment approval with a lone endorsement on the dust jacket by William S. Sessions, former Director of the Federal

Bureau of Investigation. Here it is in its entirety:

Christopher Ruddy has detailed a significant array of facts and issues involving the death of Mr. Foster. His work is serious and compelling. While enduring great criticism, he has tenaciously argued a persuasive case that the American public has not been told the complete facts of this case.

Mr. Ruddy has carefully avoided drawing undue inferences about the death. His reporting raises serious concerns about the handling of the Foster case. It is legitimate to question the process employed by authorities to make their conclusions.

Understatement, properly employed, is also a legitimate polemical technique, but considering what this book more than amply shows, that there has been a blatant and obvious, in- your-face cover-up by the President, the Congress, the FBI, and

America's press of the very- probable assassination of a high White House official, the timid and defensive tone of this statement--the first thing that the book's potential buyer might see-- is simply inexcusable.

Certainly Ruddy's work is compelling. He was allotted 305 pages (not counting the index) to lay out the whole sickening story, and it is a compelling story. He tells most of it, much of which is compressed into many fewer pages in this article, but he also tellingly leaves out a good deal of what is in this article as well as that which has been reported by others like the

British reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, researcher Hugh Sprunt, and that which had been turned up by the lawyer, John

Clarke, as part of the Knowlton lawsuit against the FBI.

Yes, that lawsuit against the FBI that Clarke was working on for Knowlton has indeed been filed, but you would hardly know it from reading Ruddy's book. After first trying to discredit Clarke with whispered innuendo, then consistently misreporting that Knowlton saw Foster's car in the lot at Fort Marcy Park, which is the crux of Knowlton's differences with the FBI, and not showing up to cover the Washington press conference in which Clarke and Knowlton announced the filing of the lawsuit, Ruddy added the capper by avoiding the subject entirely in his text.

Intentionally Ineffectual?

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion, for one whose primary concern is that truth and justice ultimately prevail, that

Ruddy, not just in this book, but also in his reporting, has been intentionally ineffectual. Consider the following: Stung by the public criticism from a man who has given him many a free hour of assistance, a man who has no doubt contributed in his own selfless way to Ruddy's prominence and to the attainment of the latter's Hoover Institution Fellowship, Ruddy recently called Hugh Turley and told him that he was in Washington and would like to get together to mend fences. Turley, wanting to let Ruddy know right off the bat how difficult mending fences would now be, asked Ruddy why he had said nothing about Knowlton's lawsuit against the FBI in his book. Ruddy's response was that the book was essentially completed page 44

WACKENHUT CORPORATION in the summer of 1996 and that the editor was quite strict in what he would allow him to add to it.

This answer is quite revealing in a number of ways. First, the bit about the strict editor is utter and complete nonsense.

Knowlton's lawsuit was filed on November 12, 1996. Ruddy's book came out in the second week of September, 1997.

Mention is made in the text of Starr's "suicide" announcement in mid-July of 1997 and of the neck-wound discovery a few days later. The excuse that the news of the lawsuit came too late to be included in the book does not increase ones confidence in the candor of the man offering it.

I asked Turley if he had asked Ruddy why the publisher had essentially sat on the book for more than a year, or if Ruddy had volunteered a reason, and the answer in either case was negative. But in consideration of the pattern that Ruddy has established, one can make an educated guess about the reason. The string on the Foster case has now, it would seem, run out.

The President signaled right off the bat that he was not going to do anything. First a Democratic Congress and then a

Republican Congress have shown that they are not going to do anything. The press, also, has thrown in the towel, though it is probably correct to say that it never got in the ring, that is, on the side of truth and justice, and first Robert Fiske and now

Kenneth Starr have given them all cover by closing the case. As I was reading the book I found myself thinking "Every

American, every member of Congress ought to read this book." But then it occurred to me. It's too late. A year ago it might have brought some pressure on Starr and the Congress, but not now. The only avenue of citizens' redress left is through

Patrick Knowlton's lawsuit, and Ruddy ignores it.

But wait! Appendix I, out of a total of seven appendices, is a chronology of events connected (sometimes very tenuously) with the Foster case. It cuts off with:

June 23 Supreme Court refuses to hear Clinton administration appeal on notes made by government lawyers during their conversations with Hillary Clinton.

Backing up ten items we find the following at the top of page 268:

November 12 Witness Patrick Knowlton files suit in federal court alleging the government violated his civil rights.

There it is in black and white, watered down and drained of meaning and impact, buried in a chronology that few will bother to read with any care or comprehension. It doesn't say that it is precisely the FBI that he is suing and it doesn't explain why he would do such a thing, but the text does talk about the harassment on the streets of Washington so the really astute reader possibly can figure things out. Still, at the very best he can only think it must be some kind of crackpot suit like we often hear about on the news, or surely Ruddy would have covered it in his text. But, as with so much in the book, what Ruddy has really covered is his rear end. He can say that he did mention it, but in this instance, quite embarrassingly so, he didn't even seem to know that he had.

But Ruddy doesn't just ignore the lawsuit, he also introduces a new interpretation of events on Vincent Foster's fateful day that would tend to undercut it. We turn to another appendix and another chronology, Appendix II, "Vince Foster's Last Day," where we see this entry:

Approx. 12:30 P.M. White House claims Foster eats lunch in office.

What's with this "White House claims" business? Linda Tripp, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum's assistant, says she brought a cheeseburger and French fries from the White House cafeteria for him, and clerk Thomas Castleton has even attested to having been sent after her to see what was taking her so long. Tripp, a holdover from the Bush administration now working at the Pentagon, would seem to be an unlikely person to make up a story to cover up a probable murder in the

Clinton White House, but what Ruddy is clearly implying here is that Tripp and Castleton didn't tell the truth about Foster's lunch.

The line of reasoning is further developed in the text. Ruddy notes that the autopsy doctor, Beyer, did not clearly fix the time of death, but he said that Foster had recently eaten a large meal of meat and potatoes. Here Ruddy passes up the chance to page 45

WACKENHUT CORPORATION drive one more nail into the "depression" coffin by failing to note that such a hearty appetite belies a man about to abandon his family and his responsibilities on account of his suicidally-tortured mental state. Rather, he uses the information to raise questions about Foster's time of death. The witnesses at Fort Marcy Park coming across Foster's body just after 6:00 pm describe a man freshly murdered, according to Ruddy (but not, by my reading, to the preponderance of the testimony), and the autopsy describes a stomach full of an only partially digested meal. Further, Ruddy relates, "CW's ("confidential witness"

Dale Kyle) FBI statement also mentions a purple wine-colored stain that one of the investigators told me was clearly visible on Foster's shirt and was obviously not blood." "A source close to the Starr probe who examined the shirt agreed with CW that a stain consistent with a wine color was on the shirt. The source said that Fiske had made no attempt to analyze the stain."

This latter evidence is presented in the context of how Robert Fiske accepted some evidence from CW that supported his conclusions but ignored other things, because CW, alone, also said he saw a wine cooler bottle near Foster's body, but that fact is not mentioned by anyone on the official record. Ruddy apparently doubts the existence of the bottle and CW's overall credibility, but he has got on the public record here, buttressed by two anonymous sources, the existence of a wine-colored stain on Foster's shirt. A picture is beginning to emerge not only of some riotous banquet that Foster might have attended where he ate a hearty meal and spilled wine on himself, but a time of death too late for Patrick Knowlton to have been a witness to much of anything. The car that he saw didn't match Foster's because Foster, what with his late meal that his stomach had been working on for two or three hours, wasn't yet at Fort Marcy Park.

Red-Faced on Television

Chris Ruddy has been praised as an old-fashioned shoe-leather reporter who doesn't just rely on official reports and the public record but goes out and tracks down leads on his own. In this he can be contrasted with many a mainstream journalist.

But his penchant for going beyond the official record--something you never see the document hound Hugh Sprunt do--has gotten him in serious trouble in the past, to the point of contributing to the suspicions, here expressed, that he is being intentionally ineffectual.

It is not lost on those who rule us that, lamentably, most Americans get all their news from the major national television networks. The only time that the Ruddy name has figured prominently on the networks, first on the ABC Evening News in

March of 1994 and then again on CBS's 60 Minutes in October of 1995 a self-discrediting blunder of his has been exposed.

In each case the blunder originated with an unattributed source. Let us look first at the ABC piece, which I discuss--much less critically of Ruddy-- back on page 25.

On March 7, 1993, he wrote an article for the New York Post that appeared under the headline, "Cops Made Photo Blunder at Foster Death Site." It begins as follows:

The U.S. Park Police never took a crucial crime-scene photo of Vincent Foster's body before it was moved during the investigation into the death of the White House deputy counsel, FBI sources told The Post.

The embarrassing blunder--corroborated by a Park Police source--was one of several routine crime scene procedures investigators neglected to follow in Fort Marcy Park in Arlington, Va., in the Foster case, FBI sources said.

The clearest impression left by this article, whose truth or lack of same rests entirely upon anonymous FBI and Park Police sources, is that nobody unsheathed even the first camera or took the first picture, a breach of procedure so serious that all trace of doubt is erased that a cover-up is going on. Now we learn later that a lot of monkey- business went on with the copious photos that were taken--the basic 35-millimeters were said to have been underexposed and two-thirds of the

Polaroids mysteriously disappeared--but Ruddy, by overstating the case had handed the networks a propaganda coup and had partially inoculated the investigators from damage from the future revelations. He took great umbrage with me personally at my writing that he had made a mistake here. The spin he took with me and continues to take in his book is that he wasn't talking about photographs overall but simply the broad perspective shots that would have settled once and for all whether the body was nearer to the first cannon as he alleges or nearer to the second cannon, as the authorities have it. That he can make such an assertion and still keep a perfectly straight face certainly does not inspire great confidence in his general probity. page 46


The Christopher Ruddy that Mike Wallace interviewed on 60 Minutes, whom Wallace credited as responsible, more than anyone else, for Americans' skepticism about the Foster death, certainly came across as sheepish and shifty-looking. I credited it at the time to skillful editing, lighting, and camera angles by the same people who had admittedly pulled Bill

Clinton's chestnuts out of the fire during the Gennifer Flowers stink in the `92 campaign and to Ruddy's youth and inexperience. But maybe the camera doesn't lie. He looked his absolute stumbling worst when he tried to explain away the bold assertion of the video (that he had a major role in producing) that Foster was left- handed, when the gun was found placed in his right hand. His weak retort was that the video was not his, but was instead a product of James Dale Davidson's

Strategic Investment Newsletter. "You edited it, didn't you," shot back Mike Wallace, and Ruddy was left with no defense.

Ruddy's defense with the faithful--and he continues to make it in his book--is that all the blame here lies with that tricky

Mike Wallace. It was he, Ruddy, who told the 60 Minutes people in the first place that the "left-handed" assertion was wrong, that it had originated with the liberal Boston Globe, and that Strategic Investment had mistakenly gone with it in their video without checking it out. Then those underhanded Clinton- defenders at CBS turned around and used it against him.

Let us look at the record. After having been let go by the New York Post just in time to miss the opportunity to comment publicly on the Fiske Report, he told me that he was gambling his journalistic future on a major report on the Foster case.

The resulting 17-page paper dated July 18, 1994, entitled "A Special Report on the Fiske Investigation of the Death of

Vincent W. Foster, Jr." leads off with a long exposition of his differences with the Park Police over the location of the body.

His conclusions depend heavily upon what he says he was told by lead paramedic Sgt. George Gonzalez and an anonymous

Park Police officer, and his own confusion over compass directions. The report includes a map that is oriented with west at the top and it is described in the text as north. Ruddy acknowledges that Gonzalez told a different story to Fiske's investigators, but what he does not tell us and probably did not know is that Gonzalez also told the same story as the one he told to Fiske's investigators in the report he wrote for the record that night, a report that pre-dated his interview with Ruddy by several months.

Eleven pages into the report we find a numbered list of 10 "Other Problems in Fiske's Findings." Here, produced in bold as in Ruddy's report is number 3, (the underlined emphasis is mine):

Why was the gun in Foster's right hand if, as The Boston Globe reported and the Park Police confirmed, he was left-handed?

Whatever did happen to that Park Police confirmation by the time the 60 Minutes set-up rolled around?

Ruddy's erroneous directions and apparently erroneous assertion about Foster's left- handedness (I say "apparently" because the matter has never been cleared up to my satisfaction.) continued to circulate in a compendium volume of Ruddy's writings, available by mail order from The Western Journalism Center entitled Vincent Foster, the Ruddy Investigation for years afterward, perhaps up to the present.

Thanks I believe primarily to Hugh Turley and Hugh Sprunt, the very embarrassing directional errors are not in Ruddy's latest book, but the argument over the body site still occupies a prominent place, consuming most of Chapter 2. Still, we see no hint that what Ruddy tells us he was told by Sgt. Gonzalez is contradicted by what appears in Gonzalez's contemporaneous report and his later deposition. Now emergency worker Richard Arthur has been added falsely as a bodysite ally to Ruddy.

If the body site claim is not the source of Ruddy's next national television embarrassment, perhaps it will come on another point. Now apprised of his record and on guard, the careful reader should be wary of any assertion that comes from an anonymous source or is not on the public record. We find one such assertion on page 53. The known evidence, most of which Ruddy recounts, is very powerful that the gun found in Foster's hand was not his and did not previously belong to his father, though we have been told by Fiske et al. that it did. Ruddy goes farther, however, saying, "Yet documents obtained by the Fiske investigators show conclusively that the gun was not owned by Foster's father and had not been part of his father's gun collection."

This is a very strong charge. I know of nothing to support it on the public record. Since the conclusion of suicide rests so heavily on the assertion that the gun found in Foster's hand was one given to him by his father, the willful withholding of page 47

WACKENHUT CORPORATION evidence that would prove otherwise is nothing short of criminal conduct by the prosecutor. What will happen, should it become necessary, when the next Mike Wallace or Ted Koppel asks Chris Ruddy to put up or shut up? AMERICA'S

DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 4

Before we leave the topic of "intentional ineffectualness" let us look at a few more of the Ruddy dodges. One thing that is noticeably lacking in the book is anything around which the people might rally for a call to action. Well laid out is the plethora of contradictory evidence concerning the nature of Foster's wounds and the complete dishonesty of the autopsy and the autopsy doctor. I looked very hard in the book for the simple suggestion that the conflicts be resolved once and for all by an exhumation and a re-autopsy under strict supervision by objective observers, and I did not find it. Perhaps the big problem with making that suggestion is that it immediately brings into relief the fundamental problem we now face in the country: Who in authority is not so mistrusted that we would feel safe hearing their word on the autopsy? Nevertheless, as a very basic first step, as something attainable that we could all agree on and rally around, the call must be made, and

Christopher Ruddy does not make it.

Ruddy also has a good treatment of the little charade that was performed by Senator D'Amato's Banking Committee with respect to the conflict between the testimony of Chelsea Clinton's nanny, Helen Dickey, and Arkansas state troopers Roger

Perry and Larry Patterson. Perry has said that he was called by Dickey around quitting time who hysterically told him that

Foster had killed himself out in the parking lot of the White House. Perry immediately called Patterson and told him (Ruddy neglects to mention here, as he had done earlier in the book, that both have put their recollections into notarized, sworn affidavits.). Dickey, brought before the committee at the request of minority counsel Richard Ben Veniste, said she called well after ten o'clock and the story she told was only what the Park Police had reported. Ben Veniste then said that the troopers had been requested to come and tell their story, but they declined. They quickly denied that they had declined to testify, and Ruddy is correct to point out that the conflict could have very easily hashed out through use of the committee's subpoena power. He also exposes the transparent ruse by which the White House and Sprint thwarted any resolution of the question of when the call was made. If the troopers were correct, as certainly seems likely, then, at the very least, the White

House knew about the death hours before they said they did.

Telephone records here could have cleared up this relatively minor dispute about time, though they could not have resolved the more important dispute about the contents of the call. Telephone records are of potentially much greater importance in another facet of the case, and Ruddy fails to note the fact. Instead, he swallows whole the story that Foster called his family physician in Little Rock and the physician called a pharmacy in Georgetown who delivered the medication to his home the day before he died. The fact that the physician did not come forward with his story until the White House, and, more importantly, unidentified sources talking to the press ( as I discuss in this article but Ruddy neglects) began to gin up the story that Foster was depressed is highly suspicious. Also suspicious is the fact that no long-distance telephone records were volunteered to prove the calls were made. I raise these points on page 21 of this paper, and I know Ruddy has read it because he commented upon a draft I sent him. It is not too late to call for the records of those calls, if they were really made, to be produced, but first the importance of such an action must be pointed out, and Ruddy fails to do it.

Ruddy also makes much of the mystery of the five-hour gap between the time Foster was last seen at the White House and when Foster's body was found at Fort Marcy Park. When part of that mystery might have been resolved, he effectively blocked it. In 1994 an acquaintance of mine who once worked for the CIA-contract company, the Mitre Corporation, told me that they had installed the security equipment around the White House and that it was so sharp that it could tell how close an arriving driver had shaved that morning. Surely, there would be a video record of Foster leaving the White House, he told me, if, indeed, he left under his own power. I passed this information on to Ruddy, and he came back with the news that "his

White House source said there was no such equipment." In retrospect I believe that source, if there ever was one, was about as dependable as the source that told him that Foster was left-handed and that the Park Police had taken no crime scene photographs. The very notion that the White House, of all places, would have no surveillance record of its grounds is, I believe, utterly preposterous. A call in 1994 for those records for the afternoon of July 20, 1993, to be produced might have brought some serious heat on the White House, but, thanks to Mr. Ruddy and his source, no such call was made, and it is probably too late to do any good now.

"Undue Inferences"

Sometimes his book's crucial omissions seem to have a larger purpose than just weakening his case with respect to the Foster death and damaging his overall credibility. Consider the following beginning to page 62:

Up until July 26, the day a White House lawyer found the torn note, there was almost no evidence to support the depression page 48

WACKENHUT CORPORATION theory.

On July 27, the Park Police interviewed Foster's brother-in-law, former congressman Beryl Anthony. For the first time, the word "depression" appears in witness testimony. Anthony and his wife said that for a month preceding the death they noted

"Mr. Foster's depression had become increasingly worse...."

That looks like pretty strong evidence, indeed, coming as it does from people so close to Vince. Go back to page 4 of this article, which Ruddy had studied with an eye toward making helpful suggestions, and note the contrast. He knows that on

July 24 the Washington Times had a front page article in which an anonymous source told the Times reporter that Foster was depressed and had sought psychiatric help through family members, including brother-in-law Beryl Anthony. Called for confirmation, Anthony reportedly responded, "That's a bunch of crap. There's not a damn thing to it," and angrily hung up the phone. With the exception of the testimony of this couple, the record is perfect in the book. All the people who were close to Vince who have spoken on the record either have said that he didn't seem at all depressed to them, or they have changed their story. Ruddy knows that Anthony changed his story, too, radically and within three days, but he doesn't use the information. Why?

Actually, even by Ruddy's account, which we come to many pages later on p. 109 they probably did change their story. We are at the Foster house on the night of July 20, `93:

Turning to friends and family, (Park Police officer John) Rolla asked a number of people if they noticed any signs of depression. "`Did you see this coming?' he recalled asking. `Were there any signs? Has he been taking any medication?' No.

All negative answers."

Among those present were Beryl and his wife Sheila, but Ruddy doesn't use this information, either, to impugn the July 27th statement of the Anthonys. Why not?

Well, maybe he can say they might not have been among those friends and family who were within earshot, but he could have also referred to Rolla's contemporaneous written report in which he concluded that no one present could think of any reason why Foster would have taken his own life. That certainly did include the Anthonys.

The failure to mention the July 24 Washington Times story is the far more serious offense, and it fits a pattern in the book.

Though here and there Ruddy is critical of the press he is careful not to reveal the depth and breadth of their corruption. The contrast, in that regard, with this monograph could not be more stark. The gradual change in the line from "incomprehensible mystery" to "deep depression" he in one place credits to White House spokesperson Dee Dee Myers, and he has those sharp watchdogs of the press catching her as she does it. What he does not tell the reader is that no hint of the exposure of the

White House verbal legerdemain ever made it into the news. In another place he faults the Park Police for being too obsessed with Foster's mental state. We would never guess from Ruddy that the depression story originates not obviously from the

White House but through anonymous sources feeding the Washington Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and Newsweek.

Those anonymous sources might well have been from the White House, but with the exception of Frank Murray of the

Washington Times who did the revealing checking behind the source, the press people were extraordinarily compliant in passing on the "depressed" line. Notice, for instance, how often we heard that Foster had lost not 14 pounds or 16 pounds, but exactly 15 pounds. Where did that come from, anyway?

Former FBI Director Sessions finds it admirable that "Mr. Ruddy has carefully avoided drawing undue inferences about the death." However praiseworthy that might be, what is not at all admirable is Ruddy's even more careful withholding of facts that might cause the public to draw its own inferences, due or undue, about the death and the cover-up. The fact that the

"opposition" Washington Times was chosen for the pivotal first "depression" leak might make us infer that they are not the true conservative opposition newspaper that we have been led to believe they are, that is, if the leaker was from the White

House. Alternatively, we might infer that the leaker was not exactly from the White House but might actually be part of the crowd that killed a scruple-smitten Foster in the first place, that now also calls most of the shots in the "mainstream" press, and that foisted off upon the American people the nephew of Raymond Clinton to guard their domain. page 49


Is it not clear now why there could be no mention of the July 24, `93, article even though it helps immensely with the argument that Foster was not at all depressed and therefore had no motive for suicide? It would have led to too many messy inferences, as would have making mention, as I do in this article but Ruddy does not, of the Foster cover-up books written by such "conservative" stalwarts as ex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich or "His Cheating Heart" revealer, David Brock. Surely the

White House couldn't be pulling their strings, too. Must it not go higher? The only other possibility is that James Stewart and

Aldrich and Brock have simply been honestly persuaded by the weight of the evidence that Foster committed suicide from depression. Anyone who has read this far and would believe that must fare very badly on reading comprehension tests.

The Post Gets a Free Ride

A possible defense that might be offered as to why Ruddy would go a little easy on fellow "conservatives" is that he could not afford to alienate his main constituency, although I would offer that full truth and disclosure in so serious a matter as the

Foster cover-up is far too high a price to pay for such a purpose. We are also still left without an explanation for why he should be so kind to those powerful "liberal" king-makers-and- breakers at the Washington Post. Trace down and read all the references to the Post listed in the index and what comes across is not the pure propaganda organ furthering the cover- up that we saw in the earlier pages of this paper but a regular newspaper reporting the news, perhaps only a tad less aggressively than it should. And, curiously, the index does not even mention this first reference to the Post on page 30:

(Body discoverer) Fornshill was impressed by the neatness of Foster's body and the overall scene. He told the FBI on April

29, 1994, and the Washington Post shortly after Foster's death that Foster's hair was "neatly in place," his white shirt "clean and apparently starched," and his trousers "extremely neat" with sharp creases.

That Fornshill told this to the FBI eight months later is a matter of record, and he might also have told this exact same thing to the Post. The long, fact-poor summarizing "Foster-was- depressed" article by David Von Drehle (with assistance by Peter

Baker and Michael Isikoff) of August 15, 1993, to which Ruddy is apparently referring (his lack of a footnote reference here makes it impossible to be certain) says, "Officer Fornshill remembered his slacks were creased, his white shirt starched, and every hair in place." Had Ruddy told us that the Post left out the crucial word "clean" when describing the shirt of a man who, according to the Post and the authorities, had just blown his brains out with a .38 caliber pistol, he might have helped us to see more clearly the Post's cover- up role rather than leaving us with the impression that they were just doing their job and reporting what they were told.

Ruddy's benign picture of the Post is also in vivid contrast to the one painted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of London's

Sunday Telegraph. This brief portrait is certainly enough to make one re-examine the Post's supposed "anti-government" role in the Watergate and Pentagon Papers episodes. Here are some excerpts from Evans-Pritchard's rebuttal of July 10, 1995, after he had been attacked in a front-page article by the Post as a Foster "conspiracy theorist":

The decision by the Washington Post to run such a piece at this late stage--in the face of overwhelming suspicions of foul play--comes perilously close to complicity in a cover-up.

The argument has nothing to do with ideology. The Washington Post ceased to be a newspaper of liberal activism a long time ago, if it ever really was. "Its anti- establishment image is one of the most absurd myths in journalism today," said Jeff

Cohen, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in New York, a liberal group that monitors the Post closely and accuses it of an incestuous relationship with the governing elite. "It has been an instrument of state power for many years."

It is worth noting too that the Washington Post ignored the series of well- researched pieces by the American Spectator alleging that Bill Clinton used state troopers to solicit women on a routine basis, and then played rough to silence leaks.

One might choose to treat that as unimportant. A private matter. Beneath the Post. But what about the story of gun-running and drug-smuggling through the Mena airport in Arkansas in the 1980s? As reported by The Sunday Telegraph in January, the managing editor, Robert Kaiser, intervened at the last moment to spike a story by Sally Denton and Roger Morris that was backed by an archive of 2,000 documents. page 50


The story had been cleared by the lawyers. It was typeset and ready to go to the printers. Since then there have been fresh developments in this story. Sworn testimony taken from a court case in Arkansas has linked Bill Clinton directly to this cloak-and- dagger operation, which has possible ties to US intelligence. Not a word about these depositions has been written in the Washington Post.

But failure to report the news is one thing. Active disinformation is another. Last week's article in the Post insinuated that

The Telegraph had fabricated a story about clandestine trips to Switzerland by Vince Foster. The author, Susan Schmidt, who is the Post's full-time reporter on Whitewater, said that sources "with access to Foster's American Express receipts say they show no purchase of airline tickets to Switzerland."

But when confronted, she admitted that her sources did not in fact have access to information--that The Telegraph did have-about the two flights Foster made to Geneva in 1991 and 1992. Furthermore, she had no credit card numbers and she did not know which of Foster's American Express cards may have been involved. Nor did she have any records from the airlines.

"These records are closely guarded," she said, by way of explanation.

You bet they are, and Ms. Schmidt failed to get them. The only information she had, it turns out, referred to a single purchase in July 1993 conducted through the White House travel office. We would surmise that her "sources" (plural) are in the Clinton White House. We rest our case.

Chris Ruddy faults the Park Police for ostensibly failing to step back and take any larger "perspective shots" of the crime scene. Ironically, that is what is so sadly missing in Ruddy's work. With Ruddy, one is eternally peeping in through the keyhole, whereas with these few lines from Evans-Pritchard one feels that he has at least one foot into the room. Neglecting to expose news organs like the Post as mere "instrument(s) of state power," he is eternally on the defensive: "How could he be the only one who is right about the Foster death?" Here, too, it is interesting to note that another thing missing from

Ruddy's Foster story is any mention of these alleged trips to Switzerland. Is he afraid, once again, that we might make

"undue inferences"? The reader might also like to know that when Evans-Pritchard wrote his article about the mysterious whirlwind trips to Switzerland by Foster, Ruddy told me that Evans-Pritchard was being fed disinformation and that I should not believe him. Now, in retrospect, what seems more likely is that Ruddy, like the people at the Post, did not want anybody to see the link between the Foster death and the dirty money that was going into secret Swiss accounts.

What About Drugs?

Linking the Post's reticence about Bill Clinton's scandals and Ruddy's reticence about both of them is the governmentimplicated illegal drug business. The following quote is from the introduction to the 1994 paperback edition of the 1992 book Evil Money: The Inside Story of Money Laundering & Corruption in Government, Banks & Business by the widelyrespected non- partisan Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld:

Evil Money was first published in the summer of 1992. My objective was to call attention to the threat illegal money, especially drug money, presents to the democratic institutions and free markets. Since Bill Clinton was inaugurated as

President in 1993, the threat to the United States seems to have worsened. It is worse because the new president's financial, political, and personal ethics, as well as his associations, reflect all of the alarming trends described in Evil Money. It appears that in the group around the president willful blindness was common, and evil money bought political power.

Ruddy's narrative touches on drugs only once when he notes that the "presidential assistant in charge of certain security matters," Patsy Thomasson, was among those who went through Foster's office on the fateful night. "Before coming to

Washington," says Ruddy, "Thomasson had been the chief operating officer of a Little Rock bond house while its owner,

Dan Lasater, was serving jail time for cocaine distribution. Thomasson's name had even turned up in one Drug Enforcement

Administration document detailing a passenger manifest of persons flying with Lasater from Latin America."

What's missing here is any mention of Lasater's great closeness to Clinton, the fact that Lasater had employed Bill's halfbrother, Roger Clinton, Jr., also a convicted drug felon, the fact that Lasater was a major contributor to Bill's campaigns, and that, as Ehrenfeld notes, "...even after being implicated in drug dealing at Roger Clinton's trial Lasater was awarded $664.8 million in Arkansas state bond contracts, making $1.7 million for himself." Most importantly, what's missing is the famous line, "That's Lasater's deal," reported by R. Emmett Tyrrell in his book, Boy Clinton, to have been said by Governor Bill page 51


Clinton to security aide and state trooper L.D. Brown to dismiss the importance of a shipment of cocaine that Brown told him he had discovered on one of those return flights from supplying arms to the Nicaraguan resistance. Brown, according to

Tyrrell, had been urged by Clinton to join the CIA, which he had done, and it was under their employ that he made his cocaine discovery.

Now one might say that Ruddy would have been getting off the track of the Foster case had he delved into these matters, but they would have certainly provided useful perspective, at least in a footnote. And what can we say about the Jerry Parks connection, which he also leaves out? Parks was a private investigator who had handled security in Little Rock for the

Clinton- Gore campaign in 1992. He was murdered gangland style on September 26, 1993. After the murder, which has not been solved, his house was ransacked and, according to his widow, Jane, there were "as many as eight federal agents in her house at one time--flashing FBI, Secret Service, IRS, and curiously, CIA credentials--not to mentions visits by Little Rock police officers. A computer was purged by an expert, files went missing and 130 tapes of telephone conversations were confiscated."

The quote is from a July 15, 1996, article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Sunday Telegraph of London entitled "Foster

`hired detective to spy on Clinton'." In the article, Jane Parks alleges that Vince Foster hired her husband around 1985 for a number of sensitive assignments. One was spying on Bill Clinton at the instigation of Foster's friend and Rose Law Firm partner Hillary Clinton. Another involved a couple of mysterious trips to Mena during the 1992 campaign. Mrs. Parks said that Foster had telephoned her husband over a hundred times at their home outside Little Rock. Parks had Clinton surveillance files stolen from his home in a burglary in July 1993, about the time of Foster's death. "`That's when Jerry got paranoid,' said Mrs. Parks, `He believed that Foster had been murdered and he was afraid that he'd be next'." And he was right.

Look in the index of Ruddy's book for the name "Jerry Parks" and you draw a blank. Would the excuse be that the Evans-

Pritchard article came too late, what with the manuscript having been essentially put to bed by the mid-summer of 1996 as

Ruddy told Hugh Turley, or would it be that it might cause the reader to draw "undue inferences," or would he echo the key

Washington Post/Newsweek Foster-case reporter, Michael Isikoff, who refused to report on the Knowlton lawsuit against the

FBI for harassment because, "It raises more questions than it answers"?

Isikoff, it should be noted, also escapes mention by Ruddy as does the important Little Rock brokerage firm owner, Jackson

Stephens. Ruddy does tell us that Robert Fiske was the lawyer for Clark Clifford in a case related to Clifford's work for the

Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), the Pakistan-based biggest customer- swindling, drug-money- laundering criminal enterprise in history, an enterprise with numerous alleged connections to the CIA. What he does not tell us, as we learn from this article back on pp 24-25, is that Stephens was instrumental in getting BCCI involved in banking in the United States, he was the biggest single client of the Rose Law Firm, and that Foster was in charge of his account.

Where he has not completely omitted vital information, Ruddy has done a brief and misleading bump-and-run seemingly designed to close off further inquiry, especially when the further-inquiry road ends at the destination of illegal drugs and wholesale government and systemic corruption. Consider the following sentence: "Foster, as noted earlier, was working on much more than the Whitewater tax papers; he had also supervised all of their personal matters, including the creation of blind trusts for their assets."

From reading this, one would get the impression that the blind trusts had been finalized. In fact, Ruddy here sounds a lot like

Robert Fiske who, in a footnote on page 20 of his report says, "In addition to completing tax returns on Whitewater, Foster also participated in creating a blind trust for the Clintons, completing their personal 1992 income tax returns, and fulfilling their financial disclosure requirements. There is no evidence that these matters were a contributing cause of Foster's distress."

What neither author tells us is that Foster was already six months late in completing the blind trust requirement. There must have been something about that assignment that was tripping him up. Might it have had something to do with drug money?

Left by Ruddy with the impression that Foster had smoothly completed his assigned task, we make no such "undue inference."

Anyone who wants to see best how Ruddy appears to be bent on keeping the flames from the Foster-case corruption from spreading should note his treatment of the Tommy Burkett case and contrast it with the discussion of the case on pp. 38-39 page 52

WACKENHUT CORPORATION of this article. Ruddy consigns it to an appendix entitled "Case Histories of Dr. James Beyer," where it plays second fiddle to the botched autopsy of Timothy Easley, a case that is, indeed, tragic but apparently has no larger political significance.

Starting out with his vague description of Tommy as "another college-aged Virginia man" rather than describing him as the

21-year-old Marymount University student who had been induced into doing undercover drug work for the DEA that he was,

Ruddy only gives us enough details of the case and of the autopsy for us to conclude that the main issue is Beyer's incompetence. He does not mention that the case has most recently been covered up by the FBI-- just as they have done with the Kevin Ives-Don Henry drug-related murders in Arkansas--and that it has been covered up from day one by the

Washington Post and the major media in the Washington area. Ruddy certainly cannot claim ignorance for his omissions. He has read my paper, he has written one article on the FBI conclusions on the Burkett and Arkansas cases, and he was present in the Burkett living room when, in response to a question from me, the parents detailed their long meetings with the

Washington Post Magazine reporter who later, like the newspaper overall, wrote nothing.

Minimize, Misdirect, and Contain

But the larger purpose of minimizing, misdirecting, and containing is well served by keeping this messy information out of the book. An agency that would cover up a drug-related double homicide in Arkansas and a drug-related homicide in suburban Washington, might also cover up another drug-related homicide in Washington's environs. That's the sort of inference that it appears neither he nor William Sessions would want the reader making. He has told us that the FBI was kept out of the investigation, which is one more reason why it is very inconvenient for him that we should know that it is precisely the FBI that the witness Patrick Knowlton is suing for harassment.

We are led to believe that it was the firing of Director Sessions that enabled the Clinton administration to keep the FBI out.

Nowhere is it even hinted that Sessions' firing had been set in motion by Clinton's predecessor, George Bush, most likely because of the independence that Sessions had shown over the BNL-Iraqgate matter and who knows what else. Vice-

Presidential candidate Al Gore in particular had made a big issue of that scandal involving the illegal financing and shipment of arms to Saddam Hussein's government, but as soon as Clinton was in he swept it under the rug. So it was not so much the

FBI that was kept out as it was a William Sessions that Clinton, or his handlers, did not trust any more than George Bush did.

Ruddy, to his credit, has a very good section on the manipulation of witnesses by the FBI agents working for Robert Fiske and how they twisted around their statements or changed them when transferring them from the handwritten to the typed form. But then he undoes much of the good by ludicrously appearing to side with Susan Thomases when her story about

Foster's sad last tale to her of a failing marriage contradicted her earlier FBI statement. In that statement she is reported to have said she last saw him, not in her room, but at lunch with a group of people, and he seemed perfectly okay to her. That is one statement I would seriously doubt the FBI doctored.

Ruddy is almost as unintentionally humorous with the first of his rebuttal statements to a list of reasons (in italics) that have been offered as to why he should not pursue the case:

The Foster case is the Kennedy assassination redux. While both (sic) share similarities--such as the fact that the first investigations into their deaths were not considered thorough--there are major differences. To begin with, there is a tremendous amount of forensic, circumstantial, and physical evidence that contradicts the official ruling on Foster's death, not to mention the mountain of evidence that contradicts the official account of what happened in its aftermath. And, of course, much more is known about Foster's death than with Kennedy's, where the facts trickled out over years.

The "of course" in that last sentence is particularly laughable. I would call the attention of Ruddy and others who were not yet born when President John Kennedy was killed, to just one book. That is Accessories after the Fact, The Warren

Commission, The Authorities, and The Report, by Sylvia Meagher. Like Ruddy's book, it came out four years after the crime, and like Ruddy's book, but contrary to his assertion here, it marshals a mountain of evidence that contradicts the official ruling. The Warren Commission published 26 volumes of raw evidence, and Meagher mastered them not unlike

Hugh Sprunt has mastered the two Senate volumes on Foster, and, like Sprunt, she showed us that the conclusions were simply not supported by the government's own evidence.

Turning to Meagher's index for "FBI" one will find many pages under "alleged intimidation of witnesses" and more pages under "alleged misreporting." What Ruddy has discovered in the Foster case is not, as he would have us believe, some kind page 53

WACKENHUT CORPORATION of aberration. The FBI has practiced these techniques so long that they have developed them almost into an art form. One of the planks in the platform of the organization that Tommy Burkett's parents have formed, Parents Against Corruption and

Coverup, calls for legislation that requires all investigating police to show witnesses their recorded statements. They would not be official until signed by the witness. This, they regard, as an elementary first step for the creation of a more just system of justice.

Even that reform probably would not have prevented the bit of FBI trickery that was performed on Lisa Foster, which I relate back on page 26. The agents obviously showed her a silver gun and told her that it was the one found on her husband at Fort Marcy Park. She confirmed that it did, indeed, resemble one that the family had brought up from Arkansas with them, and with that "confirmation" Robert Fiske and James Stewart have led us to believe that she identified the "death weapon" as theirs. Had she been shown her statement she could have truthfully said, "Yes, that's what I said." What she did not know at the time was that the gun that was finally found in Vince's hand was thoroughly and unmistakably black.

It is yet to be proved that the FBI was behind the harassment of Patrick Knowlton, though it is difficult to imagine who else could call up so much manpower and who else knew where he was going to be and that he had been summoned to testify before a grand jury, but we know almost certainly that the FBI, no doubt intentionally, showed Lisa Foster the wrong gun to identify. It is an unpardonable act for an investigator. And Christopher Ruddy, in what is supposed to be the definitive book on the Foster case, tells us not one word about it.

Perverse Perspective on FBI

For all of the FBI misdeeds in the Foster case that Ruddy recounts, he ultimately pulls his punches. The lion's share of the blame for the cover-up, starting with what he says is their misidentification of the body site, he lays in the lap of the U. S.

Park Police. "Why has no one held them accountable," he quite properly asks. To make sure that we don't miss the point that they bear primary responsibility, along with the bungling autopsy doctor James Beyer, he has an appendix for them, too, with some Park Police case history horror stories. Imagine what he could have done with a similar appendix on the FBI.

Right off the bat he could have reminded us of their recent cover-up of the Burkett and the Ives-Henry cases. He could have referred to a case just recently in the news, their framing of the Black Panther, Geronimo Pratt, for murder, causing him to spend a substantial part of his life in prison. He could have gone back a few years and told us about the sending of tapes to

Martin Luther King, Jr. that purported to record his illicit sexual liaisons, along with the suggestion that he commit suicide.

And, by all means, he would have to include the FBI shooting of Vicki Weaver as she held her infant in her arms at Ruby

Ridge, Idaho, and the immolation of the Branch Davidians by the FBI at Waco. Instead, as though to reassure us that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, he has his "protest book" endorsed by the man who was in charge of the FBI, albeit as something of a Bush-created lame duck, when they perpetrated the Ruby Ridge and Waco outrages.

Republicans off the Hook

Nowhere is his misdirection and containment more obvious than in his treatment of the behavior of the major media and of the leaders of our only "opposition" party, the Republicans.

This is from page 247:

Part of the problem has been the absolute refusal of the establishment media to report on this case. The Foster matter testifies, on the one hand, to the power of the American media to set the nation's public agenda and, on the other, to the way in which policymakers, Congress, and even independent counsels set their course based on the media's agenda.

The refusal of the media to report on the Foster case is not the biggest problem, rather it is their active and aggressive obstruction of justice and promotion of the official "suicide" line, as we amply show in this work. Ruddy almost acknowledges as much with his final line suggesting that they have some sort of agenda that is different from merely reporting the news. But because he refuses to let us have a glimpse of any larger picture and leaves us eternally peeping in through the keyhole we are left clueless as to what that agenda might be. His method also renders him powerless to address the sixth and last of the common objections he says have been raised to his pursuing the case, "The Republicans themselves agreed that Foster committed suicide." page 54


Ruddy's attempt at a response begins on the bottom of page 252 and extends to the middle of page 254, and he is as feckless here as a fish flopping around on a pier. One can read it over and over and never figure out exactly what his point is. The passage absolutely defies brief summary. The best I can come up with is that the only Republican leader who has really thoroughly committed himself to the suicide conclusion is former ranking minority member of the House Government

Operations Committee, William Clinger of Pennsylvania. This is the same William Clinger who was trotted out on both Ted

Koppel's Nightline and Mike Wallace's episode of 60 Minutes to show that, indeed, the Republicans were on board with the official line. Others such as Senate Banking Committee Chairman Alfonse D'Amato of New York and House Speaker Newt

Gingrich of Georgia have made public statements indicating that they don't quite believe the official story. Unfortunately, for some strange reason they have failed to act on their beliefs.

But why haven't they done anything, now that they control both houses of the Congress? The suggestion that they have done nothing even though they don't swallow the official story makes it all the worse for them. It means that they, too, are a conscious part of the cover-up. We needn't merely just suggest it, though. Ruddy lets the Republican who obviously is, indeed, a conscious part of the cover-up completely off the hook. That is the man who unexpectedly ascended into the chairmanship of the former Government Operations, now named Government Reform and Oversight Committee, when the

Republicans won a majority in 1994, and Clinger got out of the line of fire by retiring. When he had little power he demonstrated with strong speeches on the House floor that he knew the case well and that he didn't buy the government's story for a minute. His, like Ruddy's among U.S. journalists, was a lonesome and seemingly courageous voice in the United

States Congress. He is a Representative from Indiana and his name is Dan Burton. As committee chairman, he has made a lot of noise about investigating lesser Clinton administration scandals, but this one, he has now told us, just as he has told the

Burkett parents about their case, he is simply going to let lie.

What could possibly make the man behave this way? What could make him now earn for himself the most deserving title of arch-villain of America's Dreyfus Affair? He has neither the excuse of ignorance nor of impotence. He is the Republican who knew, but did not do. Christopher Ruddy, staying away from all the pressure points where we might get something accomplished, spares the man the questions and the dubious title. Rep. Burton is mentioned only once in passing on page 54, hearing out the "confidential witness" before becoming chairman.

Murder Mystery

How crude, audacious, and reckless,

Right under the President's seal,

What was a living Vincent Foster

Such a threat to reveal?

In light of the people they've had to suborn

And investigations to rig,

It must have been something truly ugly,

And something terribly big.

So, in the final analysis, America's Dreyfus Affair is like the original in that it involves a frightful abuse of power by those in the executive branch and much of the ruling establishment. It also involves the perpetuation of a gigantic lie with such techniques as doctored evidence, intimidation, and forgery. But with the exception of the pervasive anti-Semitism in French society that it brought to the surface, the scandal of a hundred years ago lacked the larger ramifications of this one. It did not have the apparent links to a web of seemingly endless and much larger other scandals. It did not have the power to make what were thought to be stalwart members of the opposition turn on a dime and join the cover-up camp. It did not turn the opposing party into a quivering mass of Jell-O. And it did not require layer upon layer of cover-up. We are a much bigger and more important country in the world than France, and so, too, is our scandal.

David Martin

October 5, 1997

Notes on the Net page 55


In addition to the lawsuit by Patrick Knowlton, the chairmanship of the House Government Reform and Oversight

Committee by a one-time "Dreyfusard, " and the continued efforts of the parents of Tommy Burkett, another pressure point on the Foster case is represented by the growing popularity of the Internet. Previously, I discussed the efficiency with which news group participants are able to sort out wheat from chaff and therefore can not only learn a lot of things that they never would from the regular print and airwave media, but also can have more confidence in its veracity. Now I would like to discuss briefly the phenomena of web sites and links.

Never has there been a more efficient way to garner information rapidly. Often it is very difficult to obtain information.

Noting the dearth of serious articles on the Foster case in magazines, the reader can imagine that the present article would have great difficulty finding a publisher. But it was quickly accepted by Dr. J. Orlin Grabbe for his extremely provocative home page. The site is at http://www.aci.net/kalliste/. On page 46 of his book, Chris Ruddy speaks of the blood that gushed from Pennsylvania government official Bud Dwyer when he committed suicide with a revolver on television in 1987. Photos of that scene and much else can be seen at the web site of Foster researcher Michael Rivero at http://www.accessone.com/~rivero/. Rivero also has a copy of the recently discovered neck-wound document of Dr. Haut.

The question of the FBI having shown Lisa Foster the wrong gun is developed by Foster researcher and lawyer Allan J.

Favish at http://members.aol.com/AllanF8702/page1.htm. The major details of the Patrick Knowlton lawsuit against the FBI can be found at the web site of his lawyer, John Clarke at http://www.mnsinc.com/lawofcjc/. Also discussed in this article is

Sam Smith's Progressive Review. It is at http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/. Hugh Sprunt's information, along with much else, can be found on the Clinton Impeachment Web at http://www.c-I-w.com/. It also has many useful links to other sites as does CGBG's home page at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7614/index.html. The mother of all archive sites with political links is kept in Sweden by Marcus Wendel. He calls it the Seventh Seal. It is at http://www.grs.se/marcus/seven/. Another great Foster information site is kept by Brian Thomas at http://users.aol.com/beachbt/index.html.

Christopher Ruddy's articles appear at http://ruddynews.com and http://tribune-review.com/ruddy/. We have given previously the web sites of the Telegraph of London (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) and Parents Against Corruption and

Coverup (Burkett case and others) before, but here goes again. The former is http://www.telegraph.co.uk and the latter is at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. At the Telegraph site after the obligatory registration go to the Archive and search the subject "Vincent Foster," or whatever you like, to your heart's content.

Against the backdrop of this cornucopia of knowledge, Ruddy, ever the American print journalist, leaves us mainly with this impression of the Internet:

Some of the ideas swirling around the country, courtesy of the Internet, dove into the deep end of the bizarre: Foster was actually a Mossad agent killed by the CIA; Foster was assassinated by an Austrian hit squad; Foster was about to blow the whistle on a government piracy of an intelligence gathering software: and so on. (p.16)

The last of these three is hardly bizarre, having to do with the Systematics Corporation of Little Rock, which came into possession of the PROMIS software that originated with the Inslaw Corporation. Go to the Internet search engine of search engines at http://www.dogpile.com and see what you turn up on those subjects, or check out either http://www.dejanews.com or http://www.reference.com to see what might have been said about them on a news group. As for the other two theories, which are indeed bizarre in my estimation, they might have been discussed on the Net but I have not seen them. Notice that there is no mention here of speculation about the possible connection of the death to the illicit drug business. That has, indeed, been discussed extensively, but it certainly looks as though that is something Christopher Ruddy would rather we not talk about.AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 5

Now, finally, poor Vincent Foster has officially been laid to rest. He was a troubled, over-worked man. His death was investigated over and over again not because there was any real evidence to suggest it was anything other than a suicide but because a significant piece of the political-journalistic establishment virtually insisted it had to be something else. The latest investigation says Foster was deeply depressed. If you read between the lines it says something else as well: A piece of

Washington has gone mad.

-- Richard Cohen, The Washington Post page 56


All of this led the team of experts--in fact leads anyone--to the inescapable conclusion that Vincent Foster was not murdered elsewhere and moved to Fort Marcy Park wrapped in a carpet or anything else. In the depths of despair, he took a gun from his home, went to the park and shot himself in the head.

-- editorial, The Washington Times

I have come to believe that although it is extremely important to determine what happened to Mr. Foster, this case is even more important for what it is telling us about the decay of our basic institutions, especially our "free" press which has come increasingly to resemble a propaganda organ more appropriate to a police state than to a democratic society.

--Edward Zehr, The Washington Weekly (available only online)

I don't want us to become a nation, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union, where the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state.

--Dr. Larry Jones, from his funeral oration for Glenn Wilburn

America's Dreyfus Affair, Part Three

The script said that this was to be the end of it. Four years and eighty-two days after the body of Deputy White House

Counsel Vincent Foster had been found in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, the report of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was released to the public by the three- judge panel that had appointed him. The Congress, first one controlled by the Democrats and then one controlled in both houses by the Republicans, had shown no inclination to question anything that the

Independent Counsel might conclude, and, of course, the press, as we have amply demonstrated, had been an active and enthusiastic purveyor of the suicide line from the very beginning, almost to the point of making one wonder if the press itself might have had something to do with the death. Even the one American journalist actively writing and reporting critically on the "investigation," inflated by Richard Cohen into a "significant piece of the political- journalistic establishment," had produced a book that, while it exposed many of the contradictions in the case, left the reader with nowhere to turn even to guess about ultimate blame or to continue the pursuit of justice.

The writers of the script had reckoned without those Americans outside the political- journalistic establishment, most notably the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer John Clarke.

How does one anticipate that someone is going to happen along in the parking lot at Fort Marcy an hour and a quarter before the discovery of Foster's body, that he will see a car with Arkansas tags that is of a different color and several years older than Foster's car, that he will also see a menacing looking man who appears to be acting as a lookout, and that all this will in due time be brought to light in a very messy fashion? What can one make of the fact that upon learning that a high-ranking

White House official had at that very moment been lying dead some 700 feet away, the witness called the Park Police with his information but was ignored? Then he would be called in by FBI investigators working for Special Prosecutor Robert

Fiske on April 15 of the next year and again on May 11. Because he had felt threatened by the "lookout," who had stared at him intently, he had been more observant than usual, and he was a person who prided himself in his powers of observation.

The efforts of the FBI agents to persuade, cajole, convince, trick him into saying that he might have been mistaken about the color and the age of the car he saw during the two long sessions only managed to increase his indignation, and his curiosity.

Who could have predicted that the path of such a plain, forthright American as Patrick Knowlton would lead through such sinister goings-on?

Still, the chances looked good that the Knowlton annoyance to the FBI was over at this point. They had told him not to talk to the press, and he had dutifully avoided taking his very interesting story to anyone in the media, which, in retrospect, looks like a wise move on his part. What would have been his chances of approaching a trustworthy media representative? But his live-and-let-live peaceful existence ended forever a year and a half later. On October 13, 1995, the reporter Ambrose Evans-

Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London tracked him down and showed him his testimony as recorded by the FBI. Two false transcriptions of his statement immediately stood out. One was that he would not be able to identify the man in the parking lot who gave him the menacing stare. Knowlton had said, to the contrary, that he remembered the man's appearance page 57

WACKENHUT CORPORATION so well that he could pick him out of a lineup. The other was his description of the Arkansas car he saw as a 1988-1990

Honda, which would have made it conveniently consistent with Foster's car. This could not be true because, not only did

Knowlton remember the Honda he saw as appearing older, but the rust-brown color he picked out from the panels shown him by the FBI was available on Hondas only for the model years 1983 and 1984. Unable to get Knowlton to change his story, the FBI had changed it for him.

On October 22 Evans-Pritchard's article appeared in the London newspaper. In the article not only were the false reports of the FBI noted, but a police-type drawing of the menacing- looking man was published to highlight the article. Note was also made of the fact that Knowlton had not been called before Starr's grand jury, which was meeting at that very moment in

Washington.

Starr's hand had been called. Now the grand jury had to hear Knowlton's testimony, so he was duly subpoenaed two days after the Sunday Telegraph hit the newsstands in this country. The disinterested observer can only conclude that there was great fear in the government camp over how Knowlton and his story might come across to the grand jury because of the shocking things that happened next. On the very evening of the day in which Knowlton received his subpoena, and the next day as well, he and his girlfriend were treated to an extraordinary campaign of intimidation and harassment by a series of men, 25 or more stern, mostly young, athletic-looking men, on the streets of Northwest Washington, DC. Meeting him on the sidewalk or coming up from behind, one after the other would fix him with a hard, cold stare. At one point, the girlfriend was on the verge of tears. "I have never witnessed anything like this before or since. It was intentional, coordinated, intimidating, and extremely unnerving," she has said in a sworn affidavit.

Some of the continuing harassment was witnessed the next evening by reporter Christopher Ruddy of the Pittsburgh

Tribune-Review, and he duly reported it as did Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in his London paper, but this apparent intimidation attempt of an important witness in the case of the highest ranking government official to die by gunshot since President John

F. Kennedy remained completely unnewsworthy to the rest of the country, and it was not reported.

The message had been well conveyed that there would be unpleasant consequences for Mr. Knowlton should he insist on having seen things that did not support the official story, and as a bonus, his overall credibility before the grand jury would likely be undermined. "Tell us about your alleged harassment," was, in fact, how the prosecutor for Starr's team brought it up, in the midst of questioning that seemed primarily aimed at impugning his motives and painting him as a pervert.

The tactic, in a very limited and short-term sense, would seem to have been a success. Knowlton's inconvenient recollections were merely glossed over in Starr's official record. Steered that way by the prosecution, the grand jury apparently brushed

Knowlton off as not the responsible citizen who insisted on doing the right thing, but as a passing kook who might be out to capitalize on a few minutes of fame. If reasons of state required that this one person had to be psychologically roughed up a bit and his reputation damaged, so be it.

But in a larger sense, the strategy was a colossal failure. It backfired. Remember the words of Jean-Denis Bredin, " But the

Dreyfus Affair...is not fixed in space and time. The combat of the individual against society, truth against deception, is specific neither to France nor to the end of the nineteenth century." The campaign to intimidate and discredit Patrick

Knowlton did not work where it mattered the most; it did not work on this most important individual. It did not work on

Patrick Knowlton. He did not change; no, he did not waver from his story. "I saw what I saw," he told his interrogators over and over, as he has told anyone who would listen ever since. The record shows that at least four other early witnesses remembered the Japanese car they saw in the Fort Marcy lot as brown, but they have not been so unshakeable as Knowlton.

Where Robert Fiske had reported that the brown Honda with Arkansas tags did not, according to the unnamed Knowlton, look like the pictures of the Foster car he was shown, and had left it at that, Kenneth Starr went Fiske one better, merely stating that Knowlton recalled seeing a "rust brown colored car with Arkansas license plates," leaving readers with the unambiguous impression that it was Foster's car he saw. One has to be very sharp to remember that three pages before Starr had written, "On the morning of Tuesday, July 20, 1993, six months into the Clinton Administration, Mr. Foster drove his gray Honda Accord to the White House from the house in Georgetown where he and his family were living." (emphasis obviously supplied)

Opening for the Judiciary page 58


So much for the failed intimidation. So the witness would not change his story. That damage could be controlled with verbal sleight of hand, but the failed discrediting was another matter. It simply made Knowlton mad enough to sue, and, as luck would have it, he had a young neighbor and acquaintance who also happened to be a very good and very courageous lawyer,

John Clarke. Clarke brought suit for Knowlton under 42 U.S.C. 1985 (2), "Obstructing justice; intimidating party, witness, or juror."

A horrible miscalculation had been made. As much spin had to be applied to Knowlton's story as would have been the case had no pressure been put on him, and now another unique adversary in the person of the lawyer Clarke had been acquired, and the judicial branch had been brought into the case in a very active way. The authorities, and with them the media, would now have to work much harder than before to keep the lid on the case. The significance of the involvement of the courts, too, can hardly be understated, and here another reminder of the relevance of the Dreyfus Affair is in order.

We have been told many times by defenders of the government of all the Foster death investigations that have been done. In reality, there have been three: The Park Police investigation, the Fiske investigation, and the Starr investigation. The Senate

Banking Committee in the summer of 1994 had no mandate to rule on the nature of Foster's death, and they did not do so.

Their half day of public hearings were no more than perfunctory. The office of Rep. William Clinger did little more than go over the Fiske Report and endorse it. A major contribution of the lawyer Clarke has been his demonstration of the heavy involvement of the FBI in the investigation of the Park Police, and we have seen that on August 10, 1993, when the press conference was held to first announce the official suicide conclusion, the government spokesmen were from the Park Police, the Justice Department, and the FBI. Another contribution of Clarke is his observation that the whole idea of an independent counsel is subverted when that counsel, appointed by judges so as to appear independent of the law enforcement arm of the executive branch, turns around and uses FBI agents for his investigation. The FBI is part of the Justice Department. Both its director and the Attorney General are appointed by the President. Kenneth Starr made matters worse by using the same FBI agents that the Janet Reno-appointed Fiske had used. The three investigations had been, if effect, all in-house investigations, and that house was the FBI.

In the Dreyfus Affair, there were not just three investigations, there were three formal trials. First, there was the secret trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The verdict was guilty. Then there was the trial of the actual traitor, Major Ferdinand Walsin-

Esterhazy. The verdict was innocent. It was that travesty of justice that prompted the famous J'Accuse letter of Emile Zola.

Then, after the uncovering of the forgery of the Panizzardi telegram, Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island for another trial. Amazingly, and this time to widespread consternation, he was found guilty again, but with extenuating circumstances and he was released from prison. The constant factor throughout was that the trials were conducted by the

French Army. Eventually, after a change of government, the Court of Cassation, the French equivalent to our Supreme

Court, would become involved, and Dreyfus would be exonerated completely.

Now, with the Knowlton lawsuit, America's judicial branch had become involved in the Foster mess. On November 12,

1996, Clarke and Knowlton held a Washington, DC news conference in front of the U.S. District Court building announcing the unsealing of their suit. All the major print and broadcast media were there, but what we had was a virtual replay of the aftermath of the announcement of the forgery finding by the three handwriting experts. Only the Washington Times reported on the press conference, and they did it with a short, skeptical, inaccurate and incomplete story on an inside page, with no follow-up. Particularly conspicuous by his absence from the event this time, in contrast to the handwriting conference which he actually orchestrated, was the reporter Christopher Ruddy. The news suppression was getting worse.

The Great Suppression of `97

The unanimous press approval of the thin, flawed Fiske Report; the ignoring of the finding of forgery by the three handwriting experts; and the press neglect of the Knowlton harassment and resulting lawsuit were but dress rehearsals for the most revealing and brazen act by America's press yet. It ought to be remembered as the "Great Suppression of `97." That is the complete silence of the news media about the fact that the three-judge panel that appointed Kenneth Starr included with the report of the special counsel (that tellingly lacked anyone's name upon it) twenty pages of comments by Knowlton's lawyer, John Clarke, that completely undermined the conclusion of suicide in Fort Marcy Park.

This was stupendous news, not just for what was in the Clarke letter, but that the three federal judges, David B. Sentelle,

John C. Butzner, and Peter T. Fay had seen fit to include all twenty pages with the report. They had no real obligation to do so. The submission of the letter in the first place was not technically related to the fact that Knowlton had filed suit against page 59

WACKENHUT CORPORATION many of the people involved in the investigation. His opening came from the fact that the law that created the independent counsel permitted, in the interests of fairness, comments by any persons "named" in the report of the independent counsel.

The judges might have, on firm legal grounds, ruled Knowlton out because he is not actually named in the report. He is identified simply as "C2."

Had the judges adhered most closely to the letter and the spirit of the law and to what, in other circumstances, would seem to be simple common sense, they would have allowed Knowlton to comment only upon those things that directly relate to

Knowlton; that is, just on what the report has to say about the actions and words of C2, the only parts of the report that he was allowed to see before the public release date of October 10. In fact, the 20 pages go far beyond that. They are a condensation of the case against suicide in Fort Marcy Park, presented a good deal more convincingly than Starr's 114-page affirmative case.

How far afield the Knowlton/Clarke submission wandered from matters directly relating to Knowlton is seen by looking at their five attached exhibits which together make six main points that relate to the Foster death, as opposed to the Knowlton harassment:

1. The widow, Lisa Foster, could not identify as Vince's the black gun found in Vince's hand shown to her initially by the

Park Police. She did later make a tentative positive identification of a gun shown to her by the FBI, but they, from every indication, showed her a silver gun misrepresented as the gun that had been found in Foster's hand.

2. According to the autopsy Foster had eaten a meal 2 to 3 hours before his death, and witnesses had seen him finish his lunch no later than 1 p.m. Emergency workers examining the body at around 6:10 p.m. estimated he had been dead for between 2 and 4 hours. These facts together reinforce the conclusion that Foster died between 2:10 and 4:10 p.m. Knowlton arrived at the park at 4:30 p.m. In all likelihood Foster was already dead by that time.

3. Knowlton is absolutely certain the car with the Arkansas tags he saw was brown and of an older model than Foster's car.

His recollection as to the color, age, and location of the car in the lot is supported by the initial recorded testimony of other early witnesses.

4. The neck wound that Robert Fiske and the autopsy doctor, James Beyer, insist did not exist is verified by the report of the

Virginia Medical Examiner, Donald Haut, discovered in the National Archives after Starr completed his report and turned it over to the judges.

5. Many crime scene photographs have disappeared.

6. Autopsy X-rays that were apparently taken, contrary to the insistence of Dr. Beyer, have also disappeared.

Of the six items, only nos. 2 and 3 have any relation at all to the testimony of Patrick Knowlton. The judges, by allowing in the entire 20-page submission were showing in the only way they could their great displeasure with the work of Starr. They were also sending a message to the federal judge with whom Knowlton had filed his suit. The panel, you see, had seen not just the twenty pages of comments. Clarke had shared with them the entire suit in a successful rebuff of Starr's effort to have the Knowlton/Clarke letter excluded. What better way could they demonstrate their belief that the suit had merit than by very nearly bending the law to allow onto the official record the Knowlton/Clarke Addendum?

Now there has developed a popular notion, encouraged in no small part by the opinion molders in the mainstream press, that those who treat various official pronouncements with skepticism are simply "anti- government." Such people may be contrasted with the media people themselves who show us how "responsible" they are by only giving us "the facts," as long as those facts bear an officially-approved label. But here we have a case of one official government body, the three-judge federal panel, administering a slap in the face to another official government body, the Office of the Independent Counsel.

Certainly citizen critics who applaud the action of the judges can hardly be called "anti-government," nor can the nation's press, who unanimously covered up the fact of the judges' inclusion of the Knowlton/Clarke Addendum, be called anything that resembles "responsible." The adjective that comes to my mind is "corrupt." page 60


The very fact that the press would go to such an extreme as to ignore completely the existence of the Knowlton/Clarke

Addendum in itself tells us more than anything that is in either the main body of the report or the addendum. Most telling is that even those press figures who found the Starr Report lacking neglected to tell us about the addendum in their initial reaction. These included Christopher Ruddy in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Sam Smith in his Progressive Review, and

Phillip Weiss in the New York Observer. Curiously, the "liberal" Smith based all of his objections to the findings of the Starr

Report upon the argument put forward by the "conservative" Ruddy, thereby building him up and making him look better.

The suppression also reached far beyond the Washington-New York-Los Angeles nodes of power. As luck would have it, the tireless Foster researcher, Hugh Turley, was in his native St. Paul, Minnesota on the day the Starr Report was released.

He went down to the offices of the "conservative" St. Paul Pioneer Press and obtained an audience with national editor,

Martha Malan. At that time he laid in her lap the scoop of the inclusion of the Knowton/Clarke Addendum and even gave her a copy of the addendum, which he had helped prepare, and a copy of the entire Knowlton suit against the FBI. There in her building's lobby, Turley explained to Malan the significance of everything he was giving her. The next day the Pioneer Press carried only the Knight-Ridder wire service article that extolled the virtues of Starr's exhaustive investigation that had left no stone unturned in its fair-minded quest to solve the mystery of the death of Vincent Foster.

This emblematic act by Ms. Malan and her newspaper prompted one Internet contributor, P.J. Gladnick, to coin the term

"malanize," which he would define as "suppression of the news by reporting it incompletely." So prevalent has the practice become that one would think the expression stands a good chance to make it into the national vocabulary.

Some Internet defenders of Starr and of the press have made the argument that the addendum inclusion was really not newsworthy, that it is nothing more than gratuitous opinion that the judges had no choice but to include on account of the way the law is written. The argument has a surface plausibility, especially to those unfamiliar with the actual facts who might, amazingly enough, still have a predisposition to believe that whatever is newsworthy gets reported as a matter of course. We have shown that this argument is wholly without merit. It is interesting to note, furthermore, that it has not even been attempted by anyone in the press. To do so would require that the cat be let out of the bag about the Great Suppression.

The Embarrassment and the Experts

Starr's report is much like Fiske's in that it goes very heavy on the voice of authority, though it eschews the transparent Fiske expedient of fattening up the document with the resumes of its new collection of experts. Before we treat the question of these men and their work, a big new embarrassment to Starr in his report should be mentioned. Though the Medical

Examiner, Dr. Haut, had been trotted out by Mike Wallace to change his story and give the lie to the reporter Ruddy on 60

Minutes concerning the blood around Foster's body, as we have noted previously, his actual contemporaneous written report had been missing from the Senate documents that the independent Foster researchers had pored over and critiqued, and

Robert Fiske had made no mention of it. But for intervening developments, the following footnote on page 27 of the report would have constituted something of a coup for Starr:

Dr. Haut completed a "Report of Investigation by Medical Examiner" after the incident; the report is stamped with the date

July 30, 1993. OIC Doc. No. DC- 106A-1 to 106A-2. The report states that the cause of death was "perforating gunshot wound mouth- head" and the means of death was "38 caliber handgun." Id. It states that the manner of death was "suicide,"

Id. Dr. Haut signed the death certificate. It states that the cause of death was "perforating gunshot wound mouth - head" and that the manner of death was "suicide" by "self-inflicted gunshot wound mouth to head."

Actually, this last sentence is not wholly true. The second page of the Haut document, as we have seen, is the only place where the preposition "to" follows "mouth" and it reads "self-inflicted gunshot wound mouth to neck." Starr was apparently unaware that whoever had blotted out the "NECK" on the first page and replaced it with "HEAD" had slipped up and failed to do so on the second page, where it is easy to miss as a part of a longer narrative sentence. He ends up with a quote of the wished-for falsified version of the Haut report, not a quote of the actual one. With the whole charade having been exposed a few days after his report had passed out of his hands and into the hands of the judges, he was helpless to remove the egg from his face.

The embarrassment is compounded by the fact that the reader can turn to Exhibit 5 of the accompanying Clarke/Knowlton letter and find there a photo-copy of the crucial passage of the actual Haut report with the notation that it was discovered on

July 17, 1997 at the National Archives. Following it is an excerpt from the Senate deposition of emergency worker Richard

Arthur in which he says that he saw a bullet hole in the neck with blood coming from it. Pretty good work for guys who had page 61

WACKENHUT CORPORATION not been permitted to see the related portion of the Starr Report.

Now we return to the new stable of experts, whose aura of respectability is supposed to, almost by itself, turn the sow's ear that Starr inherited from Robert Fiske into a silk purse. They are, Brian D. Blackbourne, M.D., Medical Examiner for San

Diego County, California; Henry Lee, Ph.D., Director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory; Alan L.

Berman, Ph. D.,Executive Director of the American Association of Suicidology; and Gus R. Lesnevich, described as an

"independent handwriting expert," but acknowledged to have been formerly employed in an investigative capacity with the

U.S. Army and the U.S. Secret Service and most recently employed as a government expert in six cases in the Iran-Contra matter.

Each does what is expected of him. Lesnevich concludes that the note supposedly found in Foster's briefcase is authentic.

Lee concludes, quite cautiously, that the death is "consistent with a suicide." Blackbourne is surer, saying that Vincent Foster

"committed suicide on July 20, 1993 in Ft. Marcy Park by placing a .38 caliber revolver in his mouth and pulling the trigger." Dr. Berman, exclusively through the miracle of modern psychology, is the surest of all, saying that "to a 100% degree of medical certainty, the death of Vincent Foster was a suicide." AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 6

Backing them up we are told is a lengthy report that each has prepared, and the overall report is sprinkled with footnotes referring to the experts' reports. Unfortunately, what's missing here are the reports themselves. All we are left with beyond a restatement of the Fiske Report is mainly a description of curious new evidence that Dr. Lee, at his creative best, has somehow teased out of the official record and conveniently changed stories, thanks mainly to the FBI, which has ways with such things. As of this writing, the underlying reports had not been made public, so a truly thorough Hugh-Sprunt-style critique of this latest government effort is as yet impossible. This omission, as one has come to expect by now, went uncommented upon, and therefore uncriticized, by the press. What would one expect them to do with the reports, anyway, actually read and critically analyze them? As we have seen, the likelihood of that is rather small.

Were they so inclined there is more than enough in Starr's report upon which they might have exercised their critical skills.

We have already shown the verbal trickery by which it was made to appear that the car that Patrick Knowlton saw at Fort

Marcy Park was Foster's, which, if true, would have obviated the need for his harassment and intimidation, and the utterly dishonest representation of the Medical Examiner's Report concerning the faked-up mouth-to-head wound observation.

Internet readers or those fortunate enough to get the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in which Christopher Ruddy writes or to have caught the Accuracy in Media panel discussion on C- Span that had Ruddy, Knowlton, Clarke, Weiss, and Sprunt with

Reed Irvine moderating will also know already about the oven mitt that Dr. Lee claims was discovered in the glove compartment of Foster's car. That mitt, said Dr. Lee, had traces of lead in it such as would have rubbed off from the muzzle of the .38 revolver, which suggests to Lee that this was the medium for transportation of the revolver from Foster's home.

Not explained is why a detailed Park Police inventory of the contents of Foster's car at the park made no mention of such an oven mitt or why chief Park Police investigator had reported that there was "nothing unusual" in the glove compartment.

A critically-inclined reporter might also have looked at how Starr treats the matter of the missing X-rays. "Dr. Beyer has stated that either he did not take x-rays because the machine was not functioning properly at that time, or that if he attempted to take x-rays, they did not turn out," Starr begins. Never is it made clear which it was, though an anonymous assistant says it was the latter and Beyer, the assistant, and the "administrative manager of the Medical Examiner's Office recalled

`numerous problems' with the x-ray machine in 1993 (which, according to records, had been delivered in June,1993)." Once again, John Clarke plays the role of the spoiler. Exhibit 5 of his appended letter has the following affidavit from Reed Irvine:

"Virginia Beach, Va. I succeeded in located (sic) the technician who was responsible for installing and servicing this machine, Mr. Jesse Poor. Mr. Poor denied that there had been any trouble with the machine, which he had installed in June

1993. He checked his records and reported that the machine was installed on June 15, 1993 and that the first service call was on Oct. 29, 1993 to make an adjustment to make the pictures darker."

Since the document is now public and has been widely commented upon--outside the "mainstream" of course--Starr, unlike

Fiske, does acknowledge in a footnote that Park Police Detective James Morrissette, who attended the autopsy, wrote in his report "Dr. Byer (sic) stated that X-rays indicated that there was no evidence of bullet fragments in the head." Then Starr merely says blandly, "As explained above, however, Dr. Beyer made that statement and reached that conclusion without xrays." So, just as Dr. Beyer had mischecked that he took X-rays, Morrissette had misheard Beyer say that he took X-rays, but

Beyer was still sure there were no bullet fragments even without the X-rays. Somehow this explanation lacks persuasiveness.

The skeptic cannot help but notice how convenient it is that the autopsy conclusions about the wounds, which not only conflict with the observations of the emergency workers at the park, but are now seen to conflict with the on-site, incompletely falsified report of the Medical Examiner, are neither gainsaid by X-rays or by crime-scene photographs, a good number of which have turned up missing or are said to have been botched (The missing photographs are also documented in page 62


Clarke's information-packed Exhibit 5.). How much more forthright it would have been to clear up the confusion by simply exhuming the body and conducting another autopsy under rigidly-supervised conditions!

The "Depression" and the Forgery

Next to the telling suppression of the Knowlton/Clarke addendum, the withholding of the supporting documents, and the long delay in producing the summary report itself, the fundamental weakness of the Starr effort is demonstrated by heavy dependence on the wholly-unsupported assertion that this "Rock-of- Gibraltar," this tough court-room litigator, this responsible family man who was "always on top of things" as a lifelong friend of Vince's from Hope, Arkansas, and fellow

Davidson College graduate put it to me, was so depressed as to slink off to a hidden corner of an obscure Virginia park in the middle of a work day and blow his brains out (though, strangely, the brains had apparently not been blown out). Ruddy's failure to slay the depression dragon once and for all by failing to use the best evidence available made Starr's task here somewhat easier. What we have here is much more than the "suicidologist" Berman's "100% degree of medical certainty," too. The third paragraph of the introduction reads as follows:

The police later learned that Mr. Foster had called a family doctor for antidepressant medication the day before his death. He had told his sister four days before his death that he was depressed, and she had given him the names of three psychiatrists.

He had written in the days or weeks before his death that he "was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in

Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport."

As this writer has made clear, and the reporter Ruddy inexplicably fails to do in his book, though he had previously reviewed a draft of my work, virtually every word of this statement is unsupported by the evidence. No telephone records have ever been produced to support the claim of the drug prescription, and the doctor did not come forward when White House spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers was issuing statements saying "the family says with certainty that he had not been treated (for depression). (Washington Times, Saturday, July 24, 1993). The sister's husband, Beryl Anthony, angrily denied the story about their being consulted about psychiatrists when it was first mentioned to him (same Washington Times issue as above), but radically changed his story nine days later, and there are numerous irregularities in the story about the list of psychiatrists such as where it was found, how many names were on the list, who wrote the names, and why the handwriting of the person who wrote the first name is so different from that of whoever wrote the other two names. Ruddy notes only that the level of dosage of the antidepressant, even in the doctor's own words, was enough only for insomnia, not for depression, and that the pitiful "not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington" line was in all likelihood forged.

Ah yes, the forgery. The authenticity of the torn-up note belatedly "found" in Foster's previously emptied out and inventoried briefcase is, as we see from the passage above, essential to the depression conclusion. Starr does not even attempt an explanation as to how Foster might have torn it into 28 pieces and left no fingerprints, but he does make quite an effort to prove to us that the note was written by Foster. In so doing he illustrates why the work of the three respected handwriting experts who declared the note a forgery back on October 25, 1995, were never much of a threat to him. Here, one more time, the precedent of the Dreyfus Affair is instructive. The revelation that parts of the Panizzardi telegram were forged, the reader will recall, was not the work of handwriting experts. No judgment was required as to whether the letter strokes were characteristic of Captain Dreyfus or not. The discovery was made that the document was made up of two separate documents because the lines of the paper did not match one another throughout. For their part, the work of official "handwriting experts" was uniformly dismal throughout the Dreyfus Affair. The government was able to find such experts to assert unanimously at the Dreyfus trial that he had, indeed, written, the bordereau, the crucial list containing artillery information bound for the Germans, and at the Walsin-Esterhazy trial experts who said that the true author, Walsin-Esterhazy, had not written it. In this case, furthermore, no forgery of Dreyfus' style had even been attempted. In each case, the experts backed up their conclusions with elaborate explanations. We need to keep this history lesson in mind as we read:

Mr. Lesnevich concluded that the written text on the note "contained normal, natural and spontaneous writing variations.

These normal, natural and spontaneous writing variations could be found in the letter formations, beginning strokes, ending strokes, connecting strokes, etc." Lesnevich Report at 2. He further concluded that "examination and comparison of the questioned written text appearing on the note with the known writing on the (known) documents has revealed that the author of the known documents wrote the note." Id. (reference numbers omitted). Mr. Lesnevich prepared a thorough 51-page comparison chart "that points out and illustrates a number of the normal, natural and spontaneous writing habits that were found common between the written text appearing on the questioned note and the known handwriting of Vincent Foster found on the (submitted known) documents." Id. at 3. page 63


---

The number of examinations, the experience and expertise of the many different examiners, the variety and quantity of known-sample documents, the fact that the examinations commissioned by the OIC and Mr. Fiske's Office were conducted with original documents (as opposed to photocopies), and the unanimity of the examiners in their conclusions together lead clearly to the conclusion that Mr. Foster wrote the note.

Was there ever any doubt that Starr would be able to find his Gus Lesnevich? Does anyone really believe that we are so much better than the French were a hundred years ago? Anyone familiar with the mercenary class of "expert witnesses" in our system of jurisprudence would certainly not believe it for a minute. Notice, too, the Catch 22 in Starr's statement. His expert used originals and not photocopies like the unmentioned three others did, which makes his conclusions more believable (though he won't show us the man's "thorough 51-page comparison chart"). But no truly independent "expert" is permitted to see the original, and apparently even the photocopy got out only by accident, so the deck has been stacked in this game so that it is impossible for Starr and the government to lose.

Speaking of the ever-flexible "expert witness" breed, though Dr. Lee certainly did yeoman's work for the legal team representing O.J. Simpson, no group has demonstrated a greater readiness to please a well-heeled or powerful client than have the members of the psychology profession. It is never very hard to find one ready to defy common sense with jargon and references to the psychology literature, the modern version of the soothsayer's incantations. It is altogether fitting then that Starr should vest so much importance in the work of the "suicidologist" Berman, letting him bat last, or "cleanup," as it were, in his report. Berman does not disappoint. He dismisses the fact that the "suicidally depressed" Foster ate a hearty final meal by telling us that "there is no study in the professional literature that has examined eating behavior prior to suicide" and that "even death row inmates, knowing they are to die within a short time, eat a last meal." So much for gumption and introspection. The absence of a study--upon which we are forced to take Dr. Berman's word--is here glibly equated with the absence of the phenomenon itself, and impending execution of a psychologically normal person is equated with a bout of clinical depression so acute that it results in suicide. It must be nice to be an expert.

At this point, Starr weighs in with brand, spanking new, never before seen evidence from Dr. Watkins in Little Rock

(somewhat like the new evidence that Vince actually cried over dinner on the Friday before his death, which would have had to be at the Tidewater Inn on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a fact of which Starr does not remind us). First we had silence from Watkins. Then we had the prescription of trazadone (brand name Desyrel) for insomnia, not depression, as reported in the Fiske Report. Now, out of the blue, we are told he typed up notes on July 21 (which he inexplicably kept to himself for who knows how long) and they say this:

I talked to Vince on 7/19/93, at which time he complained of anorexia and insomnia. He had no GI (gastrointestinal) symptoms. We discussed the possibility of taking Axid or Zantac to help with any ulcer symptoms as he was under a lot of stress. He was concerned about the criticism they were getting and the long hours he was working at the White House. He did feel that he had some mild depression. I started him on Desyrel, 50 mg. He was to start with one at bedtime and move up to three....I receive word at 10:20 p.m. on 7/20/93 that he had committed suicide.

Isn't it curious that Dr. Watkins would go to the trouble to write this down the day after he heard of Foster's death and two days after he supposedly made the prescription, but apparently would not bother to tell key officials about it? We have been told on the record that he was brought into the case more than a week later when a note was found in Foster's office mentioning a return of a Foster call by Watkins. This is almost as curious as the list of psychiatrists appearing in Park Police records for the first time on July 27, though the contents of Foster's car and wallet were gone through thoroughly and inventoried on the night of July 20.

But forget about such skepticism for the moment. Let's return to the world of shrink talk, where a rock-solid, highly successful lawyer can be unrecognizably transformed to suit the client:

Dr. Berman reported that "[m]istakes, real or perceived, posed a profound threat to his self- esteem/self/worth and represented evidence for a lack of control over his environment. Feelings of unworthiness, inferiority, and guilt followed and were difficult for him to tolerate. There are signs of an intense and profound anguish, harsh self-evaluation, shame, and chronic fear. All these on top of an evident clinical depression and his separation from the comforts and security of Little

Rock. He, furthermore, faced a feared humiliation should he resign and return to Little Rock." The torn note "highlights his page 64

WACKENHUT CORPORATION preoccupation with themes of guilt, anger, and his need to protect others." (by killing himself? ed.)

If that doesn't convince you try this:

In his report, Dr. Berman first noted that "[d]escriptors used by interviewees with regard to Vincent Foster's basic personality were extraordinarily consistent in describing a controlled, private, perfectionistic character whose public persona as a man of integrity, honesty, and unimpeachable reputation was of utmost importance."

What he does not tell us is that interviewees, on the record, were also quite consistent in describing a man who seemed perfectly normal in every way, but what does such an apparently admirable "basic personality" have to do with suicide, anyway? Well, at this point we have a footnote:

Dr. Berman noted that "[r]ecent studies...have documented a significant relationship between perfectionism and both depression and suicidality, particularly when mediated by stress."

It is a real shame that the Berman Report has not been made publicly available, because there is a very high probability that what we have here is a classic case of circular reasoning:

1. Vince Foster killed himself because he was a perfectionist.

2. Perfectionists tend to kill themselves.

3. We know perfectionists tend to kill themselves because the perfectionist, Vince Foster, killed himself.

Actually, it's probably even worse than circular reasoning because Dr. Berman seems to have made a bit of a leap to make a warped Felix Ungar-type out of a man who simply exhibited high standards. The likely circular reasoning is explained by a letter that I sent to the student newspaper of Yale University on February 8, 1996, with an information copy to the psychologist whose work is the subject of the letter. It was not printed, but I did get a response from the psychologist who simply thanked me for the information. I reproduce the letter to the editor here almost in its entirety. As you read it, bear in mind as well the opening quote from Edward Zehr. It is not just the propagandistic press that concerns him, but the "decay of our basic institutions."

I might also note that while this long essay began with comparisons between current developments in the United States and those in France a century ago, comparisons to our late lamented cold war superpower rival can hardly be avoided.

Dear Editor:

I trust that the final failure and collapse of that great experiment in large- scale planning called the Soviet Union will not lead to the rapid withering away of academic programs in Sovietology. There is much to be learned about human folly and treachery from the largest and longest such experiment in history. Take, for instance, the systematic corruption of that nation's institutions and professions, as all independent and objective standards were sacrificed for the perpetuation of the power of the state. Outstanding examples of such corruption were in the professions of journalism and psychiatry. We now know that to be a correspondent for Pravda or Izvestia was to be a member of the KGB, and we have all heard the tales of brave Soviet dissidents condemned to psychiatric hospitals and plied with mind-altering drugs because, after all, anyone who would challenge the state "must be crazy."

These things come to mind because I have just finished reading the innocuously-titled article "The Destructiveness of

Perfectionism, Implications for the Treatment of Depression" in the December, 1995, issue of the American Psychologist by

Professor Sidney J. Blatt of the Yale University Department of Psychology. Ostensibly an examination of the motivation page 65

WACKENHUT CORPORATION behind the recent suicide deaths of three prominent and successful men, it turns out to be something quite different upon closer examination. One of the three men, you see, and the one enjoying the prominent lead place in the article, was Vincent

W. Foster, Jr., Deputy White House Counsel.

Psychoanalysis, itself, is not without its serious detractors, but when it is done long distance and post mortem, the reason for skepticism is increased. When the analyst relies almost completely upon secondary sources for his information about the subject's mental state, the validity of the inquiry results become all the more questionable. When those secondary sources are only newspapers, and the newspapers are only The New York Times and The Washington Post, then the whole exercise is little better than a sick joke.

Do I exaggerate? Let's look at the facts. Professor Blatt deduces much about Foster's thought processes from the text of one of the few primary sources he presumably thinks he has, the fingerprintless, torn-up note which mysteriously materialized in

Foster's briefcase some days after it was searched and thought to be empty. He is able to invest such confidence in the authenticity of the note because his twin bibles failed to carry the October 25, 1995, Reuters dispatch reporting that three certified handwriting experts, one of whom is renowned literary document authenticator, Reginald Alton of Oxford

University, had, independently and unanimously, with extensive supporting explanation, pronounced the note a mediocre forgery. Scholars like to invoke the authority of the best source available, and, to date, these are it. Therefore, the best conclusion a reputable scholar can draw about the sentiments expressed in the torn-up note is that they represent what someone, who we may presume to be Foster's murderer, wants us to think Foster was thinking, not a very good basis for

Foster's psychoanalysis.

Citing a New York Times opinion column, which is really no better than a tertiary source, Blatt tells us that Foster "did not seem to be his usual self, (his)...mood seemed low, (he)...spent weekends in bed with the shades drawn...recently lost 15 pounds, and...sent out signals of pessimism that alarmed close friends and colleagues."

Virtually every word of that statement evaporates upon close examination. Had Blatt done the responsible thing and at least consulted the writings of Foster- case investigator Christopher Ruddy of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, he would have discovered that, at the time of his physical examination on December 31, 1992, Foster weighed 194 pounds and that his body when autopsied on July 21, 1993, weighed 197 pounds after having lost blood and dried out in the sun for some hours. This fact was originally discovered by independent investigator Hugh Sprunt using Senate Banking Committee hearing documents. Those documents, which include the testimony of all of Foster's close associates, turn up no one whose observations about Foster's behavior fit, even loosely, Blatt's quote. They all say he seemed his normal self to them.

Furthermore, White House spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers, says in the Washington Times of July 30, 1993, that the story about Foster working in the bed on weekends with the blinds drawn is not true, and no corroboration for it turns up in the record.

-----

Ultimately, every source, including the torn-up note, that Professor Blatt has used to support his premise that Foster was in a suicidal frame of mind is anonymous. There are, as it happens, somewhat better, attributable sources. But before he gets too excited about looking for them to invoke against me, I must inform him that these are all people who have, on the record, changed their stories at one time or another.

Perhaps Professor Blatt deserves the benefit of the doubt and did not realize just how contrived is the press case upon which he depends so completely. However, that requires imputing to him a degree of credulity that ill becomes a serious scholar. Is it not almost as easy to believe that what he has produced is not really a work of scholarship, but of propaganda?

Sincerely,

David Martin

In the case of this most recent report of the misleadingly-named Office of the Independent Counsel, as with the newspapers that reported on it, it is certainly a good deal easier to believe. page 66


David Martin

All Rights Reserved

November 23, 1997

Recommended reading on both the original Dreyfus Affair and the current American version, in addition to sources mentioned in previous "Dreyfus" installments:

1. David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973).

Professor Lewis holds the Martin Luther King Chair of History at Rutgers University. A Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of W.E.B. Dubois, his rendering of the Dreyfus Affair is one of the most readable and interesting available. He does a very good job of conveying to us the reasons why and the extent to which emotions in France still run surprisingly high over the drawn-out episode.

2. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (Washington, DC, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1997).

Evans-Pritchard, formerly Washington correspondent for London's Sunday Telegraph who was mentioned in the two previous installments of this article, writes thoroughly and well about the Foster case, but his book has a good deal more in it to dismay the concerned citizen. My opening quote from the funeral oration for Glenn Wilburn is from page 107 of this book. Glenn Wilburn was the grandfather of two small children killed in the bomb blast that destroyed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. He had led an independent investigation to discover who was behind the entire operation, something that the federal government has seemed determined not to do. He died on July 15, 1997, of cancer of the pancreas. He was 46.


The pen may be stronger than the sword,

But pens, like guns, can be bought,

And battles of words, like battles with guns

Can be unfairly fought1.

--DC Dave

America’s Dreyfus Affair, Part 4

An Essay on Prejudice, Money, and Information

Was Captain Alfred Dreyfus sent to Devil’s Island because he was a Jew? In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, many a person in France took comfort in repeating the clever retort of the German Foreign Minister to the positive assertion of that proposition: “I don’t know about that, but I know that if he hadn’t been Jewish he would not have returned.”2

What a psychologically satisfying statement to people who have been wrong, and have been parties to the infliction of a great wrong and a great injustice upon another individual! How nice it was to be back on the side of truth, and that statement certainly appeared to have a lot of truth in it to a lot of people. We all know how hard it is for governments to admit that they have been wrong, that they have made an error, much less to admit something so bad as to have framed a man for a major crime that he did not commit and to have inflicted upon him what amounted to a lifetime of torture as a consequence. The recent examples in our own country of this reluctance of governments to admit error, from the county to the federal level, are legion, whether it be in the prosecution of obviously innocent day-care workers for imaginary sex crimes or the immolation of men, women, and children practicing an unorthodox religion. In the Dreyfus case, once the error had been made, with so page 67

WACKENHUT CORPORATION many reputations on the line, it certainly took some powerful force to overturn it, to bring Dreyfus back from Devil’s Island.

What force could that be but one even stronger than the nation’s government? In the eyes of many people, that could only be the force of rich international Jewry working in concert?

The explanation directed the focus away from the messy and disturbing facts of the case and allowed those who had now clearly and obviously been wrong all along to say that, in a certain sense, they had really been right all along. The guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, in this view, was really not the important thing. The charge had been made throughout the affair that the whole mess was being stirred up by the powerful and secretive Syndicate, of which Jewish bankers were a major part.

What better evidence could there be that they were right than the fact that the (Syndicate-backed) Dreyfusards were able to muster enough power actually to win in the end?

This belief also allowed a substantial segment of the French population to keep their fear and detestation of Jews intact even though Dreyfus turned out not to be the rotten traitor selling secrets to the mortal enemy that they had thought him to be. In point of fact, the episode probably intensified their negative feelings, making eventual widespread collaboration with the conquering Nazis just that much easier.

That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience.

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self- righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.3

Americans reading this sage observation by Eric Hoffer no doubt immediately find themselves relating it to the attitudes of many of their countrymen toward blacks. Particularly in the turbulent 1960s in the South, many whites confronted with the obvious injustice of the Jim Crow laws, the separate and inferior education provided to blacks, and the widespread denial of their fundamental right to vote, retreated into an attitude that can be described only as “close- minded.” Human nature is very much the same everywhere, and it is not a purely rational nature. Close-mindedness and rationalizing are universal reactions to unsettling hard cold facts that go against the prevailing conventional view or narrow self-interest. As H. L.

Mencken put it, “The way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true, but what is merely comforting.”4

The German foreign minister, obviously an excellent politician and diplomat, knew well that the truth of his statement was less important than the fact that it was pleasing.

How appropriate was his shrewd response to his audience, and how little revered is the triumph of truth and justice when it comes at the expense of fixed beliefs, is shown by the anecdote with which David Levering Lewis concludes his excellent

“Dreyfus” book:

For a time there was a street in Mulhouse (Dreyfus’ Alsatian home town) named after Alfred Dreyfus--the only monument in all France--but not so long ago this street was widened and renamed. While riding in a taxi with the daughter of Mathieu

Dreyfus, the writer began to ask about the street in Mulhouse. “Shush, Monsieur,” she interrupted, “please speak English-the driver, you know.”5

Prejudice on Campus

We remarked at the beginning of our “Dreyfus” essay on the irony of the reversal of roles of “liberal” and “conservative” between the original Dreyfus Affair and the current American version, the death of Vincent Foster. Certainly no surveys have been conducted, but it is this writer’s perception that there is an even more ironic role reversal with respect to formal education. The eventual exoneration of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was, as we all know, a great triumph for France’s intellectual class and for its men of letters, particularly for its pre-eminent literary figure, Emile Zola (Lewis tells us that for years afterward many Catholic children in France were taught to call a chamber pot a “Zola.”). But with respect to the Foster death, it seems that one is more likely to get a blue collar worker with little formal education to believe the government is covering up than for a member of the intelligentsia to express such a belief. The “experts” that the government has page 68

WACKENHUT CORPORATION assembled all flaunt J.D.s and M.D.s and Ph. D.s of course, but they were clearly paid to arrive at a conclusion satisfactory to their paymaster, which they duly did. More disturbing has been the performance of the putative independent seekers of truth, the professional writers, and most troubling by far has been the apparent complete complacency on America’s college campuses about this apparent assassination of a high level government official. Those whose education one would have expected to have made more broad-minded and open- minded are, almost to a man, completely prejudiced and close-minded about the Foster death. One might as well expound upon the virtues of interracial marriage with a Klu Kluxer as to suggest to a member of the ivory tower set that Foster didn’t really do himself in.

Why, one must wonder, is this so? The first reason that would come to mind in ordinary circumstances is that as generally learned people they know more, particularly about those matters of public affairs that ordinary folks have so little time for, and having studied the matter they have properly come to the conclusion that the official government verdict in the Foster death is the correct one.

That explanation one can quickly discard. You won’t find anyone anywhere in the country who will argue that his support of the government in this instance is based upon his having carefully examined the matter; much less is this the case among the professorate. Members of the media also studiously avoid taking this position when confronted directly, no doubt for fear their bluff might be called and they would be asked how Vince Foster could tear a note into 28 pieces without leaving any fingerprints or how he could drive himself to Fort Marcy Park without keys for the car, or how he could end up dead there before his car even arrived, or any one of dozens of possible questions about unexplainable inconsistencies in the official story. Michael Barone, senior writer for U.S. News and World Report, all-purpose pundit on CNN, and co-author of the voluminous and impressive annual Almanac of American Politics when asked at a presentation at the American Enterprise

Institute in 1996 what he thought about the Foster death responded that he did not know enough to have an opinion6. The unfortunate thing is that one can say the same thing about virtually every news commentator and college professor in

America, though many will, when pressed, nevertheless, offer an opinion in support of the government.

Mark Twain once observed that we are all ignorant, just ignorant of different things. But why would those whose job it is to be informed about the workings of our government so that they might teach our young people remain so ignorant about something so important as the suspicious death of a high-level government official? There are several possible explanations.

The first that springs to mind is that, as many surveys have shown, most college professors are liberal Democrats, and the

Democrats are in power and would stand to lose the most if the official story were revealed to be untrue. But liberals, especially educated ones, pride themselves in their open-mindedness, or at least they used to, and the position adopted by most educated liberals in the Foster case is, as we have noted, an out-and-out, old-fashioned close-minded one, as bad as any traditional French hard-head in the Dreyfus Affair. Though a couple of liberal writers, Roger Morris and Sam Smith, have blazed a trail showing that one can be aware of apparent high-level crimes in a Democratic administration and still keep ones liberal credentials, virtually no one from the Left has followed them. We might also point out that conservative intellectual leaders have performed no better than liberal ones when it comes to the various Clinton scandals, particularly the Foster death. The only attempt at a serious Clinton expose from the Right, Boy Clinton by R. Emmett Tyrrell, doesn’t begin to measure up to Morris’ Partners in Power, the Clintons and their America; and conservative organs like Tyrrell’s American

Spectator, The Washington Times, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal have led the way in praising the findings of Kenneth Starr on Foster and in attacking Christopher Ruddy, the one American journalist raising questions.

Another argument that might be made is that, dependent as they are upon the printed word, academicians have had difficulty learning anything about the Foster case. Following on the heels of the writers of the first draft of our history, as journalists are often called, the compilers and interpreters in academia have been very poorly served by the draft writers. There is certainly no doubt about that, as we have made clear in this essay. Until the recent publication of the books by Ruddy and

British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, there was simply no information available in the usual opinion-molding sources, either books, journals, magazines, or newspapers. The high-brow magazines usually read by college professors and equivalent professionals have been the absolute worst, as we pointed out earlier, in playing down the Clinton scandals.

Still, this is a poor excuse for the degree of ignorance that exists. College professors are supposed to go beyond such secondary sources. I have interviewed a community college criminal justice major in the Washington, DC area who did just that, writing a first-rate research paper disputing the government’s conclusions on the Foster death using government documents available in the George Mason University library. He did it, furthermore, without any assistance from the Foster researchers in the area, being unaware at the time of our existence. In the process he also demolished the argument that academicians might use for avoiding the subject, that is, that this is a topic of little general interest. In the last presentation in page 69

WACKENHUT CORPORATION his public speaking class the assignment was to give a speech to persuade. With the topic already in hand from the paper he had written for another class and with what he figured was already an assured “A” in the course from his accumulated record, he decided to risk trying to persuade the class that Vince Foster was murdered. Actually, as he told me, the risk was not with the fellow students, whose vote would determine half his grade, but with the teacher, whom he had pegged as a

“liberal” who wouldn’t like the topic. He didn’t know how right he was on both counts. The students not only gave him an

“A” for his presentation, but also chose his as the best speech given, while, as he put it, the teacher distracted him with her look of absolute disgust throughout his speech. “You could almost see the smoke coming out of her ears,” he said, and as he took his seat she said, “You know I don’t agree with any of that.” She then put her grade where her mouth was, giving him a

“C” on the presentation. That combined with the student assessment, fortunately, still gave him a “B” on the speech and an

“A” for the course.

We have heard so many stories in recent years of the sort of ideological purity being enforced on campuses these days, one could imagine this little scene being played out almost anywhere in the country. In fact, one might more readily expect it at one of the elite universities instead of at a suburban community college. By happenstance there was more than ideological blindness at work in this instance, and I tell it because it is one of those cases where truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, not because of any larger point that it supports. In the small world that is metropolitan Washington, the speech teacher happened to be the wife of Robert Bryant, currently second in command in the FBI and their spokesman at the joint Park

Police, Justice Department, FBI press conference in which the initial Foster “suicide” conclusion was announced on August

10, 1993. The student had not been aware of the fact, and I took some pleasure in breaking the news to him.

This student’s resourcefulness in preparing a persuasive case against the government in the Foster death demonstrates convincingly that the failings of the faculty are more of will than of means. Surely, unless they are hopelessly behind the times, many of them must have also discovered by now what a magnificent research tool the Internet is. Anyone employing the usual search engines on the Net would quickly discover that the view contrary to the official one is thoroughly dominant

(even the legions of government disinformationists on the Net have to endorse it to retain any credibility at all) and that the traditional scholarly sort of documentation supporting that view can be found on the Net in abundance. How can so many people with a pretense to being intelligent and/or learned remain completely oblivious to that fact?

Let us take a couple of more shots at why the less formally educated seem to be more skeptical of the government in the

Foster case than are those more formally educated. Many of the less formally educated work in jobs that put a premium on horse sense where there is a serious penalty for being wrong. A car cannot be persuaded to run. To be repaired properly, its failings must be properly diagnosed. The same can be said for household plumbing, wiring, or appliances. I still recall the words of a former chicken-farming Mexican-American friend of mine in the Army who absolutely could not stand the

Army’s bureaucratic ways: “The thing I like about chicken farming,” he said, “is that you can’t bullshit a chicken.” People engaged in such activities in many ways keep their critical faculties sharper than do those who only need to keep up the proper front.

University people are also less likely to be a part of the national gun culture. They are not as likely to have had military service nor do they often engage in hunting for recreation. They don’t know what a .38 caliber revolver sounds like when fired and they know nothing of its recoil or the damage that it or a similar weapon would do firing a high-velocity bullet through the skull of a living person at point-blank range. Anyone with gun experience would be much more likely to be skeptical of the government story in the Foster case if he had heard anything at all about the relative tidiness of the body and the position of the gun where the body was found.

That better educated people are less likely to question the government than less educated people in the Foster case might also be a reflection on our education system and on our society. Those who make it over the educational hurdles increasingly do so not because they are more intelligent but because they are more willing to play the game and do what it takes to please those with authority over them. Similarly, those in the professional classes need to be more careful about having and expressing political opinions that might rub those with authority over them the wrong way, whereas a mechanic or a truck driver, say, can say or think pretty well what he wants and no one will care. It is also a tribute to the effectiveness of the propaganda job that the mainstream press has done in the Foster case that the general impression seems to exist among the timid professional classes that having doubts about the official line somehow makes one a wild- eyed extremist. A while back I put these observations in verse form in a commentary on a well- known scholarly book. The book, by an Ivy League psychologist and a former social worker turned conservative activist, smugly posited that because there is, as they claim almost as an article of faith, greater equality of opportunity than ever in our society the ones who “make it” are increasingly those in the right or superior tail of a normal curve of a distribution of human attributes. Those who fail and end up poor and miserable are, as they see it, from the left or inferior tail of the normal, bell-shaped curve: page 70


Losing Ground

We live in a sort of democracy

That they say is a meritocracy,

But The Bell Curve go hang,

If you’ll pardon my slang,

I think it’s a sycophantocracy.

Columnist Joseph Sobran put it this way in a December 2, 1997, article on education in The Washington Times entitled, “Up to Speed on Conformity”:

When I was a schoolboy, back in the sunny 1950s, we used to get solemn lectures on the dangers of “conformity.” Many intellectuals thought Americans were becoming intellectually timid. They were right, but for the wrong reasons.

Most intellectuals are themselves conformists. They tend to be liberal in their politics and social views and to exert pressure on others to agree with them. This would be natural and pardonable if the pressure took the form of reasoned argument, but too often it takes the form of ridicule, name calling, snobbery and ostracism.

When the word “extremist” is routinely applied to dissenting views and “out of the mainstream” is used as a dismissal, it’s safe to say that the pressure to conform has become very intense. Why else would these vacuous charges have any force?

The recent revolt against “political correctness” is an encouraging sign that many people have had enough.

---

Education...has become a form of mass production, to be supervised by the state for the good of the state.

...the natural result is a population that sets great store by conformity to the mass. In public controversies, most people are chiefly concerned to play it safe. Before they take any position, they ask themselves not “Is it true?” but “What will happen to me if I say this?”

Even scholars nowadays behave like bureaucrats. And why not? The university, usually state-supported now, has become a form of bureaucracy, where a premium is placed on promotion, security and tenure, while fads and trends, mostly political, exert their own brief tyrannies. Rarely has staying in fashion been so important in intellectual life.

These developments are dangerous for the future of freedom in the country, and Sobran has only partially diagnosed the malady. The tenure system was created for the purpose of buttressing freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The university would be the one place where one could pursue truth without fear or favor. If a professor’s pursuit of truth were to lead him into dangerous waters, he need not, like so many of his fellow citizens, fear for his job because he would be protected by tenure. Unfortunately, if the extreme reticence of the academic community in the face of not just the Foster scandal, but a host of others related to the presidency and the federal government in general, is any indication, the tenure system is not working as intended. The problem, it would appear, is that the habits of mind and behavior developed to achieve tenure are very difficult to break once tenure is achieved. The supreme irony here is that those achieving tenure, then, are precisely those least fit to make proper use of the privileges thus granted.

The Power of Money

At bottom, though, is the corruption of money. The old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” has not lost any of its force in modern times, and increasingly, the payer of the piper in higher education in America has become the government.

Private colleges, almost more than directly state-supported institutions, depend heavily upon the ultimately federally-funded research grants that their faculty can attract and their students more and more need federal grants and loans to foot the burgeoning higher-education bill. We hear a lot of talk, especially from “mainstream conservative” sources about “1960s page 71

WACKENHUT CORPORATION radicals” now running the show on college campuses, but what there is of it is mainly a safe form of social radicalism of the

“make-love-not- war” variety, as though sexual license were the antithesis of and the antidote for the creeping militarization of our society and all that that entails. One important part of that militarization is a “don’t-make-waves” careerist mentality that has spread from uniform to gown.

We are also well aware of how much of academia, with their anti-war “teach-ins,” turned against the government as our nation’s leaders seemed to be the last ones to figure out that our Southeast Asian venture was a bust. But they were not alone. Major news organs like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which had been enthusiastic supporters of the anti- communist crusade in Vietnam duing the early stages of the war also came out strongly against the government policy in the later stages. Perhaps what we were witnessing was nothing more than the temporary interruption of a trend that was set strongly in motion during World War II, no less for higher education than for the major news media, and now that their failing students no longer run the risk of being drafted to die in pointless battle, college faculties are back on the trend line:

For Yale, and for higher education generally, the effects of the war would never be forgotten. The university had been transformed; with the arrival of postwar veterans, its student body matured; with the development of its wartime institutes, especially in the social sciences, its links to the government had been forged, for good or ill, so that pure research would be harnessed to the service of the state.7 AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 8

Money, of course, is not just a force for bad. It is as necessary for those who would do good as for those who would do evil.

In fact, the evidence is very strong that the German foreign minister was wrong about the importance of Captain Dreyfus’

Jewishness in effecting his return from Devil’s Island. Publicity usually takes money, and Dreyfus’ case emerged from its initial first couple of years of obscurity not because of any organized Jewish effort, but because the Dreyfus family had money, and the dedicated older brother, Mathieu, was determined to spend as much as it took to get justice for Alfred. To be sure, the first Dreyfusard, the young firebrand journalist, Bernard Lazare, was one of the first aggressive Jewish activists, having written a major work on the history and causes of anti-Semitism, and to him, both in his heart and in the case he made publicly, “Dreyfus was the symbol of the persecuted Jew.”8 But contrary to the claims of the anti- Dreyfusards, he apparently got very little, if any, organized Jewish assistance for the cause of the convicted Captain.

For most French Jews, this intransigent, overly vehement, revolutionary writer lent support to the legend of the Jewish syndicate of cosmopolites and compromised the Jews dangerously by supporting, because he was Jewish, the cause of a traitor.9

Jews are like any other people in choosing to believe that which it is most comfortable to believe. Even the man who later founded Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who covered the first Dreyfus trial as Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of

Austria, wrote in his dispatch upon the conclusion of the trial that Dreyfus was probably guilty, though he would later claim that it was the Dreyfus ordeal that “made me a Zionist.”10

There was more than enough reason for Jews, like everyone else, not to want to believe Lazare. Certainly very few would want to admit to themselves that “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could only make everyone feel less secure. The state had put its full authority behind the conviction. The Dreyfus family was from Alsace, and though they were culturally

French right to the bone, their textile factory still operated there even though the region had become a part of Germany as a result of the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And what sort of man would want to defy convention and assault that bastion of privilege that was the French military officer caste in the first place? Dreyfus’ strong French patriotism, which was a major motivation for his choosing the military career, was for others, not the least of whom were fellow Jews, just another good reason to suspect him.

In addition to Lazare, perhaps the most politically prominent Jew in the country, Chamber of Deputies member Joseph

Reinach, was eventually won over to the Dreyfusard cause and he did yeoman’s work for it, but he had to struggle against his co-religionists. By late 1897, three years into the Affair, organized Jewish opinion was gravitating much more toward the new idea of a restored homeland in Israel, a development that to Reinach could only undercut the cause of justice for Alfred

Dreyfus. Reinach was so disturbed that he wrote an article in Le Figaro denouncing it:

The sole result of this campaign, which in any case is destined for a pitiful failure, would be to give the impression...that those Frenchmen who belong to the Jewish faith are subordinating the idea of the fatherland to I cannot imagine what sort of solidarity which existed in a vague way during barbarous times, which was prevalent no doubt at the origin of civilized page 72

WACKENHUT CORPORATION societies, but which in modern

societies is an anachronism.11

Profiteers?

So the eventual exoneration of Dreyfus was a triumph not of Jews as a group, but a triumph of truth and justice. It was also a triumph of a group of individuals dedicated to truth and justice, some of whom were Jewish and some of whom were not.

But it was not all just a case of high ideals winning out. It was no doubt, to a degree, a triumph of money as well. Here is

Bernard Lazare’s initial reaction when asked by his publisher to take a position on the Dreyfus case:

Why? I know neither him nor his people. If he were some poor devil, I would have worried for him. But Dreyfus and his family are very rich, they say; they’ll be able to take care of themselves very well without me, especially if he is innocent..12.

But after examining the evidence he was won over and did prodigious work for the cause. Though the author David Levering

Lewis says Lazare “volunteered” his services to the Dreyfus family, anti-Dreyfusards have consistently claimed that he was

“bought” by the Dreyfus family. The debate, I believe, is a pointless one. The family had lawyers who could hardly have been expected to work for free. Lazare was a journalist who had to earn a living, and he did put in a great deal of time for the

Dreyfus family. The family no doubt bore much of the logistical expense of his work such as printing up and distributing the initial 3,000 copies of Lazare’s pamphlet laying out the case for Dreyfus’ innocence. But Lazare was extraordinarily idealistic, and if he contended that he was not actually paid for his services to the Dreyfus family he more than earned the right to be taken at his word. The relevant point, for our purposes, is that the “bought” charge was so persistently made by his opponents. The implication behind it is that the truth of the matter is not the important thing. Confident that the disparity of resources is massively on their side, the authorities and their apologists are quick to attack anyone who would dispute them as a “profiteer.”

When it comes to the Foster case the disparity of resources on the two sides is even greater than in the Dreyfus Affair. We have noted the large and fluctuating number of daily newspapers there were in Paris at the time, which is an indicator of the ease with which one could get into the newspaper business and reach a significant audience. Newspapers were how the residents of Paris got their news. We have a number of media, and with the exception of the Internet, all are prodigiously expensive to get into. The greater their scope and reach, the more expensive it is to enter the business. Most people now get their news from television, the most expensive business, and the major television networks have been a monolith on the

Foster case, actively preventing news from reaching the public that dispute the official government line, and, in some instances, actively and very dishonestly promoting the government line. Newspapers are next in the hierarchy, both in expense to operate and in influence, and they have been almost as monolithic, with only a few little chinks in the armor creeping in at The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Investor’s Business Daily.

Magazines come next, and, surprisingly, across the political spectrum from The Nation on the left to the American Spectator on the right, no information has been allowed out through their pages that breaks ranks in the slightest with the massive cover-up effort13. At the bottom of the news hierarchy are the local radio stations with their call-in talk shows. Even the radio stations are mainly owned by large, rich conglomerates, but some have permitted guests like the journalists Christopher

Ruddy and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, citizen researcher Hugh Sprunt, and the witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer,

John Clarke.

As great as the disparity of power has been, it has not been great enough for the people in the White House. The White

House Counsel’s Office has actually produced a 331-page report entitled “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy

Commerce” which it supplied secretly to media people until the Wall Street Journal made the existence of the report public.

The principal thesis of the report is that all the information about the Clinton scandals that gets out, which is, of course, characterized as nothing more than mere conspiracy theorizing, can be traced ultimately to the banking fortune of Pittsburgh conservative, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife employs Ruddy at his small newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review and does provide financial backing to such entities as Accuracy in Media, Strategic Investment Newsletter, the Western Journalism

Center, and the American Spectator (this last having been terminated after the magazine attacked Ruddy on his Foster reporting). page 73


There is no doubt that without Scaife’s considerable commitment of money the news on the Foster death would have been even more effectively suppressed, but all that Scaife has spent has really done very little to penetrate the public consciousness. Only the American Spectator has anything like a mass audience, and, as we have noted, it has gone along with the government on Foster14. The relative meagerness of the opposition did not prevent the government and its apologists from raising the “bought” or “profiteer” charge, though. What they apparently fear above all else is that the free enterprise ideal in journalism might actually work and that someone might spread the truth in a self-sustaining manner by selling it. Thus, on its scurrilous Sixty Minutes piece on Ruddy, CBS had a lawyer for one of the Park Policemen say, outrageously falsely, that Strategic Investment had made a half-million dollars on its Foster video (Bear in mind that there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of this entire Scaife operation. Christopher Ruddy is certainly “bought” by Scaife--in the sense that he openly employs him-- to a greater degree than Lazare was ever bought by the Dreyfus family so Ruddy’s work can be interpreted as probably the best reflection of the Scaife intentions.. The reader is referred, in turn, to Part 2 of my

“Dreyfus” for a detailed examination of Ruddy’s bona fides. It was on this video where the bald and unsupported statement was made---a statement that Mike Wallace of Sixty Minutes jumped all over-- that Foster was left-handed.).

My own experience perhaps offers better parallels with the charges leveled against Lazare than does the experience of the

Scaife team. The family of the young Fairfax County, Virginia, college student, Tommy Burkett, whose violent death on

December 1, 1991, was ruled a suicide, certainly has behaved more like the dedicated Dreyfus family than have Vincent

Foster’s survivors. His connection to the Foster death is, among others, that he had the same autopsy doctor, James Beyer, who performed the same sort of job as he did on Foster; he had the same medical examiner, Donald Haut; and the current second ranking man in the FBI, Robert Bryant, involved himself in his case before he had any apparent jurisdiction, as he did in the Foster case. At least as significant is the fact that Tommy, his parents learned after his death, had been induced into doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, in his powerful new book,

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as one of two cases illustrating, at the very least, Dr. Beyer’s lack of competence refers to the

“highly sensitive death of Tommy Burkett,” and proceeds to prove how sensitive it is by not bothering to tell us why.15

The parents found Tommy seated dead in his upstairs room with his legs crossed at the feet, his hands folded on his lap, and the family revolver lying on top of his hands with its cylinder slightly ajar. A single bullet was in the wall above his head but not where it should have been if he had shot himself through the mouth as the police concluded. The family also noticed blood spatter as though from gunshots on downstairs walls. The emergency workers who first arrived told the parents that from the condition of the body it was apparent that Tommy had been dead for several hours. The first arriving policeman, on the other hand, said that he had died just minutes before the parents arrived home, and before that, even before he viewed the body he told the mother, “I’ve seen lots of these suicides. Don’t blame yourself.” Even though the bullet was not taken from the wall and the curious blood spatter was not analyzed by the police, with the help of Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, they ruled suicide.16 Later, the parents paid for the body to be exhumed and another autopsy to be performed. That autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous contusions that had not been noted by Dr. Beyer. Young Burkett had clearly been beaten to death.

This is only a small sample of the numerous anomalies in the Burkett death. After it appeared on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries the FBI was moved to conduct a civil rights investigation of the case. Predictably, in December of 1995, they came to the same conclusion as the police, but they held back what they said was a 1,800-page report backing up their conclusions. Only recently, with the help of the Virginia congressional delegation, has the FBI begun to release piecemeal to the parents a heavily redacted, unnumbered hodgepodge of documents which they say constitute part of the report. As of this writing the parents have just begun to analyze and respond to it through the same congressional channels by which they received the report. Their next immediate goal is to obtain congressional hearings on the case.17

Another similarity to the Foster case, and perhaps the most telling one, has been the role of the media. For 18 months no newspaper would even mention Tommy’s death even though reporters would sound very interested when the parents first talked to them. Only when the parents got the idea of making the original overture by pay phone instead of their home phone did they get results, Later they had a professional sweep done of their phone system and found that the phone was being tapped. A reporter for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine later interviewed the parents at length, but, to this day, the only thing that has appeared about Tommy Burkett in The Washington Post has been an “in memoriam” on the obituary page paid for by the parents.

I have written for the newsletter that the family puts out periodically, and I included song lyrics about the story and an essay about the connections and similarities of the case to Foster’s in my privately-published book, The New Moral Order. Internet correspondents professing to care greatly about government corruption and the scandals of the Clinton, and, tellingly, only the Clinton administration have labored mightily to hang the “profiteer” label on me for offering the book for sale on the Net and one of them went so far as to ask me, as one of many prying questions he put to me by private E-mail, if I was being page 74

WACKENHUT CORPORATION paid by the Burkett family.

The Burkett parents are both English teachers, the father in public high school and the mother in college. They don’t have the money that the Dreyfus family had, but they do have the same dedication and determination. If they did have that much money there is a very good chance that they would be a good deal farther down the road toward justice than they are now.

And if they could so easily afford to pay people to publicize their quest for justice, I don’t know that I would refuse any offer they might make to pay me, but the usual route these days is to hire a public relations firm for such things. From the experience I can certainly say that I know how Bernard Lazare must have felt when he was publicly dismissed as someone who had been “bought” by the Dreyfus family.

Stacked Deck Against Freedom

It is now time to reflect upon the lessons of the of the highest ranking government official to die violently under mysterious circumstances since President Kennedy. The cost, in a purely monetary sense, of the apparent murder would have been nominal, but the expense of the continuing cover-up is enormous. What are the meager resources of a few independent truth seekers selling a few books, tapes, and videos compared to the federal government, with its tentacles into academia and its joint operation with the corporate media establishment? As we look upon the pyramids of Egypt or some magnificent Gothic cathedral in Europe, we can’t help thinking about the sheer manpower that had to be mobilized to create such structures.

Similarly, we cannot help but be impressed with the expensive manpower holding together the edifice of lies in the Foster case. The millions of dollars of taxpayer money that went to the Fiske and Starr cover-ups may be the most obvious monetary hemorrhage, but think for a minute of what the simple act of attempting to intimidate the witness Patrick Knowlton must have cost. He has counted at least 25 different men putting the evil eye on him in the streets of Washington, and behind them there had to be a support structure that could mobilize so many people on short notice. More than that, the perpetrators had to be sure in advance that the vast resources controlled by those who run the media empires would not, in turn, mobilize any part of those resources to inform the public of the brazen act.

Recall now the words of the first Republican Party president with which we began the first part of the larger “Dreyfus” essay:

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

Those words were spoken in a period of great crisis for our country. Abraham Lincoln, in the first of their series of debates, was faulting Judge Stephen Douglas for his influential public pronouncements on the slavery issue, which Lincoln deemed to be excessively legalistic and lacking in morality. Consider further the words of Thomas Jefferson, a man who we might say was our first Democratic Party president:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.

Jefferson wrote this in a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington shortly before the formulation of our Constitution, whose writers took the sentiments to heart with their powerful protection for freedom of expression in the very First Amendment.

America’s Dreyfus Affair has made plain, with the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson sharing power and responsibility, and with a man at the top who took his middle name from the latter, that what that great founding father most dreaded is now a reality. For all the protection that he had hoped they would provide us against that government, and don’t, we now have a government without newspapers.

David Martin

December 30, 1997

1. David Martin, from “Of Swords and Pens,” in The New Moral Order, the Poems and Essays of David Martin (Chantilly, page 75


VA: DCD Publishers, 1995) p. 46. The entire poem is as follows:

Of Swords and Pens

The pen may be stronger than the sword

But pens, like guns, can be bought,

And battles of words, like battles with guns,

Can be unfairly fought.

Those who rule know all too well

The power of the word,

And so they ration carefully

The ones that can be heard.

In our land there’s little chance

That virtue will prevail

When “truth” is a consumer good

And words are all for sale.

2. David Levering Lewis, Prisoners of Honor, the Dreyfus Affair (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973) p. 301.

3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: The New American Library,

1951) p. 89.

4. “The Cult of Hope,” in Prejudices (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 89.

5. Op. cit., p. 325.

6. ABC-TV reporter and commentator Cokie Roberts demonstrated another tack that is commonly taken when responding to a question about the Foster case at a panel discussion at American University in Washington. “There are hundreds of first rate reporters in the country,” she said, “and you can be sure you would have read about it if there had been anything to it.”

7. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987) p. 35.

8. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986) p. 138.

9. Ibid. p. 139.

10. Lewis, op. cit., p. 60.

11. Ibid., p. 260.

12. Bredin, op. cit., p. 135. page 76


13. Perhaps in 1998 the cover-up house will crumble. The January 1998 issue of The American Spectator has a very favorable review by quintessential Washington insider, Robert D. Novak, of the best and most powerful book that the

American Press has ever largely ignored, Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported

Stories. Novak repeats uncritically the following charge from the Evans-Pritchard book:

Authorities rearranged the “crime scene” at Fort Marcy Park to move White House aide Vincent Foster’s body and place a gun in his hand. Evidence was hidden and destroyed, and testimony by witnesses altered by the FBI to fit the suicide theory.

Witnesses, in fact, were harassed. Foster’s “suicide” note appears to be a planted forgery. The career Justice Department prosecutor assigned by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr found himself blocked as he probed for the truth, and he returned to his former duties with his mouth shut tight.

Novak goes on to say that “...Evans-Pritchard holds out hope for the ‘the ordinary citizens’ who will ‘cleanse the institutions of this country before they become irretrievably corrupt.’ Patrick Knowlton, a harassed witness in the Vince Foster case, last year filed a federal tort claim naming FBI agents as defendants.”

14. But see the late breaking development detailed in the previous note.

15. The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc.) p. 148.

16. The parents themselves later had the bullet removed and analyzed. The examiners found no trace of human tissue on the bullet, indicating that it had not passed through any part of a human body, but it had apparently passed through something.

About half of the bullet was missing and could not be accounted for.

17. For more information contact Tom Burkett and Beth George, 13456 Muirkirk Lane, Herndon, VA 20171, Tel. (703) 435-

3112. E-mail tburkett@clark.net. Especially recommended is the web site of the national organization the Burketts have founded, Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up: http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html. For all four parts of

“America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster,” go to http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ AMERICA'S


I accuse the War Office of having conducted an abominable

campaign in the press (especially in L'Eclair and L'Echo de

Paris), in order to cover up its misdeeds and lead public

opinion astray.

--Emile Zola

If your goal is righting wrongs

You won't get very far

By pretending things are better

Than they really are.

--DC Dave

America’s Dreyfus Affair, Part 5

Communications Stream of Discredit

What is the most persuasive thing, in the eyes of the American public, that might convince many--though fewer than the molders of opinion would have us believe-- that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster did, indeed, commit suicide?

It is certainly the fact that they are being told so by virtually all of the nation's authority figures. How many times, when one tries to talk about actual evidence, is he confronted with the rejoinder that "four investigations" have all concluded that it was, indeed, a suicide (They refer, presumably, to the U.S. Park Police investigation, the Robert Fiske investigation, the

Kenneth Starr investigation, and then either to the inquiry by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee or the one done by the office of Rep. William Clinger, then ranking Republican on the House Government Reform and

Oversight Committee, neither of which was an actual independent investigation of Foster's death. Presumably, they do not refer to the largely secret cursory investigation conducted by the FBI based upon which it concluded that the assassinations page 77

WACKENHUT CORPORATION law [18 U.S.C. Section 1751] requiring it to be the principal investigative body in the case did not apply.) Never mind that several investigations have been required instead of just one definitive one, as is customary. That fact, alone, should be more than sufficient to make people suspicious.

More than the fact of the official "investigations," it comes down to ones essential faith in our major institutions. As the

French newspaper, L'Autorite, put it in the earlier case, "If Dreyfus is not guilty then the government is." If Vincent Foster is not guilty of self-murder, then not only are our government leaders protecting those who are guilty of the assassination, but so, too, are the controllers of our major news organs. This is a very unsettling thought. It should make all of us feel rather insecure, suggesting that we don't have the government of laws that we thought we did nor a free press, as we thought was guaranteed by the First Amendment, that would keep the government under scrutiny. It would mean, to put it bluntly, that

Thomas Jefferson's last line of protection against tyranny has been breached.

Let us look at a couple of examples of how this faith in our institutions plays itself out. I had just finished describing the outlines of the case for murder to a friend of long standing who I had not seen for a while. He is a professional historian of a somewhat standard liberal political orientation. "I can't believe," he said, "that if what you are telling me is true that

Republicans like Dick Armey or Newt Gingrich wouldn't be making all kinds of political hay over it." The logic is impeccable if one believes that we really do have the vigorous, two-party system that we think we have. An opposition party that would let the party in power literally get by with murder is certainly no opposition party worthy of the name. To be sure, continued congressional inaction on the Foster case since the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in 1998 speaks volumes, but I would suggest that my friend is seriously misreading what is in the volumes. Suffice it to say that the main difference between my historian friend and me is that I have studied the Foster death and he has not. Maybe, too, we are different in that I have the urge to satisfy my curiosity over something I regard as very important to the nation and he does not. Perhaps he, like so many Americans, has made the rational calculation that it could not be good either for his peace of mind or for his career to do too much picking on this festering little sore. Whatever his motivation, this putative seeker and revealer of historical truth has revealed to me in unmistakable terms that as for this messy little episode in very recent history, he would truly rather not know.

On the press front, I was at a forum on politics and the news media at American University in Washington, DC. Someone in the audience raised a question about the harassment of the witness, Patrick Knowlton, in the Foster case. Rather than address herself to the specifics of the question, one of the panelists, television news commentator, Cokie Roberts, responded that we have many, many excellent journalists in the country who you can be sure have looked into every aspect of the Foster case and if it were anything more than a simple case of suicide you can be sure that they would have told you about it.

Again, what we have is an appeal to the public's faith in our basic institutions, and, again, if the premises are granted the reasoning is impeccable. Certainly all the major news organs have told us over and over again that Vince Foster committed suicide. And we see how the "conservative" and the "liberal"ones war with one another, or so it seems. Even arch-Clinton opponent Rush Limbaugh has been virtually silent on the Foster matter, as have nationally-syndicated talk-show hosts G.

Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, while such "conservative" standard bearers as The Washington Times, the Wall Street

Journal, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the American Spectator have all weighed in in support of Kenneth

Starr's suicide conclusion, slapping down dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" in the process. The national publicity machine has also given a great deal of attention to books by "conservative" writers like Gary Aldrich, James Stewart, and David

Brock, all of whom reinforce the suicide conclusion. No wonder the appellation "nutcase" or "right-wing Clinton-hater" is hung so freely on anyone with the temerity to take issue with the official verdict. Surely all these people we trust for informed opinion could not be, in effect or in fact, lying to us, could they? To believe it is to see ones belief system come completely un-tethered. To deny that Vince Foster committed suicide becomes, then, a very radical act, and most people don't like to take very radical actions.

It all comes down to this: To believe Vince Foster was murdered is to believe that our government is corrupt to the core and that what represents itself as a free and vital press is nothing more than a big propaganda machine. Put another way, so high have the stakes been raised in this case that one cannot have any faith at all in our federal government and in our vaunted free press and still entertain the notion that Vincent Foster might not have committed suicide.

Before we further explore the implications of all this, we should first deal with one more "authoritative" voice that has been invoked in support of the suicide conclusion, that is the voice of the Foster family. Although we have been told that on the night of the death none of them could think of any reason why he would have committed suicide and although none of them has made a positive identification of the gun found in Foster's hand, and three days after the death the family was still saying

"with certainty" that he had not been treated for depression, and although the Park Police seem to have gone out of their way page 78

WACKENHUT CORPORATION to avoid questioning Foster's three grown children, claiming that the Foster family lawyer would not make them available (as though he had that power) the family has through that lawyer, James Hamilton, and in a New Yorker interview with the widow Lisa climbed aboard the suicide-from-depression train.

All that is required to deal with the authoritativeness of the family is to contrast the Foster example with that of the Martin

Luther King family and a number of other similar examples around the country. The King family has recently proclaimed its belief in the innocence of James Earl Ray, hinting that they think that the government may have been involved in the death, and has certainly been involved in the cover-up. When the King family held a news conference on February 13, 1997, in which they called for a new trial for Ray, the supposedly liberal Washington Post reacted to this extraordinary new development by ignoring it, writing nothing at all about it the next day. The press has generally treated the King family as simply hopelessly misguided and has lent no editorial support for the family's call for a reopened investigation. For lesswell-known people whose death has been ruled suicide over the vigorous protests of the families involved, America's press has been largely silent. One hundred and thirteen squares were in the cover-up quilt displayed at the second annual

Washington, DC, Quilt Day program on the National Mall, May 23, 1998, sponsored by Parents Against Corruption and

Cover-up. The whole purpose was to gain publicity for the families in their attempt to obtain justice for their lost loved ones, but the publicity was not forthcoming. For the second year in a row the event was blacked out by America's major press.

So, the authority of the family in these cases may be subsumed under the authority of the press because it is the press that tells us which families we should pay attention to and which we should not. In turn, the authority of the press must be subsumed under the authority of the government because, invariably in all these controversial cases, whether it be the ones mentioned or the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, Pan Am 103, or TWA 800, the only families whose voice carries any authority with the press are those who happen to agree with the government's version of things.

The (Intentional?) Losing Hand

We are back, then, to the press and the government whose moral authority is at issue. Anyone who would dispute the official finding in the Foster case, but stops short of calling into question the very legitimacy of America's basic institutions, plays from a losing hand. If our basic institutions are not corrupt and illegitimate, then Vince Foster did, indeed, commit suicide from depression. The evidence of Vince Foster's murder must be placed against not just the evidence of suicide in Fort

Marcy Park but also against the evidence of overall government and press probity.

Now one might argue that simply from a narrow, tactical standpoint it is better not to bring these larger issues up. One runs the risk, after all, of simply being denounced as someone who sees conspiracies everywhere. The only American reporter to investigate the Foster death from a standpoint critical of the government, Christopher Ruddy, up until recently when he spread his net to look into the suspicious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, had been very careful not to look beyond the Foster death to any larger pattern of corruption. He won't even go so far as to suggest the likelihood that Foster was murdered. A lot of good his circumspection has done him. Consider the review of Ruddy's book by Jacob Cohen in the

"conservative" National Review (Nov. 24, 1997), a review that is all too representative of the sort of treatment Ruddy has received from the mainstream. Cohen begins with some red herring examples of spurious witnesses in the Kennedy assassination case, witnesses of whom this writer in all his considerable readings on that case has never heard, and represents them as typical of the anomalies or "contradictions" that sober investigators must resolve, and usually do most satisfactorily, in almost any real or apparent crime. But, says Cohen:

"There are those, however, who revel in the contradictions, resisting every effort to resolve even the most easily resolvable of them, as if every human report had equal metaphysical validity and therefore had to be respected permanently. To people of this sort, efforts to resolve contradictions and to scoff at the ridiculous are seen only as proof of blind prejudice, a desire to cover up evil-doing, or worse. For them reality is not singular but, like Alice's Wonderland, fundamentally absurd. Some of this sort devotedly read wild conspiracy books, or write them.

"As a case in point, consider the tolerance for contradiction and the resulting insinuations in Christopher Ruddy's investigation' of the apparent suicide of Vincent Foster, Bill and Hillary Clinton's close friend and legal advisor, an event which, Ruddy palpably implies, was a murder followed immediately by a massive cover-up, engineered by people who are thereby implicated in the murder."

In short, Ruddy is nothing more than just another one of those "wild" conspiracists. This is the kind of ridicule and abuse to page 79

WACKENHUT CORPORATION which Ruddy has been subjected in spite of his great caution. Before I elaborate further upon the fundamental fecklessness, either intentional or unintentional, of the Ruddy approach, please indulge me a brief digression upon the subject of Professor

Cohen. He first came to my attention a few years ago with an article in the magazine Commonweal, I believe, in which he engaged in the kind of debunking of the film "JFK" by Oliver Stone, that has been completely universal in America's press.

Unlike the run-of-the-mill journalist, however, Cohen is an academician, a professor of American studies at Brandeis

University. American studies, the reader should know, is one of the favorite places for the Central Intelligence Agency to plant professors who double as recruiters for their agency. That is because this is one of the favorite courses of study for foreign students with leadership potential in their home countries. Furthermore, those destined to become experts on the

United States back home are prime candidates for recruitment by our spooks, and who better to recruit them than one of their professors? Perhaps it is just a coincidence that an American studies professor would be the one to dash cold water on a movie that points the finger of suspicion at the CIA for the Kennedy assassination or upon a book about the death of a highlevel government official with numerous associates connected in one way or another to illicit drug smuggling and money laundering in his home state that has, in turn, been linked to the CIA, but perhaps it is not.

I did a search of Brandeis on the Net, and found out that they have a student-run FM radio station that features political talk shows. I e-mailed the station, introduced myself as the author of "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent

Foster," which they could access on the Net, and offered to debate Professor Cohen about the Foster case on the air. The response was very favorable, but a final decision had to be put off until after the end-of-year break. After the break I received an amazing correspondence telling me that Professor Cohen was amenable and I was asked my preference for a format. I communicated my agreeableness to almost any format and waited with great anticipation. Several weeks passed and I heard nothing. I followed up and got the response that Professor Cohen, now that he had gotten around to reading

"Dreyfus," had concluded that it would not be "productive" to be on the air with me, but that they still would like to have me on for an hour-long interview.

"Fine," I responded, though disappointed, and once again waited.

A couple more weeks passed and then I was hit with the proposal that I be interviewed for thirty minutes (on tape). Professor

Cohen would then be permitted to hear what I had to say and would be taped in a thirty-minute interview which would follow my interview immediately (leaving the impression that he was responding to me spontaneously). With few options, I responded that I would do it if they could explain to me how the proposed arrangement was fair. The response was that

Cohen was no friend of the students at the station, and that they would be even-handed in their questioning of the man.

"Okay," I answered, and once again waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing. Several follow-up e-mails have been ignored, and I have given up. There is something about this case that forbids open discourse.

I had attempted to pique the students' interest from the beginning by characterizing the Cohen review as one of the most dishonest I had ever encountered. It seemed to work initially, but something happened to dampen their initial interest. Here is but one example of the Cohen dishonesty. He is making light of Ruddy's case for the body having been moved to the park:

"Continuing the implied scenario: the killers drove into the park, to a spot near the first cannon, removed Foster's body, carrying it a considerable distance over rocky, hilly terrain. They then propped him beneath the cannon, the first cannon, perhaps shot him again in order to make it look like suicide, and left him there. Of course, we have already learned elsewhere in the book that they had no worries that medical authorities would find signs of the murder because those authorities were willing to do anything to preserve the suicide legend. All this would have happened in broad daylight, in a park across the street from a dense residential area, a park that is routinely filled with lovers, joggers, picnickers, cruisers, and men who wish to relieve themselves. Park rangers drive through quite frequently. One wonders, didn't the killers worry they might be seen? Perhaps not, since they could be confident that the conspiracy would bully any inconvenient observer into remaining silent. Perhaps that explains why they did not wait for nightfall, when the park would have been closed."

Cute, but Cohen describes a park that does not exist. This story told to a knowledgeable audience would mark one purely and simply as a big-time liar. I have been to the park many times--usually on the weekend--and most commonly there is no one there. The chance of encountering anyone on a weekday is particularly low, especially on a disagreeably muggy summer afternoon. Wedged between two busy commuter roads, the George Washington Parkway and Chain Bridge Road, it is preserved for its Civil War interest and for no other reason. It affords no view of the Potomac River. Usually the sightseers are at the two scenic Parkway Potomac-cliffs overlooks before one gets to the entrance to the Ft. Marcy parking lot, an entrance which one comes upon suddenly and unexpectedly. The park is spooky in its emptiness. page 80


The dense residential area "across the street" does not exist. There is only the compound of the Saudi Arabian ambassador.

Middle-class residences abut the park on the same side of the road, but the residents have no easy access to the fenced and wooded park, and no real reason to go there. Once you've seen the cannons and the earthen works, you've seen them. There are no facilities and there's hardly enough open space even to throw a frisbee. Virtually perfect clandestine access is available from an abandoned road off Chain Bridge that ends at an abandoned cabin. One would be less noticeable in the day than the night because most people are away at work and because no car lights would give you away. The park is fenced, but there is a break where a tree has fallen across it near the cabin. From there to the body site (either the official one or the one where Ruddy says it was) is an easy walk in very secluded woods of about 100 yards. Neither site would be easily seen by the occasional visitor to the park.

Interestingly, there is no mention of the old road in the many volumes of official documents that have now been released to the public. Even Ruddy makes no mention of the old road and pointedly leaves it out of the map of Fort Marcy Park and its surroundings that he has in his book. From the official documents we do learn that a young woman who lives in the area reported seeing a man wearing a suit, who did not fit Foster's description, walking most improbably in the woods near the old road the day before Foster's body was found near there. It was a hot July day. The police apparently did nothing with her information. What could that have to do with a suicide the next day, anyway?

By chance, the people most likely to know about these unique park features work at a building a scant mile up Chain Bridge road. It is said that they conduct some training at the park. I speak of the public servants who toil at the headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The autopsy doctor compliant toward corrupt higher-ups is hardly a figment of the Ruddy imagination, either. On this subject, Ruddy is remiss in his book only in that he does not convey to the reader the true rottenness of the performance of

Dr. James C. Beyer in the Timothy Easley and Tommy Burkett cases. Based on that sorry record, which I lay out in some detail in "Dreyfus 4," it is abundantly clear that killers with the right connections would have no more to fear from Dr. Beyer than they would from a mainstream journalist approached by an "inconvenient observer," or from Jacob Cohen, for that matter.

Ruddy raised his exercise in futility to new heights recently in an article in the May 17, 1998, issue of The Pittsburgh

Tribune Review. Rather than taking the obvious step of assaulting those opinion-molding organs that are his greatest nemesis, he went a long way out of his way to build them up. Any reasonable, dispassionate and objective student of the series of assassinations and attempted assassinations that have had such a major effect on public life in this country over the past 35 years can see that the routine, official "lone-crazed-gunman" explanation of events is exceedingly weak, but, as with the Foster case, it prevails because it has the unanimous support of our news media right across the political spectrum. To ridicule the critics is to build up the credibility of precisely those people who stand between Ruddy-on-Foster and the

American public, but that's precisely what Ruddy does in his May 17 article, and he does it in tones reminiscent of Jacob

Cohen.

The chosen critic to scoff at is none other than Sidney Blumenthal, currently a controversial high-level White House advisor but formerly journalist for The New Yorker, in which capacity, Ruddy neglects to tell us, he wrote in the September 9, 1993, issue the first magazine article that made the case for Foster having committed suicide from depression. Blumenthal, in fact, was the source of the fiction that Foster had lost 15 pounds. Ruddy has discovered an obscure book that the young

Blumenthal co-edited in 1976 entitled Government by Gunplay: Assassination Theories from Dallas to Today.

"Because of his own conspiracy thinking," says Ruddy, "Blumenthal has been nicknamed Grassy Knoll' by White House insiders." He then proceeds to lampoon Blumenthal for the latter's apparent belief that the government--perish the thought-- might have had something to do with the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the shooting of

George Wallace.

"The world knows that Blumenthal is a radical left-winger. His book demonstrates that. Its introduction is written by former

CIA agent Philip Agee, who became something of an icon for the left as he fled the country to find safe haven in Castro's

Cuba and later Europe." page 81


Thus does Ruddy burnish the obverse of the line he and both his public supporters and detractors have cultivated in the

Foster case, that it is all a matter of right-wing versus left-wing. While only the political "extremists," of one stripe or its opposite, are permitted under the color of their blinding and self-discrediting ideological bias to point the finger at the most awful goings-on, the "responsible mainstream" is able to appear to rise above the fray, dismissing them all as marginal

"nutcases."

What a fine formula to keep the great mass of the public divided and impotent while the permanent government and their paid propagandists in the ostensibly independent press go their lawless way! The last thing in the world they would want us to see is that there might be a consistent pattern and many of the same actors in the recurrent outrages. To take one example, one finds in the index of Sylvia Meagher's meticulously-researched, thoroughly non-ideological 1967 book about the Warren

Report on the Kennedy assassination ten pages of references under the heading "FBI, alleged intimidation of witnesses," and another four pages under "FBI, alleged misreporting."

Ruddy chronicles precisely the same sort of actions by the FBI in the Foster case, but yet he can write, when speaking of

Blumenthal's professed youthful opinion, "The paranoia that marks a true conspiracist is evident when the conspiracist begins to believe that all of his pet conspiracies run together, forming a unified conspiracy theory.

"Thus, one chapter argues that the same right-wing anti-Castro Cubans who were part of Nixon's Watergate plumbers' operation had links to the same people who killed President Kennedy 10 years earlier. Blumenthal's chapter, 'Cointelpro:

How the FBI tried to destroy the Black Panthers' argues that the FBI domestic surveillance efforts used against the Black

Panthers created the framework for the Watergate operation."

No wonder Ruddy has received an approving pat on the head in the form of a book-jacket promotion from former FBI

Director William Sessions. The fiction is perpetuated with the right-wing faithful, as with the book by former FBI man Gary

Aldrich, that the tyrannical actions we are now witnessing are an aberration, the product only of the takeover of the government by the "liberal" Bill Clinton and his Arkansas desperadoes.

Ruddy also discovers in the book that Jeff Gerth, the New York Times reporter who broke the Whitewater story, has a chapter on Richard Nixon's alleged secret mob ties and Jeff Cohen, now head of liberal media watchdog group, Fairness and

Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who was head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Assassination Information Bureau, "a leftwing group that promoted theories about Kennedy's, King's and other deaths," wrote the chapter on the killing of Martin

Luther King.

His presumed purpose in pointing these things out is to show how the mainstream press and the liberal establishment is infested with a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. A much more plausible interpretation is that these young writers were being given a good, leftist, anti-establishment sheep-dipping pursuant to being placed on a journalistic career track to power and influence. Just as Ruddy has established his bona fides with the right, and has already parleyed it into a Media Fellowship at the prestigious "conservative" think tank, the Hoover Institution, Blumenthal, Gerth, and Cohen were being groomed for bigger things when they got their tickets punched with their low-impact book with its self-discrediting title and its offputting leftist bias. Judging from their complete public inability to see the most serious current crimes of our government, along with most of the rest of their professed leftist brethren in the mainstream press, I am inclined to conclude that, in reality, they were no more radical critics of the government than the driven, politically-ambitious young Bill Clinton was a principled, anti-Vietnam War protestor.

Ruddy has given me reason to believe that he knows better. I was in regular communication with him from the time he wrote his first article on Foster in late January of 1994 up until shortly after I came out with my first installment of "Dreyfus" almost exactly two years later. Ironically, it was he who suggested that I do the essay showing the parallels between the

Foster and Dreyfus cases when I showed him the passage by Barbara Tuchman in her book, The Proud Tower: "(General

Mercier) had all the strength but truth on his side." I never made any bones about the fact with him that one of the things that raised my suspicion from the beginning about the Foster death was the similarity to the Kennedy assassination in the performance of the major news media, the lack of suspicion, the lack of curiosity, the high tolerance for anomalies, the inconsistencies and the changes in the early stories with hardly a comment from the press, and the overall willingness of the press to accept at face value virtually anything they were told by government authorities. He never took issue with me on any of these things. At one point he arranged for me to be a regular weekly guest with political poems and commentary on

Scott Wheeler's "Reporter's Journal" on the American Freedom Network out of Johnstown, Colorado. Several times I got back to Ruddy with my doubts about Wheeler's sincerity, because Wheeler, who is now with Paul Weyrich's National page 82


Empowerment Television, insisted on seeing things in simplistic good-conservative, bad-liberal terms, hardly any different from Rush Limbaugh. The screed that Ruddy recently penned against the young Blumenthal and his nutty conspiracy theories might have tripped from the tongue of Wheeler at any time.

When I expressed my doubts about Wheeler to Ruddy his response was, "Scott's okay, but you have to understand that he's just not as politically sophisticated as you are." The implication was that though Wheeler may not have such sophistication about various government misdeeds that transcend party and ideology, he, Ruddy, did. Ruddy was also quite defensive toward me about his reliance upon retired New York homicide detective, Vincent Scalice, because one of Scalice's big claims to fame is that he worked as a consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the body which, to my mind, perpetrated the second major cover-up, after the Warren Commission, of the Kennedy assassination.

The Script that Divides

Ruddy began to cool toward me noticeably as soon as I came out with the first installment of "Dreyfus." At first I took him at face value that he was upset because I had written that he made a "mistake" when he reported that the Park Police had not taken crime scene photographs. Now that I have seen the national script that is being followed over the Foster case, with all challenges to the official version of the truth supposed to have emanated from the "conservative" orbit of Richard Mellon

Scaife, I can see why my work might be a little upsetting to Ruddy, or more precisely, to those who have written the script.

Even excellent Internet web sites on the Foster case tout Ruddy's work and have links to his web site, which could lead to charges that they are ultimately Scaife operations as well. I do not fit the Scaife-beholden conservative mold, and I am willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if it involves the revelation of massive malfeasance in America's press. I am also a lot more inclined than Ruddy to give the required attention to cases like that of the December, 1991, murder of

Tommy Burkett, which is related to government corruption in the so-called drug war that well pre-dates Bill Clinton's presidency and to the FBI-embarrassing lawsuit of the harassed witness, Patrick Knowlton.

About the same time as I came out with the first installment of "Dreyfus," I was given a powerful object lesson on the force of the right-versus-left script. For quite some time I had been urged by my fellow Foster researcher, Hugh Turley, to get a computer that is up-to-date and fast enough to negotiate the Internet. He particularly wanted my voice to join his on a discussion group entitled the "cs (Clinton scandals) list." Though the very name of the group connotes a blinkered view of the political landscape, Turley told me that I would be among friends who were as skeptical of what the government was telling us about the Foster death as we were.

To the contrary, hardly more than a couple of months had passed before we were both banished from the group--to be precise, put punitively into the purgatory of "digest status" for the postings of others and told that anything we wanted to post must first clear a censor. Yes, political censors on the Net! And what was the charge. We were said to be engaging in

"media-bashing" and "ad hominem attacks." Upon the specific request of fellow cs member, Hugh Sprunt, no examples of the latter could be produced, which is no surprise because we never did it. We only defended ourselves when attacked by others. The real offense, then, was the media bashing, and as long as we have the press we do in the U.S. I shall remain a felon in the eyes of any discussion group that, in effect, criminalizes the pointing out of our media's shortcomings. As with the Dreyfus Affair, the principal enabler of tyrannical actions is a press that is in league with a corrupt government. They won't print your letters to the editor and they dump you like a hot potato from radio call-in shows--or screen you out in the first place. All we have left is the First Amendment and the Internet, and we would be seriously remiss in our civic responsibilities if we did not use them to the maximum extent of our ability.

Actually, I got the distinct impression that it was not the press-bashing per se that was so much the problem as that I departed so radically from the right-versus-left script. Apart from its apparent great interest in the minutiae of the Foster case, the overall tone of the group was little different from what one might hear on Rush Limbaugh or read in the pages of

The Washington Times. I wasted no time in pointing out that the "conservatives" were as much a part of the Foster cover-up as the "liberals" were. The so-called "Confidential Witness" who ostensibly found the body and then claimed to see no gun in the hand, I told the group, was not to be trusted. That is not just because he had wavered in his story when questioned by

Robert Fiske's FBI interrogators and not just because his long uphill hike to take a leak was implausible, but also precisely because he had gone public through the "conservative" G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy, I reminded the group, is not only a former

FBI agent, but in the Watergate caper he was accompanied by CIA man E. Howard Hunt and former Cuban freedom fighter,

Frank Sturgis, both of whom have been linked to the Kennedy assassination in published books. CW's tale was also suspect,

I noted, because it was being touted by ultimate Washington insider columnist, Robert Novak, and that Novak had otherwise shown no interest whatsoever in the Foster case. Both Liddy with his unsavory connections and Oliver North, with his reported connections to Latin American drug smugglers, have been handed the national megaphones they now hold not in page 83

WACKENHUT CORPORATION spite of these connections but precisely because of them, I speculated, in postings to the group.

Upon those preaching trust in "conservative" organs like The Washington Times or the editorial pages of the Wall Street

Journal I dashed cold water as well, and my assessment has been thoroughly borne out by the very positive reaction of these two publications to the cover-up report of Kenneth Starr on Foster--and their blackout of the news of the court-ordered attachment of the critical letter by the lawyer of aggrieved harassed witness Patrick Knowlton thereto. As evidence at the time I had begun to post my rejected letters to the editor to The Washington Times and my series of exchanges with the editors of the Wall Street Journal when I was banished. You'd think that curiosity alone would have made them hold off, but apparently I was cutting a bit too close to the bone and there was no time to waste. Assuming the readers of this tome have greater curiosity, I shall at this point, give you my first never-published Washington Times letter, with the others in an appendix, and my exchanges with the Journal. Recall that Foster's body was discovered on July 20, 1993:

July 26, 1993

To the Editor

The Washington Times

Dear Editor:

Anyone with a shred of curiosity must wonder about the identity and motives of your "source close to the Foster family" who seemed to go to such lengths to persuade us that senior White House aide Vincent Foster, Jr., was deeply and obviously depressed and therefore a likely candidate for suicide. Brother-in-law former Rep. Beryl Anthony was in much closer harmony with acquaintances in Arkansas who have spoken for attribution when he angrily denounced such insinuations.

Strong, solid, stable, and responsible, a successful professional litigator accustomed to pressure and hard work, Vince Foster hardly seemed the type who would take his own life because of a few minor setbacks and a hectic schedule.

Other news reports describe him as a man of uncommon intelligence and integrity. You may label me a cynic, but it seems to me that such is our current condition that those qualities alone would mark him as a prime candidate not for suicide, but for murder.

Sincerely,

We are referring here to the front-page Saturday, July 24 article by Frank Murray in which Murray checks on the allegations by the anonymous source that Foster had sought psychiatric help through the aid of his sister Sheila and her husband Beryl

Anthony. Anthony had responded, according to Murray, "There's not a damn thing to it. That's a bunch of crap." Recall that

Ruddy in his book notes that on July 27 Anthony becomes the first witness to refer to Foster's "depression," but Ruddy never mentions how radically Anthony's story had changed since he was caught off guard by the Murray phone call. (For the record, Dan Moldea, who says he supports the suicide conclusion, actually does recount the Murray-Anthony exchange, but as with many other such curiosities in his new book, which we shall discuss in detail later, he then proceeds as though he had never reported it.)

The Wall Street Journal's Role

Interestingly, in an editorial on July 28 strongly critical of the White House handling of the Foster death investigation entitled "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" the Wall Street Journal made pointed reference to the Anthony quote, suggesting that something was seriously amiss. By the late summer of 1996, however, the Journal editorial page had given strong advance indication that its tune was changing on Foster and that it was in on the cover-up. It was no surprise, then, when on

November 25, 1997, Micah Morrison weighed in at the top of the Journal's editorial page with a long article entitled "In Re:

Vincent Foster" in which he reviewed the Starr Report on Foster, Ruddy's book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, and Webster Hubbell's book, Friends in High Places. What he had to say is summed up in the following two sentences: "Mr. Starr's report convincingly answers the questions Mr.

Ruddy has raised over the years and repeats in his book.... Most of the...allegations, including the recollections of muchtouted witness Patrick Knowlton, represent the confusions inevitable in any large investigation of a dramatic event." page 84


Let us back up now to Thursday, March 23, 1995. Reporter Ellen Joan Pollock, demonstrating the apparent split personality of the Journal, has just written a truly scurrilous front-page article with the hackneyed title "Vince Foster's Death is a Lively

Business for Conspiracy Buffs." True to its title, the article rips into the crowd of supposed right-wing nuts and religious fanatics who are exploiting the Foster death by selling videos and sending out fund-raising letters outrageously suggesting that Vince Foster was murdered. I get a call from Ruddy urging me to send in a letter of refutation.

"There hasn't been a critical letter permitted in any American newspaper, yet," I respond. "I don't see why I should waste my time."

"This time it's different," answers Ruddy, "I have a friend who is letters editor there. Address it to Micah Morrison and it will get in."

"Okay," said I, and I hastily and not too optimistically slapped together a short letter that was less than my best effort, and lo and behold, on April 11 between the much longer ones of Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, Joe Farah of the Western

Journalism Center, and James Dale Davidson of the Strategic Investment newsletter, under the heading "Vince Foster, Big

Questions Remain" my letter got in. It is reprinted in the order in which it appeared among the other letters in Appendix II.

I couldn't help but think that the four letters together would have been quite a body blow to the casual Journal reader, who never before had been exposed (and hasn't been since in that paper) to so many doubts about the official version of events in the Foster case.

On July 1, 1996, I was further encouraged by the following nice, short letter:

Dear Mr. Martin,

The Wall Street Journal is about to publish another volume of our commentary on Whitewater. We're planning to include your April 11, 1995 letter to the editor. It will be published in full, as it appeared in the Journal.

We hope to have the book out in early August, and we'll send you a copy then.

Yours sincerely,

Melanie Kirkpatrick

Assistant Editor of the

Editorial Page

I had occasion to follow that letter up with a not-for-publication letter to the editor himself, which went as follows:

July 29, 1996

Mr. Robert L. Bartley, Editor

Dear Mr. Bartley:

Last week at a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute, in response to a question, Paul Gigot of your newspaper stated that The Wall Street Journal had taken its copy of the famous torn-up note said to have been found in Vincent Foster's page 85

WACKENHUT CORPORATION briefcase to its own handwriting expert who had, in contrast to the three experts hired by Strategic Investment newsletter, pronounced the note authentic. Mr. Gigot's assertion raises several new questions which I trust you will be able to answer:

1. Has this development, which would be of great importance to the nation, been reported in the pages of your newspaper? If so, when? If not, why not? Might it be so recent a development that it has simply not yet been reported?

2. Who is the expert and what are his credentials? How do they compare to those hired by Strategic Investment?

3. Will he make his full analysis public, including his methodology?

4. What is the status of your Freedom of Information Act request for at least a first generation copy of the actual note, in contrast to the bootlegged copy which you printed in your newspaper? Were you able to get this FOIA copy, and was this the one your expert used?

By the way, I was gratified to learn that my April 11, 1995, letter will be included in the update of your Whitewater compendium. The collection of letters that appeared in your paper on that date remains, to this day in my opinion, the most thorough and compelling discussion of the Foster death to appear anywhere in an American newspaper. It makes one wonder why we can't see more of the same elsewhere.

Sincerely,

I got no response, but I eventually did get my book, which prompted me to write again.

September 11, 1996

Dear Ms. Kirkpatrick:

Thank you very much for the complimentary copy of Vol. 2 of your Whitewater compendium. I suppose I should be especially grateful for the free book because, as it turned out, I apparently did nothing to earn it. I was expecting, as I had been told, that my letter of April 11, 1995, would be included in the volume, but try as I might, I can't find it, nor can I find the letters of Reed Irvine, James Davidson, and Joseph Farah published the same day. All these letters, as you are no doubt aware, cast serious doubt upon the official version of events surrounding the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent

W. Foster, Jr. Instead, I did notice articles and editorials in which the expression "Foster's suicide" was routinely used, as though it were a proven and universally agreed upon fact that Foster murdered himself.

I trust that being dropped from your book is not your answer to the enclosed inquiry which I sent to Editor Bartley on July

29. If it is, it is the only one I have yet received, and I really would like to have your newspaper's answer. Was Mr. Gigot not telling the truth to his audience at the American Enterprise Institute? Since I have not received an answer to the questions, my natural assumption can only be that Mr. Gigot must have resorted to fabrication in order to maneuver out of an uncomfortable spot created by a difficult question.

Now I have one more question. Does the dropping of my letter, and related ones, signal that even the editorial page of your newspaper is now on board with the government's Foster coverup?

Sincerely,

Enclosure page 86


Ms. Kirkpatrick eventually responded to that letter as follows:

October 8, 1996

Dear Mr. Martin,

As we were putting "Whitewater II" together, it grew to be too long and we had to cut some material. I'm sorry your Letter to the Editor didn't make the final cut, but I hope you enjoy our collection nonetheless.

As for you query on Vincent Foster's death, I just don't know when or whether we'll get into it again. We are following many threads and have to set priorities.

Sincerely,

Melanie Kirkpatrick

To which I could not resist responding as follows:

October 16, 1996

Dear Ms. Kirkpatrick:

Thank you for your October 8 letter responding to my letter of September 13. As I am sure you were aware when you wrote it, your response is generally unsatisfactory and your stated reason for dropping my letter from your Whitewater volume, in view of your overall treatment of the Foster death, is, I'm sorry to say, not very believable.

The questions I posed about Mr. Gigot's remarks before a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute were not idle ones.

To put it bluntly, I wanted to know if your columnist was telling the truth when he said that the Wall Street Journal had submitted a copy of the famous torn-up note reportedly found in Vincent Foster's briefcase to its own hired handwriting analyst, who declared it authentic. It certainly didn't ring true because I shouldn't think that a news disseminating organization would keep such important news to itself.

In my letter to you I said quite clearly that it was only natural for me to assume that the silence by which my initial query was greeted indicated that, indeed, Mr. Gigot had taken liberties with the truth. Your continued silence on the questions initially directed to Mr. Bartley, but redirected to you, even though you did take the trouble to write and there is no reason why you would not know or be able to get the answers, has turned my original assumption into a virtually certain conclusion.

You end your letter by telling me in an off-putting way that you don't know "when or whether" your paper will address the

Foster death mystery again, implying that there are any number of things that have a higher priority than solid evidence of

White House complicity in the apparent murder of one of its top officials, even to the point of forging a suicide note. At the

AEI presentation Mr. Gigot boasted that, of our major newspapers, the Journal's performance on the Foster case had been the best, and, you know, he was right about that at least. Is it any wonder that the American people have lost confidence in their newspapers and are turning away in droves?

Sincerely,

I'm sure that you are not surprised to learn at this point that that was the end of our correspondence. page 87


At least from this episode we were able to get a fine education as to why you won't see anyone from the mainstream press putting his head up on any of the Internet news groups. And as the things to keep covered up continue to mount, it seems that there are fewer and fewer functions being announced in the Washington area where one may go and ask a tough question or two of one of these authority figures.

Spin-Doctor Moldea

Anyone wanting to see world-class argument-from-authority on display, as well as a prime exhibit, much of it unintentional, of the fake right and the fake press at work, should check out A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster

Ignited a Political Firestorm by crime writer Dan E. Moldea. Published by "conservative" Regnery Publishing, Inc., the same people who gave us Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton and Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access

(though the former is a far, far better book, please note which one got the national publicity), it has the most in common with the Simon and Schuster-published Foster book of Christopher Ruddy. One gets the distinct impression, as much as their different interpretation of events is touted, that they are horses out of the same stable. Ruddy, in the way he stays away from the continuing pressure points on our political system by downplaying the significance of the lawsuit against FBI agents for their harassment and intimidation of the witness, Patrick Knowlton, avoiding elaborating upon all connections that might lead to larger bipartisan scandal like the slaying of Jerry Parks in Arkansas a couple of months after Foster and the murder of

Tommy Burkett a year and a half before, and ignoring the Republican cop-out, shows that he, or those who are behind him, never wanted more than to fan the flames of the left-right "political firestorm," not to obtain justice in the case. Ruddy seems to want very little more than to buy credibility with those who think of themselves as conservatives.

Moldea, describing himself on the flyleaf as a "pro-cop liberal," (as though declared bias and murder investigation were compatible) as he picks over the case, seeming to side with the tortured logic of the authorities at every turn, ends up doing the same thing for Ruddy that the infamous 60 Minutes interview of Mike Wallace or the White House's "Communication

Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" did for him. The more Moldea, the self-professed liberal, tries to show up Ruddy with half-baked defenses of the official line, the more he gives Ruddy all that he ever seemed to want out of the case, credibility with a narrow band of "conservative" followers. No one ever adhered to "the script" more scrupulously than Moldea, the script that says that the Foster case represents nothing more than a scrap between the "liberal" Clinton White House and a fringe of the "right wing." Ask yourself which one you are and that tells you what you are supposed to believe.

Let's dive right into the heart of this phony wrestling match. Look at how they both treat Indiana Republican Representative

Dan Burton. To both, Burton is the great skeptic on Capitol Hill. Neither seems to have noticed the fact that now that he is

Oversight Committee chairman, and in an ideal place to put up on the Foster case, he has shut up. Moldea gives us long passages from Burton's floor speech of July 13, 1994, when he was not even the ranking committee member of the minority party. Take a critical look at the snake oil he was selling:

"I believe there is a real possibility that Vince Foster committed suicide. I do not believe, after reading that (Fiske) report in some detail with about seven other people, that he committed suicide at Fort Marcy Park. I believe that his body was moved to that location...."

---

"There was blonde hair, not Mr. Foster's, on his T-shirt and other parts of his garments. Whose hair was it? It was not his.

There were carpet and other wool fibers found on the body. Where did they come from?

"I do not like to talk about this, but there was semen found on his underwear, which would indicate there might have been a sexual experience that afternoon between one and five."

---

"Why did the man who found Foster's body say there was no gun in either hand, not once, not twice, but three times when he talked to Gordon Liddy, and that is the man the FBI investigated.

"My concern is for the facts and the truth. When people say I am down here trying to bring this body to a low ebb, I resent it." (pp. 249-251)

One cannot help wondering where the great concern for facts and truth went when Burton became committee chairman. But was it really ever there? Even in the "courageous" floor speech there are the earmarks of fake-right misdirection, the same page 88

WACKENHUT CORPORATION emphasis on the curious, difficult-to-believe witness who comes to us through the dubious auspices of G. Gordon Liddy and

Robert Novak and the promotion of what looks for all the world like a safe fall-back position, the suggestion that Foster killed himself in some embarrassing place or manner and some folks then took it upon themselves to protect the family, the

White House, and the American people from the embarrassment by dumping the body in the out-of-the-way park. Even the fact that there is apparently "hard" evidence for such a scenario such as the unknown hair and the semen in the shorts might well be doubted. It originates, after all, with the dubious FBI lab, whose probity has recently been called into question in a number of other cases and which claimed to have detected the anti-depressant Trazadone in Foster's blood when it was missed by the autopsy toxicologist.

The Feeble Fall-Back Position

The biggest argument against the moved-suicide-victim theory, of course, is that it is simply farfetched on its face. Who would run the risk of making themselves look like murderers by transporting and dumping a suicide victim? And the assumption of suicide elsewhere fails to clear up many of the anomalies. How did he do it? What gun, if any, did he use?

Why did he do it, when all the evidence of depression seems to be based upon changed stories or forged writings that turn up in strange places?

It has been standard fare among the official right-wing crowd, however, which we might regard as reason in itself that it is not true. I heard it from an FBI-agent friend of Gary Aldrich as I stood in line at a book-signing in a store in McLean,

Virginia. The late Bernard Yoh, Director of Communications for Accuracy in Media (AIM), tried to cajole me and the professional writer Richard Poe into writing a fictionalized account of Foster being moved from a safe house after he had done himself in in some embarrassing way. Obviously, neither of us went for it.

An early article by Christopher Ruddy, on March 11, 1994, which Moldea talks about (pp.173-174) might well have been designed to buttress the suicide-elsewhere line and/or to take attention away from the real murder scene. Citing a confidential White House source, Ruddy said that Foster had "shared a secret apartment with several senior administration officials at the time of his death." The apartment was supposed to be just across the Potomac River from Washington, perhaps in the Crystal City section of Arlington.

Shortly after that article came out I was told by an acquaintance of mine who used to work for the CIA-contract Mitre

Corporation that Mitre had installed the security equipment at the White House and that their surveillance cameras were, as one might expect, state of the art. "They could tell you how close the driver of a car had shaven when he drove in the gate in the morning," he said. It had intrigued me that with everyone wondering where Vince had gone after he left the White House proper, no one had ever raised the question of when the surveillance videos showed him leaving the White House grounds or whether they showed him leaving the grounds alive at all. I passed the word on to Ruddy and asked if he might look into it.

A week or so later he came back to me with the incredible story that his White House source had told him that there were no such surveillance cameras, that Clinton had found that they cramped his carousing style and he had had them removed. I relayed that word to my acquaintance, who simply shook his head in disbelief.

Upon further reflection, the failure of the Park Police or the FBI to interview on the record anyone minding either of the gates to the White House compound or the exits of the Old Executive Office Building that Foster would have had to use to leave the White House compound, as opposed to the White House, itself, is as telling as the failure to consult the surveillance record. Taken together they strongly suggest that Foster, in fact, never left the White House compound alive on

July 20, 1993, and the investigators know it. Ruddy's lack of interest in these matters, in fact, his apparent fabrication to steer me away from them, is, in retrospect, at least as telling. It is also reminiscent of the apparent fabrication by Paul Gigot that a handwriting expert hired by the Wall Street Journal had examined the torn-up note "found" in Foster's briefcase and had pronounced it authentic.

Nowhere is the false trail that members of the fake right would want us to follow laid out more explicitly than in a March 14,

1995, letter that was sent to Foster researcher, Hugh Sprunt:

My feeling is that the Foster death indeed was a suicide, and that the scandal will arise from (a) where he was during the time he left the White House and his body was found; (b) why he killed himself and (c) what the Clinton crowd was so eager to conceal afterwards ... Ruddy and others have done good work in keeping the pressure on for the truth. We've lived with various Grassy Knoll conspiracy theories since Nov. 22, 1963, and we do not need another. That is why the investigation of page 89

WACKENHUT CORPORATION the Foster death should be thorough and leave no avenues unpursued. (Moldea, p. 288)


The writer of that letter to Sprunt, at the time the number two man at AIM under Reed Irvine, is described this way by

Moldea in a note:

(Joseph C.) Goulden, a respected award-winning journalist and the former Washington bureau chief of the Philadelphia

Inquirer, was also the bestselling author of sixteen books. Many in the world of journalism and publishing were shocked when Goulden joined Irvine and the right-wing AIM group in January 1989. But the fifty-nine-year old Goulden, who had all the money he needed from the success of his books, believed that his generation had made a mess of journalism, and that serious media criticism had been lacking.

I received a quite different view of Goulden from AIM's Bernie Yoh. He virtually apologized to me for a piece that AIM had put out debunking the very idea that the government could have been involved in any way in the arms and drug smuggling operation at Mena Airport in northwestern Arkansas, saying that the piece was the exclusive work of Goulden, and Goulden, he told me, was "connected." He certainly meant by that that Goulden was connected to the intelligence community, most likely the CIA. Goulden does little to dispel the notion. He tosses off lines in his articles and books like "...when I was having lunch with an old friend who had spent twenty-five years with CIA as a covert agent" (The Death Merchant, p. 15), and I recall his having made reference at a conservative conference to his own training in "psychological warfare," which is spook speak for propaganda. Most recently he had a column in The Washington Times praising the new book by Gerald

Posner that predictably attempts to debunk the notion that James Earl Ray might not have been guilty of the murder of

Martin Luther King.

Goulden even turns up in the Meagher book (p. 348) on the Kennedy assassination floating the rumor in the Philadelphia

Inquirer just 16 days after the killing that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the FBI payroll as an informant. Meagher marvels that neither Goulden nor two other writers reporting such speculation or allegations were ever called to testify before the Warren

Commission. Peter Dale Scott in his Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, overlooking the third writer, Harold Feldman of

The Nation, handles the episode this way in an end note: "The story was first floated by two journalists with intelligence connections, Joe Goulden (Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1963) and Alonso Hudkins (Houston Post, January 1, 1964)."

(p. 368)

Goulden was also overheard by Hugh Turley, who was seated directly in front of him, mutter almost under his breath,

"That's nonsense," at a C-Span-televised, AIM sponsored panel discussion on Foster at the Army-Navy Club when Patrick

Knowlton's lawyer, John Clarke, rose to describe the staring-down intimidation treatment that Knowlton claims to have suffered on the streets of Washington, DC. Afterwards, in the lobby, Turley asked Goulden what he meant by the "nonsense" remark. Goulden responded, "I know about psychological operations, and they don't do things like that."

The most compelling evidence on Goulden's CIA affiliation comes from his own pen in a footnote on page 138 of Death

Merchant, his book about the CIA "renegade," Edwin Wilson:

"Even after Wilson's convictions no one in the CIA would speak about him for attribution. Therefore, what I call "informal answers" came from officials who desired to state "CIA's side of the story," but who were also bound by the decision to say nothing publicly about Wilson. My own view, which I argued vigorously in the upper echelons of the CIA, is that the agency could have shaken much undeserved mud from its boots by talking candidly about Wilson. I did not prevail. The persons who did talk with me, on a background basis, are of sufficient rank that I am confident they "spoke for the Agency," even if anonymously."

Yoh, a charming, cultured, broadly-educated man with whom I conversed by phone almost daily for a couple of years, when he talked about intelligence, Goulden, and psychological warfare, certainly was one to know whereof he spoke. Here he is alluded to by Douglas Valentine in his 1990 book, The Phoenix Program, "Eight years later, after enduring religious persecution in Laos, Father Hoa was persuaded by Bernard Yoh--a Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) intelligence officer on loan to the CIA--to resettle his flock in the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau peninsula in southern South Vietnam." (p.

37) page 90


Here he is colorfully and disparagingly described doing his public relations work for the President of South Vietnam in the

1965 book by Hilaire du Berrier, Background to Betrayal, the Tragedy of Vietnam:

"Bernie Yoh was the stooge to fly back and forth between Washington and Saigon; to Saigon so he could say he had been there, then back to America to tell editors, women's clubs and congressmen, Don't believe what you hear. I have just come from Vietnam. I have been in the jungles with the guerillas, killing Communists, and we are winning. You are not going to desert Vietnam as you did my country, are you?" (p. 143)

Yoh denied to me that he had ever worked for the CIA, saying that he thought they were too stupid for him to have anything to do with them, but he had lectured to the U.S. Army War College on a subject in which he claimed world-class expertise, psychological warfare.

Since Ruddy was working hand and glove with AIM on the Foster case (though he had told me that it was an anonymous

Washington Times reporter thwarted by his superiors rather than Reed Irvine who had enticed him into the investigation, as

Moldea tells us a couple of times), I passed on Yoh's intelligence about the journalist-cum-spook Goulden to Ruddy, who seemed to take the report at face value. Ruddy, who is not altogether lacking in a sense of humor, later joked with me that when he met with Goulden he let drop on a couple of occasions that he, Ruddy, was capable of being bought and that his price was a million dollars. The idea was that if he should ever be offered such an amount to stop pursuing the Foster case by spook-central, he would know how they arrived at the figure. I would inquire from time to time if the offer had been forthcoming, and the answer was always in the negative. Now I wonder who the joke was on all along.

More Spooks?

Before leaving the subject of apparent cloak-and-daggery involved in the Foster "political firestorm," we must mention a couple of very curious organizations showcased by Moldea. Referring to a March 13, 1994, article in The Washington Post, he writes, "(Michael) Isikoff also spotlights Floyd Brown, the chairman of Citizens United, a nonprofit conservative group, which has hired two full-time investigators' to investigate Foster's death. One of the investigators is David Bossie, known by some as a young attack dog' who has been brought on, specifically, to investigate President Clinton in a practice known as opposition research.'" He also reminded us that Brown had been behind the production of the Willie Horton commercials which played on racial fears and made Michael Dukakis, in his presidential campaign against George Bush in 1988, appear to be soft on crime.

That Isikoff article--and particularly that passage-- had jumped out at me when I first read it, but certainly not because I believed it was true. I surmised that what I was witnessing was the propaganda technique that would later reach its finest flower in the Moldea book. The Post, I suspected, was intentionally showcasing Citizens United to give the group free publicity, building them up as legitimate, though unscrupulous, overzealous, and exceptionally-partisan conservative opponents of Bill Clinton. Those thinking of themselves as conservative would then gravitate toward the group rather than form their own groups while everyone else would be given an easy explanation as to where all these scurrilous, irresponsible and unfounded charges against the Clintons might be coming from. For their part, Brown and his group could be counted on the create a lot of sound and fury primarily about minor and complicated Clinton financial shenanigans centered around the joint vacation-home investment with the McDougals known as Whitewater, with perhaps a sexual peccadillo or two thrown in for spice.

These were my suspicions because, active as I was in looking into the Clinton administration misdeeds by this time and although I lived and worked in the Washington area, I had never heard of Citizens United. Most importantly, in the small world of people nosing into the Foster death the paths of the "two full-time investigators" had never crossed mine. Bossie had not been named as one of them, as Moldea implies, and, at any rate, I had not heard of him either. I also wondered how, if they were spending so much time on the case they were yet to come up with anything that had been made public, considering all there was to come up with. I tracked down a phone number for the group and called them, asking them who the two Foster investigators were. The woman on the other end of the line didn't know what I was talking about and couldn't find anyone there at that moment who did. I requested that she have one of their two investigators call me so we could compare notes should she ever ferret him out and asked her to send me some of the group's material. I never heard from the

"investigators," but I did get some material from them although it took at least a month to arrive. The literature was slick and expensive-looking, with a number of boxes to check at the bottom of the last page for how much money I would send them, ending on the top end at some outrageously high figure, but the disclosures of Clinton misdeeds were so bland and the organization had been so languid in responding to my initial inquiry, one had to wonder why anyone would be moved to page 91

WACKENHUT CORPORATION send them a dime. The distinct impression left with the perceptive reader was that the plea for contributions was there to give the group some visible means of support. To this day I have never read or heard of the first thing with respect to the Foster case that this organization has ever uncovered or publicized.

Later when I learned that Bossie had ended up, in spite of his lack of legal, law-enforcement or even journalistic experience, as Rep. Burton's chief investigator of the Clinton scandals, I was not at all surprised. I was even less surprised when he turned out to be the guy held responsible for the Burton-discrediting selective release of Webb Hubbell's prison tapes. It is no less than what one should expect of a fake-right operative.

Speaking of which, another patently phony Clinton-opposition group accounts for no more than a flickering zephyr in

Moldea's "political firestorm" account, but he appears to take them seriously, nonetheless. That is the bizarre outfit that fashions itself the Clinton Investigative Commission. In his penultimate endnote, Moldea credits "investigative reporter"

Byron York of The American Spectator with having written a "hilarious expose" of the group (speaking of outfits lacking evident economic viability, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, Moldea tells us in his text, had a review by York of

Ruddy's book in which he concluded "the conspiracy theorists simply have too much invested in their scenarios to conclude that the evidence proves them wrong."). One can't help wonder what awesome investigative and literary skills York had to bring to bear to make this crew appear ridiculous. It could hardly be more obvious that their entire reason for being is to make all suspicions of the Foster death appear almost humorously absurd. That our clandestine community has gone to such lengths as to manufacture such ruses is just about the best evidence we have that we are dealing with something far more important here than a simple suicide.

Consider the fact that on Saturday, October 19, 1997, (it would be a Saturday) The Washington Times, on the heels of its ringing endorsement of the Starr suicide conclusion, permitted under the heading "More questions than answers on Vince

Forster (sic)," its first and only skeptical letters to date on the Foster case. The first and by far the longest of the letters almost comically mixes up the facts in the case. It is signed "Scott Lauf, Director of communications, Clinton Investigative

Commission, Annandale (VA)." Lauf maintains once again that Foster was left-handed, the apparently erroneous assertion over which Ruddy had been crucified on national TV by Mike Wallace, and tells us that park policeman Kevin Fornshill

"stated to the FBI that there was no gun in Mr. Foster's hand, that both palms were face up and his arms were laid by his side as if in a coffin." (Here he is putting the testimony of several other witnesses into the mouth of Fornshill, who, in fact, claims not to have seen a gun, but he said that after discovering the body he never bothered to look to see if there was a gun in the hand.).

The second letter is a vague, two-sentence fluff ball by a California reader who also happens to be a heavy participant in the alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater news group on the Internet. This reader, by coincidence, has, of late, taken to attacking me, though I find it almost impossible to pin down what it is he doesn't like about my message.

The third letter, five short paragraphs in length from a reader in Pennsylvania, faults The Times in a general way for not having done enough of its own research, compares Starr's work unfavorably to Ruddy's, offers an on-script gratuitous swipe at "conspiracy theories," saying that they (I think he means the theorists.) are "intellectually lazy," and concludes, "As you point out, the Clintons have dissembled and covered up. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask why."

In the first, almost comical, fund-raising letter that I saw from the Clinton Investigative Commission I noted that they gave the name of a non-profit group in Arlington, Virginia as their respectable-sounding parent organization. They provided no telephone number but gave a street address. I went looking for their office, but found that although the street existed, there was no address with a number even close to the one given.

If, in this Orwellian world that America has become, letter writers aren't really letter writers, leftists aren't really leftists, rightists aren't really rightists, citizens' groups aren't really citizens' groups, respected veteran journalists aren't really respected veteran journalists, major book authors aren't really major book authors, and magazine investigative reporters aren't really magazine investigative reporters, one can surely say the same thing for newspapers and their reporters.

Moldea's Big Revelation

The big scoop in the Moldea book, the thing that would have commanded headlines if we had anything remotely resembling page 92

WACKENHUT CORPORATION a free press in the country, is the revelation that the pivotal newspaper article linking Vince Foster and his death to the lesser scandal known as "Whitewater" and precipitating the employment first of a special prosecutor and then an independent counsel, is fraudulent. Moldea, the "pro cop" writer has been given access to the Park Police that apparently goes beyond anything we have seen before, even in the official investigation. At times, then, when cops are his source, he breaks new ground. With this in mind, let us look now at the revelation by lead Washington Times reporter, Jerry Seper, on December

20, 1993, that "Whitewater documents" were removed from Foster's office in the wake of his death.

First, Ruddy's account is straight from the script:

"Fiske's appointment may be a classic example of how much influence the press can have in not only opening a criminal probe, but defining its extent. In this case, it was the conservative Washington, D.C. daily, the Washington Times, that drove the case.

"On December 20, 1993, five months to the day after Foster's death, the Times reported that it had learned from Park Police sources that Whitewater documents in Foster's office had been spirited out before the Park Police could search the office. (p.

138, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster).

----

"The all-but-forgotten Whitewater affair, first broached by the New York Times (Jeff Gerth, remember. ed.) in 1992, might have passed forever were it not for the December 1993 coverage of the Washington Times and the links it was suggesting between Foster's death, the strange activities of officials in his office, and the land partnership deal." (p. 139)

Readers of my entire "Dreyfus" will recall that back on page 24 of the initial installment I had expressed skepticism that the

Park Police could have known at that time that Whitewater files were among those removed from Foster's office, implying that what we are actually dealing with here is an official, purposeful leak. Moldea as much as confirms it, but doesn't seem to have recognized what he has done.

First, he improves on Ruddy by telling us that The New York Times on December 19, 1993, had an article which reports that

"law-enforcement" sources say that Foster had a separate file on Whitewater figure Jim McDougal and speculates that those documents might have found their way to Foster lawyer Jim Hamilton.

"In reality, Hamilton has no such file, and never did," says Moldea. (p. 145) What he then says about Jerry Seper's headline article entitled "Clinton papers lifted after aide's suicide" in the next-day's Washington Times deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

"While the New York Times and the Washington Post had merely speculated about the disappearance of Foster's files on

McDougal during the July 20 and July 22 searches' by (Bernard) Nussbaum, Seper, citing two U.S. Park Police investigators,' flat-out declares: White House officials removed records of business deals between President Clinton, his wife and an Arkansas partnership known as Whitewater Development Corp. from the office of Vincent W. Foster Jr. during two searches after the deputy presidential counsel's suicide.' Then Seper makes the same mistake the New York Times had made the day before, saying, The Park Police investigators familiar with the Foster inquiry say the Whitewater documents were among those taken from the office by White House officials and later turned over to Mr. Foster's attorney, James Hamilton.'"

(pp. 145-146)

At this point Moldea has an asterisk and an accompanying note at the bottom of the page which completely confirms my earlier suspicion that this story did not, as Seper tells us, originate with the Park Police:

"During my separate interviews with Captain (Charles) Hume and Detective (Pete) Markland, who were the only two Park

Police officials present for Nussbaum's search of Foster's office, they each told me that, at the time of the search, they had no idea what Whitewater was. Also, both Lieutenant Robert Kass and Investigator (John) Rolla, who went through Foster's personal files in Jim Hamilton's office on July 28, told me that they, too, neither saw Whitewater documents, nor had any knowledge of what Whitewater was at the time."

What Moldea says next is almost as interesting: page 93


"Consequently, even though this claim in Seper's story is inaccurate, White House Communications Director Mark Gearan is forced (that same day) to issue a statement..." which confirms that Whitewater files were indeed taken out of Foster's office on the 22nd by Nussbaum and turned over not to Hamilton but were sent instead to the Clintons' personal attorney, Robert

Barnett and later David Kendall of Williams and Connolly.

Moldea appears to be saying that it is untrue that there were Whitewater files taken from Foster's office because they did not, contrary to reports, end up with either Foster's or the Clintons' personal attorneys, but he offers no evidence for that assertion. But he does nail down solidly his claim that the Park Police were not Seper's source for his monumental scoop. All of the possible Park Police sources for the leak deny it on the most believable of grounds, that they, in effect, didn't know

Whitewater from white wine at that point. But then Moldea shows all of the aggressiveness of a manatee by letting Seper off the hook, saying simply that he made a "mistake."

What mistake? Seper knows who gave him the information. Moldea is providing us with compelling evidence that the razorsharp "investigative reporter" for the paper that "drove the case" and kept Whitewater alive as a political issue, The

Washington Times, is simply lying. And what an influential lie it was!

A cry for those precious files goes up all around in the mainstream press and in the Congress along with calls to Attorney

General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor. The putatively liberal and definitely influential newspapers, The

Washington Post and The New York Times both weigh in with editorials crying wolf over the White House stonewalling.

Even the TV networks get interested. Among those pretending outrage over White House lack of cooperation in this little misdirection ruse related to the precious Whitewater files is our friend at the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot: "Whitewater may not be Watergate, but the Clinton White House's skill in handling the real estate S&L suspicions has certainly earned it the right to be called Nixonian," he writes on January 7, 1994.

"You probably think I'm part of the conspiracy," he had said at the AEI gathering, as he smugly dismissed the pesky questioner about the likelihood that the suicide note was forged. Either possibility, he would have had us believe, projecting the insufferable self-importance of the American celebrity journalist, is as farfetched as the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.

On January 12, Janet Reno produced the desired result and the Foster case had its first General Mercier, someone to personify the cover-up and give it credibility in the form of Robert Fiske.

Seper may have fabricated his source for the leak that changed history, but if, as Moldea maintains, the whole story of the

Whitewater connection to Foster's office is a fabrication as well, you can be sure that it did not originate with Seper, no more than the story that the police were turned away from the Foster residence the night Vince died originated with Ann Devroy or Michael Isikoff of The Washington Post or the story that the list of psychiatrists was found in Foster's office rather than his car originated with Isikoff or Sidney Blumenthal of the New Yorker, or the many stories recounting how "depressed"

Foster seemed originated with the various mainstream reporters who passed the tale along from anonymous sources.

Another Journalistic "Mistake"

Moldea also tells us of another confirmed significant fabrication relayed by a reporter, this one a recent winner of a Pulitzer

Prize, but once again he excuses it as just a "mistake," and he misses its likely fake political firestorm significance completely. I refer to the infamous ballyhooed "Case Closed" article by Mike McAlary in the New York Daily News. The article, notes Moldea, is riddled with factual errors, and he continues:

"In the biggest mistake of all, McAlary further claims: The body was discovered by a park maintenance worker who had slipped into the area for a quiet midday drink. He reported finding the body, but then made up a story about having seen a white van. He has since recanted the white van story, admitting it was created to cover up his own behavior.'"

How truly bizarre! Moldea can recognize in retrospect that the story has problems because the final official story is the same page 94

WACKENHUT CORPORATION as the original, that is that the man in the white van found the body and he then drove up the road and told the maintenance worker who phoned in the report, but what can one make of Moldea's complete lack of curiosity about either the provenance or the purpose of this intervening story relayed by our new Pulitzer laureate?

The McAlary story was worrisome from the beginning. If the maintenance worker had lied initially he would have, in all probability, stuck to it. Drinking and goldbricking on the job is not something one readily owns up to even if it doesn't involve admitting lying the first time through and even if it isn't related to something so important as a potential homicide. In short, it sounded like a whopper, sort of like the absence of security cameras at the White House or the Foster family lawyer not permitting the Park Police to interview the grown Foster children.

The only purpose for it that I can see is that it gave the so-called "confidential witness," now identified as construction worker Dale Kyle, an excuse to break his silence and come forward. He said he did so because he had heard that this maintenance worker was now telling a false story about the body's discovery, and he just wanted to set the record straight.

He chose Liddy as his conduit, he said, because Liddy had shown he was the sort of man who could keep secrets in the

Watergate case. If that was his real reason it had to be an act of extraordinarily poor judgment. Considering Liddy's secretgovernment background and associates, he's about the last person I would confide a life-and-death secret to involving highlevel skulduggery. Kyle also said that he didn't come forward at the beginning because he "didn't want to end up like that fellow back in the park. But at that point the body in the park could have been anybody, and now he knows who it was and he has first-hand information that suggests that it was a murder and not the suicide they say it was, and he's confiding it to the G-man? First he's inexplicably cowardly and then he's inexplicably bold.

So where did McAlary get the story that ostensibly flushed Kyle out? It probably came from his stated primary source for the article, the Park Police, but the chance that they originated it is about is great as that McAlary did himself. Tell me where this one and Seper's story and several of Isikoff's stories came from and I'll tell you who the Foster killers were. I think, probably, that the crime writer Moldea could do so as well. Whether he would do so, of course, is the more interesting question.

Minus the obvious errors (One gets the distinct impression that Moldea's book was proofed by the folks at AIM and perhaps by the independent researcher Sprunt as well, though it is hard to see how they could have missed Moldea's completely unfounded claim that Patrick Knowlton ever said or denied he said that he could pick a certain GW Parkway van driver out of a lineup. [p. 417]), what Moldea has wrought is nothing more than a much longer version of the McAlary article. A safe reporter has been selected to embellish the official suicide line with inside information. Just as McAlary says he was given access to a Park Police report that had not been made public more than half a year after the official verdict had been rendered, Moldea claims to have seen autopsy and crime scene photos which we are not allowed to see and he is also allowed to talk to policemen who tell him things that they not only have not told to reporters but they haven't even said before in their official depositions, at least in none that have been released.

Moldea Undercuts Himself

For one whose apparent purpose is to continue to keep the lid on the scandal, this method has its pitfalls. We have already seen how it has resulted in exposing the reporter Seper and his newspaper, The Washington Times, as apparent liars and frauds. There are other examples. Take, for instance, the following passage:

"Hume then walks over to Detective Markland and tells him that a torn-up note from Foster has been found. When Markland asks where the note was discovered, Hume replies, In Foster's briefcase--the one Nussbaum searched on the floor.'

" Bullshit!' Markland exclaims in disbelief. Either it didn't come out of the briefcase, or Nussbaum was lying that he didn't see the note!'"

Detective Pete Markland, Moldea dutifully reminds the reader, was present and observing intently, as were several other people, when Nussbaum cleaned out the briefcase and inventoried its contents. On page 111 we have this from Markland's written report: "After the contents were removed, I could see that he spread open the briefcase and visually inspected it as if to confirm that it was, indeed, empty. Mr. Nussbaum did not recall doing what I described." page 95


Most of all, though, Markland's spontaneous reaction to the claim that not one but twenty-seven pieces of a torn-up note had subsequently been "found" in that emptied-out briefcase speaks volumes. It would be hard to find better evidence that the note is a fraud, and it negates almost completely Moldea's attempts to paint the note as authentic by calling Ken Starr's handwriting expert "respected" (an adjective that he also uses for former BCCI lawyer Robert Fiske and, as we have seen,

Joe Goulden) and dishonestly casting aspersions in a note on the motivations of noted literary document authenticator

Reginald Alton of Oxford University who had declared the note a forgery.

If the note is a fraud the whole suicide house of cards comes tumbling down, of course. Although he is only talking about the

Foster lawyer Jim Hamilton at the time, and not the authenticity of the note, Moldea lets drop the following bit of information in an end note on page 410:

"On August 25, 1993, Hamilton sent a letter to Attorney General Reno, asking her for the original of Foster's torn-up note. In his letter, Hamilton wrote: The family, of course, understood the need for the Park Police and the FBI to obtain and analyze the note. Now, however, the investigations into Vince's death are concluded and family members see no good reason why the note should not be returned to Mrs. Foster.'

"Reno politely turned down Hamilton's request."

That is the letter that I reproduce in its entirety on page 50-51 of the first installment of "Dreyfus." Hamilton in that letter also says, "The family appreciates the manner in which the Department and you handled the note during the investigations and particularly thank you for your decision not to release a photograph of the actual note. That clearly was the correct decision for all concerned."

What's the big deal with the photocopy when the text is already out, if not to keep it out of the hands of authenticators? If one were trying to act guilty of a forgery it is hard to see how he would behave any differently. Had Moldea reproduced the whole letter--along with the Markland observations-- in the context of the note's authenticity he would have left little doubt that it is, indeed, a forgery, which is reason enough why he didn't do it.

Toward the end of the book, Moldea presents new police evidence that virtually destroys Dr. Henry Lee's desperate attempt to show, in conflict with the testimony of all the witnesses at the park that night, that a bloody mess came flying out of the back of Foster's head along with the exiting bullet. The problem is that no one saw or collected any evidence of it under the path of the bullet or on surrounding vegetation. According to the autopsy report, the bullet as it passed through the back of

Foster's skull opened up a one inch by inch-and-a-quarter hole. The pressure of the gases from the explosion that propels the bullet, the bullet itself, and Foster's own blood pressure should have all caused blood and brains to spew out of the relatively large hole like a geyser, which it apparently did not. Here's how the Starr Report tries to salvage the situation:

Possible Bloodstains on Vegetation at Scene

Dr. Lee stated that one photograph of the scene "shows a view of the vegetation in the areas where Mr. Foster's body was found. (Note the imprecision. ed.) Reddish-brown, blood-like stains can be seen on several leaves of the vegetation in this area. He also noted that "[a] close-up view of some of these blood-like stains can be seen in [a separate] photograph." (p. 59)

Moldea, in his summary of the Starr Report, refers to this passage but then gives us this end note:

"USPP Investigator Renee Abt told me that she, along with other police investigators had specifically examined the foliage around Foster's body for blood but found none. However, "Abt, a gardener, did observe minuscule raised brown spots on the leaves which she described as leaf disease.'" (p. 443)

If this is the conspiracy debunking book it's been touted to be, perhaps we need more of them. We have given just a few of the many, many examples in which Moldea just drops out powerful evidence that thoroughly undercuts the official suicide line to which he doggedly pretends to adhere. In his promotional interviews for the book Moldea, like Kenneth Starr and page 96


James Stewart, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of the book Blood Sport, has stressed motivation, concluding that it was private more than public worries that led Foster to do himself in.

Turning to Moldea's book all we find in the way of support for his argument is a rehash of Blood Sport, which he pumps up by calling it "a widely respected chronicle of the Clinton administration" and "a well-researched and important book," as evidenced by the fact that it made number one on the New York Times best-seller list. One of the reasons for the book's success, he tells us, is the "penetrating interview" of Susan Thomases, the Clinton confidante who told of an evening meeting in the privacy of her guest-house boudoir on July 14, 1993, in which Vince poured out his heart to her about his despair for his marriage on account of his burdensome wife in whom he is unable to confide.

Moldea, believe it or not, takes at face value this account in which the very private and supremely confident Vince Foster, the handsome southern gentleman whom Moldea tells us elsewhere the female employees of the White House had chosen as the man with whom they would most like to have an affair (Now that has the ring of truth. They're only a few months on the job and look what they're concerning themselves with.), looks for all the world to be hitting on the dauntingly plain Susan

Thomases.

"Thomases, didn't know what to say. Foster seemed calm, dignified--but infinitely sad," concludes Moldea's long quote from

Stewart on page 340 (a quote that also appeared in a long excerpt from the book in a Time cover story).

Moldea appears to forget completely what he had written back on page 224 about Thomases' earlier deposition to the FBI:

"Thomases tells the FBI that the last time she saw Foster was on either Wednesday, July 14, or Thursday, July 15, 1993, just days before Foster's death. They had lunch together; other people were present, she says. She adds that she could offer no reason or speculation as to why he may have taken his life.'"

The best one can say for Moldea here is that at least he doesn't attempt to resolve the contradiction by suggesting that this is one of the examples where the FBI misreported a witness's statement as Chris Ruddy does in his book. The script that

Stewart was using was apparently the real thing. In order to adhere to it on this subject Ruddy would undercut himself almost as badly as Moldea does repeatedly.

So regularly does Moldea undercut himself that one begins to think of him as a hostage forced to write a letter to the outside world in which he is told what he is supposed to say. He knows he must please his captors so all the broad outlines of the letter are completely in accord with their wishes, but he laces the letter with hidden messages for alert outside readers so they will know he really doesn't mean what he seems to be saying. Another comparison that one might make is with The

Washington Times. The Times has done one-time, bump-and-run articles telling us of the suit by the aggrieved witness

Patrick Knowlton against his alleged FBI harassers working for Kenneth Starr, the forgery findings of the three handwriting experts, and on Dr. Beyer's indefensible autopsy performance in the Timothy Easley and Tommy Burkett cases. They also regularly printed full-page ads by Ruddy in which he detailed many of the unexplainable anomalies in the official version of the death. If one accepts what is in these articles and ads as true then one cannot endorse the official suicide verdict, but that is precisely what the newspaper's editorial writers and reporters do, embracing the Starr Report and routinely referring to the

"Foster suicide."

Upholding "The Script"

What seems important to Moldea, as to The Times, is not really the truth in the Foster case but that the left-versus-right fiction be kept up. To read Moldea, from early-August, 1993, when the Park Police declared suicide, to late-December,

1993, when The Washington Times wrote of the removal of Whitewater documents from Foster's office, everything was going along just swimmingly. And no one has any real reason to be concerned until the "conservative" Ruddy and the

"conservative" AIM start stirring things up the next month. All the problems with the case evident from just reading the newspapers carefully and using ones own common sense, which I detail in the first part of "Dreyfus," simply do not exist. In light of the fact that the Foster case is only a concern of the far right, the general public can put it out of their minds. It works just as well from the other side: page 97


"The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with (Martin Luther) King when he was shot, said he agrees with the family's quest (for a new investigation of the killing), and has told Mr. Clinton of his own feeling that federal officials should keep investigating because rumors persist among black Americans that King was the victim of a government conspiracy." (The Washington

Times, June 17, 1998)

Get the message? If you are not a black American, it's none of your concern, no more than the Foster death should be your concern if you are not a right-wing fanatic, in particular, a follower of the godfather of most major right-wing conspiracist's causes, Richard Mellon Scaife.

In the final analysis, the obvious overall purpose of the Moldea book, even with it's numerous revelations that undermine the official suicide case, is to further flesh out the White House charges contained in their 331-page Communication Stream of

Conspiracy Commerce. He even makes quite uncritical reference to the document along with a favorable acknowledgment to another script-reader, Philip Weiss of the New York Times Magazine, for revealing the existence of the White House report in his mini-version of Moldea's book, "The Clinton Haters," a February 23, 1997, cover article. Weiss lets out some useful information as well, such as the news of the Knowlton harassment and lawsuit, but as long as the broad-brush impression is left that only some kind of nut could possibly care about or even believe these things, and everything remains contained within the right-versus-left structure, that's okay. A by-product of the operation is that fake opposition, or, at the very least, acceptable opposition, which is regarded with all the mock horror of Br'er Rabbit contemplating the briar patch, is built up and publicized. Unapproved opposition not using the horse-and-buggy, never-bother-to-defend-what-you-write traditional media, only gets the back of Moldea's hand:

"...an avalanche of questionable data and wild speculation about the Foster case finds its way onto the Internet, demonstrating the best and worst of the new information superhighway. President Clinton, one of the Internet's greatest supporters, is accused of everything from weapons trafficking to murder, among many other groundless allegations." (pp.

326-327)

Finally, Moldea's very different perspective from mine on the scurrilous, Weiss-style front-page article for the Wall Street

Journal about the lively business shameless right-wing "conspiracy buffs" have made out of the Foster death, and the article's aftermath, is instructive. Many of the Scaife-dependent culprits who later turn up in the Weiss article and the White House

"Communications Stream" are there, but Accuracy in Media and its director, Reed Irvine, who have certainly done more than their share to keep the Foster case alive, are missing.

Moldea then has an amazing long passage in which he quotes from and alludes to the taped transcript of Reed Irvine's call of complaint to Ms. Pollock for having been left out. Irvine, the responsible government doubter, gets all the better of Ms.

Pollock in the exchange as Moldea recounts it, demonstrating his far greater command of the subject than the Wall Street

Journal reporter who is supposed to be covering the case.

Noting earlier in the book Moldea's use of previously unpublished excerpts from White House press briefings in the wake of the Foster death, briefings that a friend of mine first ferreted out and furnished to me, which I then passed on to Irvine, I had suspected that Moldea worked very closely with the people at AIM in preparing this book. His use here of AIM-taped phone transcripts and Moldea's uniformly positive mention of the organization throughout the book certainly confirms that. (Giving

Irvine the benefit of the doubt, he might have thought that exposing Moldea to the facts would lead him to the proper and obvious conclusion. Moldea, unfortunately seemed determined not to let facts get in the way of what was apparently a conclusion that was foreordained)

"After this conversation," writes Moldea, "Irvine, Farah, and Davidson all write letters to the editor of the Wall Street

Journal, defending their work, as well as the reporting of Christopher Ruddy."

Please notice that he does not give us the April 11, 1995, date when the letters were published so the reader cannot easily track them down and read them for himself, and something else seems to be missing as well. Hmm.

"You probably think I'm part of the conspiracy," I can imagine his response to my insights into his work. page 98


Yes, Dan, I do.

Gary David Martin

June 22, 1998

Appendix I

Additional Letters of Mine to The Washington Times that Were Rejected

January 27, 1994

Dear Editor:

I have read the London Sunday Telegraph article to which Richard Grenier alludes in his January 26 column, "The Tonya

Harding and Bill Clinton Parallels," and I must say that he gives only the slightest inkling as to its real power and importance. You would do your readers and the country a great service were you to reprint the article in its entirety.

Sally Miller Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, was, according to her own well-substantiated account, one of the victims of a vigorous 1992 effort to suppress "bimbo eruptions" threatening to the Clinton campaign. She was, the Telegraph reports, offered a cushy federal sinecure if she would cooperate and deny everything, and was threatened with bodily harm if she would not. She didn't cooperate and although she has not been physically injured, she has been subjected to career and lifethreatening harassment.

A better parallel than with the amateurish buffoons associated with Tonya Harding is with the much more effective plata o plomo (silver or lead) intimidation techniques of the Medellin cartel. It shouldn't take a letter-writer to say it, but such thuggery has no place in any country which pretends to be civilized. We must eliminate it root and branch before it spreads and takes us over. But before it can be eliminated it must be exposed in all its ugliness. That's where you in the vaunted

American free press come in. Get with it.

Sincerely,

----------

Feb. 15, 1996

Dear Editor:

Your February 15 report on the testimony of former White House aide Helen Dickey contains a blatant and verifiable untruth which goes right to the heart of the Vincent Foster death case. You report, correctly, that Ms. Dickey testified that she did not call Arkansas reporting Foster's death before 10:20 p.m. Eastern Time on July 20, 1993. You then say: "Conspiracy theorists focused on a supposed 7:30 p.m. call by Ms. Dickey as central to a Foster murder theory. Minority counsel Richard

Ben-Veniste noted that Arkansas troopers who first said the call had come earlier refused to testify or supply the panel with any corroborating evidence."

It is indeed curious that the Washington Times, of all newspapers, should satisfy itself with the Clinton-apologist minority counsel on this vital factual question. Had your reporter called the troopers in question, as talk show host Michael Reagan did (see enclosed transcript), he would have learned that Mr. Ben-Veniste has not talked to Trooper Larry Patterson or to his attorney about this matter and that the trooper is ready and eager to testify on the subject. Please set the record straight, and let's get on with the pursuit of justice without the gratuitous name-calling. page 99


Sincerely,

Commentary:

Though the letter was not printed, The Times did have an article a few days later based on an interview with the troopers' lawyer in which they did, in fact, set the record straight. That did not stop Gene Lyons from repeating the Ben-Veniste story in a long negative review of Partners in Power, the Clintons and Their America in the August 6, 1996, issue of The New

York Review of Books, with the added embellishment that the troopers had actually declined to honor a subpoena by the committee to appear. The Review has a very generous letters policy, often printing several long letters attacking articles that they have published, but with the proviso that the original author is able to get in the last word with a rejoinder. I was willing to play by those rules and I sent in my letter straightening Mr. Lyons out on the matter.

I had never seen them do it before, but they changed the rules. Mr. Lyons himself had a letter in the September 19 issue in which he was permitted to respond to "some readers" without naming them and without their being allowed to make their case for themselves. This letter contained additional factually erroneous information to which Reed Irvine responded. To my knowledge, neither that letter nor any letter correcting the errors ever appeared.

----------

May 22, 1996

Letters to the Editor

The Washington Times

Dear Editor:

Why should you expect the public to read and take seriously the pages of your newspaper when, in a matter of utmost importance to the country, your editorial page people apparently do not? In the May 22 issue, editorial page editor, Tod

Lindberg, says, " Here, ruining people is considered sport,' Vince Foster famously wrote before his own suicide." The editorial on Whitewater the same day also refers twice to Foster's "suicide."

But your paper reported in a Reuters dispatch on October 26 of last year that three well-credentialed handwriting experts, including a noted literary documents authenticator from Oxford University in England had examined the note and each, independently, had declared it a forgery. Considering its disjointed, sophomoric text and the curious way and condition in which it was found, their ruling should not have come as a surprise to anyone with anything resembling a critical mind.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Kenneth Starr's investigation of the death still open and ongoing, and hasn't that also been reported by your paper? So why do your editorial page people insist upon ignoring the news part of the paper and protecting

Bill Clinton by continuing to treat the belatedly-discovered torn-up note as authentic and the strange death of Vincent Foster as a completely-confirmed suicide?

Sincerely,

Commentary:

I don't think I shared this letter with Christopher Ruddy, so I shouldn't think of taking credit for the title of his book, but, then again, maybe it reached him through other channels. For all I know, my material is widely-circulated in our political nether world. page 100


----------

August 28, 1996

Dear Editor:

May I take it that in printing a long, front-page article about new evidence of Hillary Clinton's involvement in the delay in reporting the "discovery" of a note attributed by authorities to Vincent Foster without even hinting at known, published (in your own newspaper), credible and convincing challenges to the authenticity of the note, you at the Washington Times have cast your lot quite clearly with "authority?" Might I ask further if, in so doing, you believe you are continuing to perform the role of a vigorous, independent, truth-seeking press so necessary to our survival as a free people?

Sincerely,

----------

December 16, 1996

Dear Editor:

I wish to thank you for publishing periodically the very learned and deeply philosophical letters of Stephan Zachartowicz of

Chantilly. So substantive and thoughtful are they, and so well grounded in Christian tradition, that collected together they ought to be worth about a semester of college credit in one of our elite universities these days.

His most recent letter, "History does not culminate in liberal democracy'," (Dec. 14) reminding us that conservatives should not credit Enlightenment-inspired "liberalism," by either its original or its current definition, for our most cherished values, I thought was one of his best. A people unnurtured in the deeper values of the Western tradition can't handle the freedom that liberal democracy espouses, and the Leviathan state, often in the guise of anti-crime measures, must grab for ever-moreconcentrated power.

Mr. Zachartowicz could have made his letter a good deal more powerful and poignant in one area, however. "Human rights and the rule of law? Ask a parent who has seen his child's murderer freed on a technicality," he says. Perhaps he hasn't heard about it, but at that point he might have cited the example of his 21-year-old neighbor in Chantilly Highlands, Tommy

Burkett, the story of whose violent death in his own home was reported on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries on November 11,

1994 (Of the area's major news organs, only the Times found this significant enough news to report.). In spite of abundant evidence to the contrary, the police ruled his death a suicide, supporting the conclusion stated to Tommy's mother by the attending policeman even before he saw the body. The episode ended with the news that the FBI had taken over the case and would conduct its own investigation.

Late last year Louis Freeh's FBI announced that it had completed its review of the matter and had concluded that it was, indeed, a case of suicide. Supporting the conclusion was a 1,800-page report, their spokesman said. However, up to now no one from the press or the public, which includes the outraged parents, has been permitted to see the report, though it has been shared with certain members of a couple of Congressional "oversight" committees who, in turn, won't let anyone else see it, nor will they heed the parents' plea for Congressional hearings.

If this is the sort of thing we can continue to expect from the Juggernaut that governs us, I shall have to join Mr.

Zachartowicz in digging in to hold off the "Great Decline." page 101


Sincerely,

Commentary:

Critics on the Net who certainly do not wish me well have taunted me by saying my letters don't get printed because I am too unrelentingly critical of the newspaper, which ignores the fact that a person's usual motivation for writing is to disagree with what a newspaper says, and such is the tenor of most published letters to the editor. I have also had letters printed in The

Washington Times that are critical of The Times or one of their columnists, but only about much less controversial topics.

Nevertheless, in an effort to increase the chances this letter would be printed I stroked the paper not once but twice, attacked their competitor, and had nothing critical of them to say. I even sent it in twice.

No luck. Could it be the message? They actually only did one pretty unsatisfactory bump-and-run on Tommy Burkett three years after the murder, and they have reported nothing on the FBI perfidy. Obviously there is a reason for their silence, and like so many other things that our press keeps a lid on, it clearly includes enforced silence from the citizenry, at least as far as the paper's assistance is concerned.

Appendix II

Other Wall Street Journal Letters, April 11, 1995

Vince Foster: Big Questions Remain

Your March 23 page-one article labeling critics of the botched investigations of the death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr. as

"conspiracy buffs" reflects the fact that most journalists who have written about this case want to believe the official reports and refuse to examine critically the evidence they present.

You say that those who have pointed out flaws in the investigations are "generating elaborate and scurrilous rumors about his suicide." You describe Christopher Ruddy, the first reporter to challenge the findings of the Park Police investigation, as

"the king of Foster conspiracy theorists." You say this that Mr. Ruddy and many other conspiracy theorists stop short of saying they have proved murder." You say this "may be because so many of the theorists' suspicions can be explained away by a cursory reading of a report by Robert Fiske, the former independent counsel."

A cursory reading of Mr. Ruddy's stories should have shown you that rather than weaving conspiracy theories and generating scurrilous rumors about Mr. Foster's death, Mr. Ruddy did what you and other journalists should have done.

Hearing charges that the Park Police investigation had been bungled, he did his own investigation. He was the only reporter who interviewed the EMS personnel and Park Police officers who had seen Foster's body as it lay in Fort Marcy Park.* He reported that some of them and experts he consulted had doubts about the quick rush to judgment that this was a suicide.

There was the unusual posture of the body (laid out as if it was in a coffin), the paucity of blood, the gun in the hand, the failure to find the bullet or bone fragments from the exit wound in Foster's skull and his shiny shoes in a dusty park.

As Mr. Ruddy pursued the story for the New York Post, he found many flaws in the Park Police investigation, all resulting from their failure to observe the rule that unattended violent deaths should be investigated as a homicide until there is enough evidence to rule out that possibility. The Park Police admitted that they didn't immediately check Mr. Foster's car for fingerprints because "it was obviously a suicide."

Mr. Ruddy neither generated nor disseminated rumors. He reported facts that exposed serious flaws in the Foster investigation. Your article's statement that many of the suspicions raised were explained away by the Fiske report is inaccurate. The Fiske report actually revealed even stronger evidence that cast doubt on the finding that Foster killed himself in Fort Marcy Park. The appended FBI lab report concluded that Foster's head had not always been in the face-up position in which it was found. This was proven by the blood on his right shoulder and on his cheek and jaw. page 102


Mr. Fiske's rejection of the alternative explanation--that the blood indicates that the body was moved--was based on the claim of his four pathologists that moving the body would have resulted in a lot of blood being spilled on Mr. Foster's clothing and skin. One of these pathologists (Dr. Donald Reay) has since acknowledged that this could have been controlled by bandaging the exit wound.

The Park Police investigators apparently made no tests for gunshot residue on Foster's hands or face, but the autopsy reported that black marks presumed to be gun smoke were observed on both index fingers in front of the gap between the cylinder and the barrel, precluding the possibility of his having a firm grip on the gun to aim it. It would be awkward to have even one hand in that position and senseless to have two. It would have been difficult to aim the gun accurately, risking incurring an injury that would paralyze but not kill.

These are only a few of the unanswered questions that have been posed by those that you berate as :"conspiracy buffs" who generate "scurrilous rumors" about Foster's death. If you don't have the answers, you could at least tell your readers what the questions are.

Reed Irvine

Chairman

Accuracy in Media Inc

*Editorial Comment: Ruddy may not have been the first journalist to interview the emergency workers. Recall what was written back on page 16 of the first part of "Dreyfus." After Ruddy had produced his first New York Post article based on interviews of a couple of emergency workers on January 27, 1994, The Washington Post responded two days later with a short article buried away in Saturday's Metro section in which it maintained that the workers had "consistently described the scene of Foster's death as tidy, but only recently indicated their suspicions that his death might not have been a suicide."

If reporters for The Post had not interviewed them, how did they know how the workers had consistently described the scene. Assuming that someone from the paper must have interviewed them before and the paper is not just making up this story of how the emergency workers had described the body before, one must seriously question the probity and professionalism of a news organization that would keep such vital information to itself.

---------------

As a concerned former college mate of Vincent Foster Jr., I have done much more than a "cursory reading" of the Fiske

Report, and I can say unequivocally that the report (which is itself quite cursory) does not "explain away" the numerous inconsistencies in the case pointed out by Mr. Ruddy.

The flecks of mica the FBI lab found on Foster's shoes, socks and clothing are consistent with his body having been transported and dumped in the park. But I have walked the 200 or so yards that Foster would have had to walk to get to where they say his body was found, and that simply can't be done without getting dirt on your shoes. The barren ground in front of the second cannon where they say they found his body is also inconsistent with the one photograph that has been released to the public and also inconsistent with the description of surrounding "heavy vegetation" given by all initial viewers of the body.

I also wonder how it is possible for a police investigator to write that he was told by the autopsy doctor that X-rays showed no bullet fragments in Foster's head when the doctor, as he now maintains, took no X-rays, and how it is possible for assiduous investigators to overlook for almost a week a crucial note torn into 28 pieces and left in Foster's briefcase.

Gary D. Martin

Chantilly, VA

-----------

If the CIA or La Securite were doing a course on professional disinformation they could hardly find a more worthy exhibit for study than your articles on Vincent Foster. You have helped to convince the world that Vincent Foster committed suicide--notwithstanding compelling evidence to the contrary. page 103


Your most recent article of March 23 is yet another study in insinuation and falsehood. Your intent is plainly to discredit those of us who have attempted to maintain public pressure for a thorough and honest investigation of Foster's death.

Crucial forensic evidence strongly suggests that he met foul play. At least seven of America's leading forensic experts have stated for the record that the pattern of powder burns on both Foster's left and right index fingers is "not consistent with suicide." They include Masaad Ayoob, head of the Lethal Force Institute, Dr. Vincent Di Maio, medical examiner for San

Antonio, Texas; Dr. Martin Faschler, who headed the U.S. Army's Wound Ballistics Laboratory, and Vincent Scalice, who was for many years a New York Police crime scene expert as well as a forensic consultant to the House Committee on

Assassinations.

Yet rather than report this important expert testimony, you say that all that keeps Foster's memory alive are "elaborate and scurrilous rumors about his suicide."

A lot more is involved. What is at issue are not rumors, but facts, few of which are known to most Americans. To ask that the truth be told is not to search for conspiracies.

The thinking citizen who looks beyond your reports to review the medical, biographical and simply descriptive facts of the case will be left with the strongest impression this side of certainty that Foster was murdered.

Jim Davidson

Baltimore

-------

For someone who thinks conspiracists are silly (yet newsworthy), you certainly weave a pretty good conspiracy tale of your own.

You assert that my organization, the Western Journalism Center, has a political agenda because of its connections with

"conservative activists." One of those, it turns out, was a major contributor to Bill Clinton's political campaign.

Any good conspiracy theory must, by definition, do two things: (1) explain who's behind it, and (2) reveal what really happened. In our investigation we have scrupulously avoided doing either of these two things. We have simply and painstakingly raised questions and inconsistencies that our colleagues have missed.

So what is your agenda? On April 4, 1994, your news story stated that then-Special Counsel Robert Fiske was about to conclude Foster had killed himself. While it turned out you were right, the curious thing about it is that by April 4, 1994,

Robert Fiske had not yet conducted any substantive aspects of his investigation--no FBI lab tests, no pathology review. This fact was reported by Christopher Ruddy in the Pittsburg (sic) Tribune-Review on March 21.

Mr. Ruddy's 20-page response to former special counsel Robert Fiske's report was the only detailed critical analysis published before Fiske was sacked by a three-judge panel. Though you apparently forgot to mention it, Mr. Starr has empaneled the first grand jury investigation into the case.

Some of the substantive points raised by Mr. Ruddy: The gun did not have Foster's fingerprints on it. The family has not been able to positively identify the gun. The gun remained in Foster's hand despite the explosive recoil. Gunpowder residues, as noted in the Fiske report, demonstrate that neither of Foster's hands was on the gun's grip when it was fired.

There was uncharacteristically little blood at the scene, according to the medical examiner on the scene--a direct contradiction of the Fiske report. Mr. Foster left no suicide note and made no final arrangements for his family. The note he allegedly left did not have his fingerprints on it. Key crime scene photos, as well as X-rays, are missing. Mr. Foster would have had to walk more than 700 feet through the heavily wooded park without getting a trace of soil on his shoes and clothing. Wile he had no soil on him, his clothing was littered with unexplained carpet fibers of various colors. Several witnesses even dispute the location of the body's discovery.

Joseph Farah

Executive Director

Western Journalism Center

Fair Oaks, Calif. AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR, Part 11

It is a crime to lead public opinion astray, to manipulate it for a

death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. page 104


--------

I have said it elsewhere and I repeat it here: if the truth is buried

underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that

the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it.

-- Emile Zola

America’s Dreyfus Affair, Part 6 by David Martin

The Reign of the Lie

It was a Wednesday night in the late summer of 1998 at the mausoleum-like headquarters for America’s information commissariat in Washington, DC, the National Press Club building. Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., had now been dead more than five years, and in spite of three official investigations of his July 20, 1993, violent death, all heavily involving the FBI, and some Congressional pecking around the edges often represented as investigations as well, the evidence of homicide as opposed to the official verdict of suicide was as strong as ever. But in the dominant hollow terminology of the time and the place, most of the nation’s citizenry, we were given to believe, had achieved "closure" over this matter, and many other very serious things of a highly-suspicious nature as well, and were satisfied to "get on with their lives."

The gathering was the periodic meeting of an odd mixture of the civic-minded, policy junkies, and likely government agents, replicating in the flesh what one sees on Internet news groups. Officially, it is called the Sarah McClendon Study Group, after the hostess of the meetings, the doyenne of the Washington press corps who, as she does periodically, had reserved the room for the occasion. On this evening the guest speaker is another grande dame of the Washington press, long-time chief

UPI Washington correspondent, Helen Thomas, speaking on the timely impeachment issue. Assiduous Foster-case researcher, Hugh Turley, and I are there not only to hear what Ms. Thomas has to say but also to see to it in the questionand-answer period that larger issues don’t get overlooked by the 20-odd attendees.

We managed to get our points in. Mine, picking up on Ms. Thomas’ remark that President Clinton remains quite popular with women, was that he would likely not be if the numerous allegations of thuggish intimidation of various of his actual or would-be paramours had been properly reported to the American people by the American press. Turley’s was that Kenneth

Starr is a good deal less upright than we are given to believe, and the beliefs about his rectitude persist only because the

American press has failed to report on the lawsuit against several members of his "investigative" team for witness intimidation. Ms. Thomas, who comes across in person as every bit as much a Clinton partisan as news magazine reporters and TV celebrities Eleanor Clift or Margaret Carlson, was immediately hostile to my suggestion and, perceiving an "enemy" of Starr as a friend, was initially quite receptive to Turley. By the time Turley revealed that he was talking about the Foster case and the lawsuit of Patrick Knowlton, Ms. Thomas had agreed to review carefully a copy of the addendum to Starr’s report on Foster that the three-judge panel had forced Starr to include in his report on Foster. In the process she had had to shush a couple of men in the back of the room who knew right off the bat where Turley was headed and had tried to prevent him from getting there. page 105


Turley’s real main point, as was mine, was a truly heretical one to make in such a place, that is, that there is major news suppression in the country. That point was most vociferously challenged by a large, blond fortyish man in the back--one of the shushees--who really didn’t like the use of our word "suppression" one bit. Wielding the authority of one who claimed to have worked for Ted Koppel’s Nightline and for ABC News for many years, he staked his objection upon what seemed to me the pedantic point that suppression requires conscious, collective agreement not to report something that is newsworthy, and if we had no proof of that we were irresponsible to sling around the charge of "news suppression."

After the meeting formally ended, we continued our discussion of this point in private. Attempting to get around the collective-action prerequisite, I asked him if he would consider the actions of The Washington Post alone in the Tommy

Burkett case "news suppression."

"No," he responded, "just sloppiness."

"How can you say that? What do you know about the Burkett case, anyway?" I shot back.

"I know plenty," said he.

"But what do you know?" I persisted.

"Stuff," was his last word on the subject, which he said with great bravado as he broke off the discussion and then walked away at a surprisingly fast clip. It really had to be seen to be believed.

The Tommy Burkett case is by now quite familiar to readers of this series, and it might ring a bell with the readers of

Christopher Ruddy’s The Strange Death of Vincent Foster or Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, who both mention it briefly, Evans-Pritchard elaborating somewhat more than Ruddy. Burkett was a 21-year-old college student in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, who was found dead in his room in his parents house on December 1, 1991.

The Fairfax County Police, who did virtually no investigation, ruled death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The parents later exhumed the body and a second autopsy revealed a cleanly broken jaw, a mangled ear, and numerous bruises and scrapes. He had clearly been beaten to death. The parents also learned later through confidential informants that Tommy had been doing undercover work for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The original autopsy doctor was James C.

Beyer, the same person whose later autopsy of Foster, as with Burkett, was absolutely vital to the suicide conclusion.

Walt Harrington, a writer for the Sunday magazine of The Washington Post, interviewed the parents at length about their experience, demonstrating great enthusiasm over the prospects for an ensuing article as he did so. No article ever appeared.

To this date The Post, in fact, has blacked out the Burkett story. They have written nothing, not even a simple news report.

To my mind it is one of the most compelling examples of blatant news suppression that one is likely to find, and the large blond self-proclaimed ABC News veteran initially claimed a familiarity with the case. But he was bluffing. Put somewhat less politely, he was lying, and he had been caught in the lie right off the bat. This calls to mind our experience with Wall

Street Journal columnist and TV commentator, Paul Gigot, who, as we recount in "Dreyfus 5," claimed that his newspaper had hired a handwriting expert who had determined that the torn-up note "found in Foster’s briefcase" had, indeed, been written by Foster. The only difference is that we hadn’t the means to catch Gigot in the lie almost as soon as it left his mouth.

That only came later. page 106


The experience also provided a poignant reminder of one of the things that most offends one about the whole Vincent Foster episode. It’s the lying. Such lying is a hallmark of oppressive regimes across the political spectrum from the far right to the far left. It is a chilling thought, and one perhaps that not too many people have had. One must begin to examine things for himself to realize the extent to which the United States of the late twentieth century has begun to resemble such regimes.

Lying and tyranny, wherever one finds them, are bound up with one another. Consider what the famous Soviet writer Boris

Pasternak had to say about it in his epilogue to his novel, Doctor Zhivago:

"It isn’t only in comparison with your life as a convict, but compared to everything in the ‘thirties, even to my easy situation in the midst of books and comfort, that the war came as a breath of deliverance...its real horror, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared to the inhuman reign of the lie."

I would fault only his use of the adjective, "inhuman," because, unfortunately, lying is an all-too-human failing, but it is one the better angels within us strive to overcome. We do so not only because it offends our innate moral and religious sense and because it goes hand and glove with tyranny, but also because lying is the handmaiden of injustice, and a sense of justice seems to be even more innate in the human species than a sense of truth. "That’s not fair" typically springs much earlier from the toddler’s mouth than "that’s not true," but in a mature society with pretensions of decency and civility the two can hardly be separated:

"Truth and justice--how ardently we have striven for them! And how distressing it is to see them slapped in the face, overlooked, forced to retreat!"

"Not for one minute do I despair that truth will triumph. I am confident and I repeat, more vehemently even than before, the truth is on the march and nothing shall stop it. The Affair is only just beginning, because only now have the positions become crystal clear: on the one hand, the guilty parties, who do not want the truth to be revealed; on the other, the defenders of justice, who will give their lives to see that justice is done."

Thus did Emile Zola appeal to the people of France a century ago. As truth and justice go together, so, too, do untruth and injustice.

In my study of both the Foster case and of the framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France I have become acquainted with a variety of propagandistic methods by which the authorities have managed to do damage to the truth, to leave a false impression with the public. As we have noted, it has become easier to do so than it was for the French at that time because both our political and our media power are a great deal more concentrated than was theirs. A much narrower spectrum of opinion is represented by America’s dominant news media, and they are generally much more in thrall to the government on major issues. What is more, the political choices that the voters face are much more narrowly circumscribed. On major issues such as world trading arrangements or exposing deep, systemic national corruption, the two dominant parties might as well be one party, not all that different from the one that has controlled our southern neighbor, Mexico, for most of this century.

I have summarized the techniques used by our ruling Uni-party and its media cohorts with the following list, a list which has enjoyed wide circulation on the Internet:

Fourteen Techniques for Truth Suppression page 107


1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.

2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "How dare you?" gambit.

3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")

4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.

5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nutcase," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.

6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).

7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.

8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."

9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.

10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.

11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster "suicide" note was forged, they would have reported it. They haven't reported it so there is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report the leak.

12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. For Example: If Foster was murdered, who did it and why?

13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions. page 108


14. Scantly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.

All of these techniques have been used in the Foster matter in lieu of a discussion of the actual facts. Doubtless, most of them were used in the Dreyfus Affair as well. We have already discussed how #6 and #7, in particular, were relied upon heavily. The reputation and the honor of the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, was placed against that of the shadowy, Jewish-led international "Syndicate." With no one in the United States commanding the respect that Mercier did then, our ruling elite have had Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr play the role of the partisan out to get President Clinton any way he can. Most recently that reputation has been embellished to a great degree by the Monica Lewinsky episode. The only ones who could possibly question him, they would have us believe, when he lets the administration off the hook on

Foster are a tiny, irresponsible clique of folks politically aligned with the extreme right. Most of them, the artificial scenario goes, are in the pay of arch-conservative moneybags, Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or they are simply unscrupulous opportunists out to make money. Facts, once again, are forced to take a back seat and the truth is successfully suppressed.

The experience with our ABC news veteran at the National Press Club, as with the Wall Street Journal’s Gigot earlier, brought home to my friend, Turley, however, that I had left the oldest, the most obvious, and still the most effective truth suppression technique of all off the list. That is not just to create a false impression through the use of various subterfuges, but simply to lie.

It is an old and effective technique, but it has one big disadvantage, as President Clinton has had the misfortune to learn. One can get caught in a lie. In the case of the Foster death, however, that danger is substantially lessened by the disinclination of anyone with an audience to point it out. Here we can see what is so truly bad about a corrupt Fourth Estate. On the most serious of matters, government officials and journalists as well can lie with impunity, knowing that they will not be held accountable in the court of public opinion, and justice is the loser.

Up to this point in the Foster case we have assigned central place to the first of the truth suppression techniques, "Dummy up," that is, we have noted repeatedly the blatant suppression of very important news. There are a surprising number of examples of plain, provable old-fashioned lies as well, but before we get into them we should note that the Foster news suppression has continued in spectacular fashion. In October of 1998 the aggrieved witness, Patrick Knowlton, amended his complaint to name in his lawsuit alleging conspiracy to violate his civil rights through harassment and intimidation, Deputy

FBI Director Robert Bryant and Dr. James C. Beyer, among others. The main reason for naming Bryant relates to another bit of suppressed news, that is the revelation of an FBI memorandum sent to Bryant only a couple of days after the Foster autopsy which reported that the autopsy revealed no exit wound. That memo had been obtained by Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media through a Freedom of Information Act request. Bryant, along with the Park Police and Justice Department announced some days later, on August 10, 1993, that they had concluded suicide, though he was aware of this recently disclosed information that contradicted the official version of the suicide. Beyer was named in the suit for general misfeasance in his autopsy, but also specifically for moving up the starting time contrary to accepted practice, beginning it even before his announced starting time and apparently tampering with the evidence in the process, and misreporting powder burns on the soft palate in Foster’s mouth that a laboratory report contradicted.

The most voracious reader of American newspapers or listener to the news on the airwaves, of course, would have no idea whatsoever that this latest event, this naming of the second highest official in the FBI and of the Foster autopsy doctor as defendants in an important lawsuit, had taken place. While the blackout of this more important news proceeded, the public was busy falling victim not only to Truth Suppression Technique #1, but also to variations of #13 and #9, with the Monica

Lewinsky matter. The host of extremely serious scandals associated with the president could all be boiled down to the relatively trivial illicit sex question, a monumental distraction or changing of the subject, and the system could be made to appear to be working by, in effect, coming half clean about the president’s corruption.

A Parade of Lies page 109


The public would not have been so ripe for distraction and "confession and avoidance," however, had all the other techniques not been practiced on them throughout, not the least of which is the latest we are adding to the list, plain old lying. Reviewing the Foster case, one is surprised at how often members of the press and the government have resorted to outright whoppers. We are not talking about merely misleading statements or sweeping conclusions based upon weak evidence, matters that might be subject to some honest disagreement, nor do we propose to examine the numerous instances where the chance is quite high that the person is lying. Rather, what we propose to do in the remainder of this "Dreyfus" installment is to point out instances in which clearly identifiable individuals tell obvious lies for the furtherance of the official conclusion that Vincent Foster committed suicide out of depression.

Let us look first at the nationally-televised attempted destruction of the reputation of the one American reporter, Christopher

Ruddy, who has consistently demonstrated skepticism about Foster’s death. Bear in mind that, as I indicate in Part 2 of this series, that was a reputation demolition in which there is a very high likelihood that Ruddy conspired. The more important of the two instances in which Ruddy was pounded on national television was by Mike Wallace on October 8, 1995, on 60

Minutes. By less than honest reporting methods Wallace was able to leave the impression with the viewers that Ruddy had misrepresented what Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Haut said about blood at the scene. He then nailed Ruddy quite effectively by revealing that Ruddy exercised editorial control over a video in which the narrator asserted unequivocally that

Foster was left-handed, when, according to Wallace, Foster was actually right-handed. Therefore, the fact that the gun was found in the right hand was not the anomaly that the narrator of the video so confidently stated it was.

Neither matter was so cut and dried as Wallace represented them. Ruddy had taped his conversation with Dr. Haut and had told Wallace so, and the tapes would prove, according to Ruddy later, that Haut had changed his story about the blood, but

Wallace never checked that evidence against Haut’s on-camera statement. And Ruddy had corrected himself in print about

Foster’s dominant hand and had told Wallace, but, again, Wallace ignored that fact on his program. One might say that, in essence, Wallace was lying in each instance here, but we can do better than "in essence." Wallace went on, in his authoritative baritone, to make the following statement: "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into

Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger."

No doubt most people believe that Wallace was telling us the truth. "He wouldn’t just baldly lie about something this important, would he?" And if he was telling the truth, that pretty much seals the matter, doesn’t it? The only, quite-unlikely, murder possibility remaining if Wallace is truthful here is that Foster had been rendered unconscious and someone then placed the gun in his hand, maneuvered the muzzle of the gun into the mouth, and then pressed Foster’s thumb against the trigger.

But, in fact, Wallace is flatly lying. There is no evidence whatsoever connecting the supposed fatal bullet to the revolver found in Foster’s hand. How could there be when the bullet has never been found? As far as the evidence of Foster’s thumb having pulled the trigger goes, it is interesting that on television Wallace has Rep. William Clinger state that the depressed mark noted on Foster’s right thumb indicates that he had used that thumb to pull the trigger. Clinger, of course, has no medical-examiner qualifications for arriving at such a conclusion (See my two-letter exchange with Wallace’s producer,

Robert Anderson, over this and other matters in the Appendix.). Maybe Clinger was picking up on some legerdemain by

Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske on this point:

"The physical evidence also demonstrates that Foster himself pulled the trigger. An autopsy photograph depicts a mark on

Foster’s right thumb consistent with the recoil of the trigger after firing. Based on the existence of this mark and Park Police scene photographs showing the position of the gun, the Pathologist Panel concluded that after Foster fired the gun, his ‘right thumb was trapped and compressed between the trigger and the front of the trigger guard..’ Pathologist Report, Paragraph 8.

Fiske was good enough to furnish us with the three and one-half page report of his four consulting pathologists as an appendix, and, sure enough, the concluding quote is right there in paragraph 8, but there is no mention of autopsy photographs depicting a mark. Consequently, there is no conclusion that the mark shows that Foster fired the gun with that thumb, or even that it is "consistent with the recoil of the trigger after firing," which is really nothing but a tricky nonsense page 110

WACKENHUT CORPORATION statement by Fiske. The supposed mark or indentation is also consistent with his thumb having been wedged in there after the gun was fired as well, and if, in fact, there was such a visible indentation in the photographs that is a much more likely explanation.

Perhaps the failure of Fiske’s experts to support the conclusion which he appears to attribute to them explains why Kenneth

Starr in his report more than three years later on Foster has as yet made public none of the reports of his hired experts even though fully three-quarters of his footnote references are to those reports. In effect, Starr has returned us to where we were after the first official suicide verdict on August 10, 1993. We now have a conclusion based upon multiple secret reports instead of just one, not unlike Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ conviction for treason based upon secret evidence. All the while our media "watchdogs" seem perfectly content with the state of affairs.

The first influential TV trashing of Ruddy occurred on March 11, 1994, in the wake of his New York Post "photo blunder" article in which he left the clear impression that the Park Police had taken no photographs at all of the Foster death scene.

Jim Wooten on ABC Evening News just four days after Ruddy’s article appeared produced a photograph of a hand with a gun which he said was, indeed, one of the crucial crime scene photographs that Ruddy had reported did not exist. Later a still of the photograph with the ABC logo in the corner appeared in Newsweek, and it has since been reproduced in many other places. "Pro-cop" author Dan E. Moldea, with his special access to the Park Police, has the photograph as well in his book, A

Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, but, unlike the others, he didn’t have to use ABC’s copy. He got his photo straight from the Park Police.

Like Mike Wallace, though, Wooten could not leave well enough alone with this Ruddy embarrassment. He went on to say that Ruddy was wrong about the absence of blood at the scene as well, and showed a photograph of a sylvan setting in which he said blood was obvious. It was a lie.

This, supposedly, was another crime scene photograph that had been taken, and again Ruddy had apparently been contradicted. Unlike the hand with the gun, this still photograph didn’t get reproduced for the print media. No wonder. Reed

Irvine of Accuracy in Media has examined the video and, just as I recalled from the TV, he sees no obvious blood in evidence, but what is worse, he sees no green foliage, as there would have had to have been on July 20, the day of the death.

And here is the best that Kenneth Starr can do in his report referring to Dr. Henry Lee’s examination of a scene in which a man who, according to the autopsy doctor, and the autopsy doctor alone, has blown a hole an inch by an inch-and-a-quarter out the crown of his head:

"Dr. Lee stated that one photograph of the scene ‘shows a view of the vegetation in the areas where Mr. Foster’s body was found. Reddish-brown, blood-like stains can be seen on several leaves of the vegetation in this area.’ He also noted that

‘[a]close-up view of some of these blood-like stains can be seen in [a separate] photograph.’

Recall, though, that Park Police investigator Renee Abt told Moldea that they had looked for blood on the foliage and found none, and that what Lee takes for blood is merely leaf disease.

If is very, very hard to come to any conclusion about Wooten’s claims for what his photograph shows than that he is simply lying. Had Foster fired the gun as Mike Wallace described and had it produced the sort of massive exit wound that Dr. Beyer described, there would have been a good deal of blood and other tissue on the foliage under and around the path of the bullet.

It would be nice for the government’s case and for Wooten’s credibility if it were there, but it wasn’t.

Lies Fit to Print page 111


Wallace and Wooten are hardly alone in the press with their lies on the Foster case. Working our way forward in the alphabet, let us look at the performance of the stalwart New York Times duo of reporter Douglas Jehl and Pulitzer Prizewinning columnist, Anthony Lewis, in the wake of the Fiske Report. The August 5, 1994, Lewis column in particular is a veritable virtuoso performance in propaganda, employing a number of the truth suppression techniques, and like his counterparts from the fake right, Lewis goes out of his way to perpetuate the notion that the Foster death, like many another high-level scandal, is strictly a partisan political issue. The column, entitled predictably enough, "The Grassy Knoll," is such a representative sample of the sorry genre of Foster cover-up articles that we can’t resist sharing with the reader a good deal more than his out- and-out lies:

The desperate nature of the Republican effort to make something of Whitewater was on marked display in the Senate hearing on the death of Vincent Foster. Partisan zeal would not yield to elemental human decency.

Ever since the assistant (sic) White House counsel committed suicide in July, 1993, the political right has tried to use the death to attack President and Mrs. Clinton. Conservative commentators claim that Mr. Foster killed himself over the

Whitewater affair, or was murdered.

As crackpots from Mark Lane to Oliver Stone had a theory about President Kennedy’s assassination, so with Mr. Foster they have come up with conspiracy fantasies. A newsletter suggested that he had died in a Virginia apartment, and the body was moved to the park where it was found. Rush Limbaugh reported that charge to his large audience, embellishing it to say the newsletter "claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton."

All these claims were exhaustively investigated by the independent counsel on Whitewater, Robert B. Fiske, Jr. His massive report concluded that Mr. Foster committed suicide because he was depressed, as he had been earlier in his life. The many colleagues, family and friends questioned by the counsel’s staff said Mr. Foster had never mentioned Whitewater was a cause for concern.

Last month Mr. Foster’s family pleaded for an end to the use of "outrageous innuendo and speculation for political ends." It was "so unfair," the statement added, "for the family’s privacy and emotions to be pawns in a political struggle."

All in one short article Lewis waxes indignant, knocks down straw men, calls the skeptics names, impugns motives, and invokes authority. He even changes the subject to the Kennedy assassination, about which he leaves no doubt that he is in the same camp, defending the indefensible Warren Commissions findings, as is his putative adversary over Foster, Christopher

Ruddy. So he has given us numbers 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13 of the popular techniques for truth suppression--anything but facts about the case--, but when he talks about the "massive report" of Robert Fiske he is giving us the newly-minted technique number 15. He is simply lying. As we noted in the first installment of this series, the body of the Fiske report is only 58 double-spaced pages in length. No one with an iota of integrity who has actually bothered to crack its pages would call it

"massive," or "exhaustive," for that matter. Most of its seven-eighths of an inch in thickness comes from the 97 pages of the resumes of Fiske’s team of pathologists and the fact that the text is printed on only one side of the paper.. But if invoking authority is what you are up to, a "massive report" surely does sound authoritative.

Lewis’ suggestion that Foster had been depressed "earlier in his life" looks a lot like a number 15 as well. He doesn’t say where that bit of intelligence came from. Here’s what the Fiske Report says:

Foster’s family and friends said that Foster did not experience any extended period of depression prior to the spring of 1993.

Although he experienced some brief episodes of depression and anxiety, these appeared to be resolved without treatment.

From time to time Foster experienced what his wife described as anxiety or panic attacks, marked by heavy sweating or a page 112

WACKENHUT CORPORATION strained voice. In late 1992, he told his physician in Little Rock, that he was feeling depressed and anxious. At least two of

Foster’s close relatives have suffered from periods of depression.

Reading this carefully one encounters here what sounds like a normal man, not the man with the history of depression that

Lewis suggests, especially when one notes that the wife, Lisa, and Dr. Watkins were rather slow to come around with their stories of Foster’s recent agitated frame of mind. Furthermore, "suicidologist," Dr. Alan L. Berman, who labored so hard in

Kenneth Starr’s much longer report to persuade us that Foster was suicidally depressed, for some reason didn’t see fit to tell us about any bouts with depression "earlier in his life," so we can safely assume that they did not happen.

Dishonest as he is in this column, Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis still is not the worst bearer of false witness in America’s

"newspaper of record" when it comes to the Foster case. That prize belongs to reporter Douglas Jehl. This is from his July 1,

1994, report on the freshly-released Fiske Report, which he presents to us without any degree of objectivity or skepticism, but amplified and embellished through the medium of the White House in an article entitled "First Whitewater Report

Pleases Clinton Advisers."

The special prosecutor devoted nearly 200 pages to his review of an exhaustive investigation that he said left no doubt that

Mr. Foster, a kindergarten classmate of the President’s and former law partner of Mrs. Clinton, put a revolver in his mouth and took his life July 20, hours after he left his office in the White House West Wing.

Very few citizens have the time, the natural skepticism, the inquisitiveness, or the resourcefulness to order a government document like this for themselves. They depend on the newspapers, and they expect that what they read in the newspapers is the truth. But Mr. Jehl and The New York Times lied. The investigation was in no way "exhaustive," and 58 scant pages are not "nearly 200 pages." One might say that Jehl is including the various exhibits and the doctors’ resumes, but they cannot be construed as the special prosecutor’s "review."

Then, not content to lie, Jehl in his very next sentence manages to sprinkle in truth suppression techniques 3, 4,5, 6, and 7:

Although the Park Police quickly concluded last year that it was a suicide, the death of the 48-year-old Arkansan has spawned theories so widespread and ugly that Mr. [Lloyd] Cutler [the White House counsel] went on today to express hope that "those rumormongers and those parts of the media that published their rumors will now leave the Foster family in peace." Among the rumors spread by political opponents was that Mr. Foster had been killed in another location and that his body had been moved to the park.

The reader gets no hint of the host of anomalies already apparent to the astute observer as detailed in "Dreyfus 1," nor would he guess that the "part of the media" which has raised doubts, The New York Post and their reporter Christopher Ruddy almost exclusively, had dealt primarily with facts such as the paucity of blood and gore at the scene and the curious straight positioning of the body with the arms down by the side "as though ready for a coffin."

This is the same Douglas Jehl, we might remind you, who nine days after the death, in another "special to The New York

Times," had heavily influenced public opinion in the case by revealing "facts" that came as news even to White House spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers. We touched on this briefly in "Dreyfus 1," but with lying as our theme, a somewhat fuller treatment is in order. Here’s a longer excerpt from the Jehl article:

Clinton Aide Appeared Depressed Before Death, His Associates Say page 113


Federal officials said today that a piece of paper with the names of at least two psychiatrists had been found among Foster’s possessions, but White House officials insisted that they had learned of the discovery only late last night.

In contrast to White House assertions that there had been no signs of trouble, Vincent W. Foster Jr., the longtime friend of

President Clinton who apparently committed suicide last week, had displayed signs of depression in the final months of his life, according to federal officials and people close to Mr. Foster.

Mr. Foster, the deputy White House counsel, had been so depressed about his job that before his death he had spent parts of several weekends working reclusively at home in bed with the shades drawn, a close associate said today.

The 48-year-old lawyer had also told at least one doctor that he was dispirited and had obtained the names of at least two

Washington psychiatrists, Federal officials and associates of Mr. Foster said. A family doctor in Little Rock, Ark. sent antidepressant medication to Mr. Foster.

The medication arrived in the final days of Mr. Foster’s life, but he apparently had only just begun to take it, said a person close to the family. This person said that Mr. Foster’s wife, Lisa, recalled after her husband’s death that when he would try to smile it was a "forced, hollowed-out kind of expression."

In a court of law, a witness who has been caught in a lie in his testimony isn’t worth very much. Neither would he be permitted to pass on what he says he has been told by people that he does not identify. What evidence is there that Mr. Jehl isn’t simply lying here, as he would provably lie later? Has he given us any reason to believe that even the "federal officials" themselves and "people close to Foster" are not simply inventions or stooges? What reason would they have had to want to remain anonymous at this point, anyway? And what’s with this "at least two psychiatrists" business? Didn’t they just tell us that they have the list in hand? Can’t these "Federal officials and associates of Mr. Foster" count? Might this have something to do with the fact that the photocopy of the paper with the list of names that was released with the police investigative papers three weeks after the Fiske report came out had the names blacked out?

Then when the same list was reproduced in the Senate Banking Committee documents, the names appear--probably by mistake--, but the writing of the first name, that of Dr. Robert Hedaya, is scrawled in block letters, unlike the other two. It is easily perceived as an afterthough, added at the beginning instead of the end to make it look less like a late addition. Were they unsure at the time that Jehl wrote that Hedaya would go along with the cover-up? He is the one, after all, who said in his deposition that Foster’s sister, Sheila Anthony, had called him about her brother’s depression just a few days before. Even more curiously, Park Police lead investigator, John Rolla filed a report only a couple of days (if it is not fraudulently backdated, which seems a distinct possibility) after the death in which he said he called each of the psychiatrists, and Hedaya made no mention of the Anthony call, saying only that he had not talked to Foster. Isn’t that strange? You’d think he would have responded to the inquiring policeman, "No, Mr. Foster didn’t call me about an appointment, but his sister did just this past Friday."

While we are asking questions, we might also ask who Mr. Jehl works for. The fact that these two key articles are denoted as

"special to The New York Times" suggests that he is not a regular employee of theirs. Hasn’t Mr. Jehl, whose anonymous sources are eventually virtually unanimously contradicted by friends and associates who testify on the record, given us good reason to believe that he actually works for one of those organizations that counts lying as part of its "trade craft?" Whoever their employer, Jehl and Lewis both would be high on my list of candidates for the Duranty Prize, a proposed award named after the Times’ Moscow correspondent of the 1930s, Walter Duranty, who regularly filed glowing and fictitious accounts of

Joseph Stalin’s "workers’ paradise."

When we see how eagerly journalists like Jehl and Lewis seize upon the suicide-from-depression report of Robert Fiske it becomes apparent how necessary it was to get a high-profile special prosecutor on the case, someone advertised as page 114

WACKENHUT CORPORATION independent who is supposed to uncover wrongdoing, but whose real role is precisely to cover up wrongdoing. It was deemed so necessary that a connection to the long-ago Whitewater land scandal had to be fabricated in the form of

"Whitewater documents removed from Foster’s office the night he died." We saw in "Dreyfus 5" how crime writer Dan

Moldea let Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper off the hook by saying that he was simply "mistaken" about his sources for that December 20, 1993, story revealing the Whitewater document removal, when, in fact, it was very nearly the central lie in the entire Foster death cover-up.

It may be rivaled, though, by one told in another "special to The New York Times" in the summer of 1994. David Johnston, in a July 21 article, reports that parts of the Park Police report have just been released, three weeks after the Fiske Report came out, but the pages of the report "offered little new." He doesn’t tell us that numerous sections of the Park Police documents have been inexcusably and very suspiciously "redacted" or blacked-out, but even so, there remained at least one

Park Police document that offered something new that is highly significant. That is John Rolla’s contemporaneous report on his and detective Cheryl Braun’s death notification visit to the Foster home on the night he died. That report jumps out at the knowledgeable reader, but Johnston doesn’t even bother to tell us of its existence (nor did any other national reporter).

The Biggest Lie of All

Up to that point, the definitive word on the matter of the Park Police and the Foster residence had come from the following passage in a major front-page article in the July 30, 1993, Washington Post by Ann Devroy and Michael Isikoff:

Police who arrived at Foster’s house the night of the death were turned away after being told Lisa Foster and family members were too distraught to talk. Investigators were not allowed to interview her until yesterday. "That was a matter between her lawyers and the police," [White House counselor David] Gergen said, and the White House "had no role in it."

This echoed what Frank Murray had reported in The Washington Times on July 24:

"Park Police investigators had many questions about Mr. Foster’s final hours but deferred to his friends and family by delaying contacts with them until after yesterday’s funeral in Little Rock."

And to further make the point, Devroy and Isikoff say in their July 30, 1993, article that the widow, Lisa Foster, "yesterday was interviewed for the first time by police."

Lies all. Did Devroy and Isikoff know they were reporting lies? Isikoff surely did at least by August 15 when he wrote in

The Post, adding an invention of his own about Foster’s mental state and the definitive nature of documents that he, but not we, had had the privilege to see: "Foster’s attempt to seek legal help is described in more than 200 pages of Park Police and

FBI reports into his death that have not yet been publicly released...those reports leave no doubt that Foster was suffering from a worsening depression...." The Park Police documents that were finally released added up to a scant 100 pages, and they included, as we have noted, the Rolla report on his visit to the Foster home. Isikoff had to have read that, but he passes up this early opportunity to correct his earlier gigantic lie that the police had been turned away. At the same time he inadvertently tells us several months in advance that the 100 pages with its many redactions was only a small part of the written record withheld from the public. He also lets us in on something else that he probably didn’t mean to. The FBI was a participant in the investigation right from the beginning, and its initial report is still secret. It is as though another 100-plus pages have also been redacted in their entirety, blacked out, that is, as far as the public is concerned, but not as far as a journalistic player in the cover-up is concerned.

Even without these police documents in hand, it would have been a truly amazing thing if Devroy and Isikoff were in the dark about the visit by Park Police investigators John Rolla and Cheryl Braun to the Foster home on the night of the death. A very large number of people, after all, were there that night, as we later learn, and consider who they were. We can start with the man who sets the tone for the reign of the lie, himself, President Bill Clinton. In his written report Rolla curiously makes no mention of the president’s arrival at the house, but he broke the news a year later, shortly after the Johnston article about the police report appeared in The New York Times. He and Braun did so in their nationally-televised testimony to the Senate

Banking Committee on July 29, 1994 (This time it was The Washington Post’s turn to report blandly that the testimony page 115

WACKENHUT CORPORATION contained nothing new. The New York Times, for its part, neglected to report on the hearing at all.).

Did the government people simply withhold the information from the press? Anyone who could even entertain the idea has no notion of the cozy relationship that exists between the White House, especially Bill Clinton’s White House, and the national press, The Washington Post in particular. But there’s no reason to speculate. This passage comes from a very important op ed piece, "Vincent Foster: Out of His Element," by Arkansas native, Walter Pincus, in the August 5, 1993 Post:

"Near midnight that Tuesday at the Foster home in Georgetown, I sat in the garden with a few of his Arkansas friends for half an hour." Pincus doesn’t say what time he arrived, but the police, on the record, were there from shortly after 10 to sometime after 11 (In fact, the police in all likelihood were there even longer, arriving sometime before 10. The later arrival time presumes they went to the morgue first to search for Foster’s car keys again in his pants, an almost certain untruth.). He surely would have known that the police were not "turned away," let alone by Foster family attorneys.AMERICA'S


Then we have this from White House attorney Jane Sherburne of Sherburne and Nemetz, prepared on May 16, 1996:

"[Mickey] Kantor had been with Vernon Jordan and David Gergen at Ben Bradlee’s house when David got the news about

Foster. They all wound up at Foster’s house."

As you might have suspected, Gergen, we see, wasn’t just repeating what someone had told him, he was simply lying when he agreed that the police were turned away. Not only did he know it, but The Post’s Bradlee very likely knew it as well, and notice how well this little gathering illustrates what we have just observed about the coziness between The Post and the

White House.

So, the president, the police, and the press knew that the police did not wait nine days to talk to family members about

Foster’s death, as had been widely reported as fact and was not contradicted for a year. What of it? Wouldn’t the loved ones have been too emotionally wrought up to have been of much help to the authorities? To be sure there are those who would want us to believe that, though even if it were true, it does not excuse the bald-faced lie told the public. True or not, it is what

Clinton lawyer Jane Sherburne was peddling as late as May of 1996. Here she summarizes some of the doings of White

House aide, David Watkins, that fateful evening:

It took ten or fifteen minutes to drive to the house. When they arrived, no one else was there. They walked up to the house; the police officers, who insisted on doing the official notification themselves, walked ahead, with Watkins right behind them.

As they went up the steps, another group of people, including Webb Hubbell and Foster’s sister, came up behind them.

They entered the house and Mrs. Foster came down the steps. The male officer told them that Foster had committed suicide.

Mrs. Foster became hysterical; she could not possibly have been interviewed.

Perhaps Ms. Sherburne can claim simple ignorance, thereby admitting incompetence. If not, what we have here is another conscious lie. The following is from Rolla’s public testimony almost a year before, on July 20, 1995:

Some people were not approachable. We tried to talk to different people. We talked to--I think we talked briefly to both sisters. I had more of a rapport with Mrs. Foster, so I talked to her. Cheryl talked to Laura, the daughter. The sons weren’t home. We talked to Mr. Watkins. Other than that, we didn’t talk to anyone else there.

Well, now, let’s try taking Rolla at his word on this. They talked only briefly with Sheila Anthony and Sharon Bowman, and only Ms. Braun talked with the daughter, while the only other person Rolla talked to was Lisa Foster, with whom he developed a "rapport." Yet he writes in his report that he was there for more than an hour. What was he doing all that time, eating hors d’oeuvres?

The first twenty-four hours after a crime has been committed are crucial. If it is not essentially solved within that period, the chance that it will ever be solved falls drastically. The Park Police obviously know that, which is why they did their proper police work and no doubt wrung as much information out of the immediate relatives of the victim as they could. Then why would they be party to this gigantic, apparently gratuitous lie that they did not? In "Dreyfus 1" I speculated that one reason might be that they didn’t hear what they wanted to hear from the family concerning Vince’s "depression," his inclination toward suicide. Rolla did say in his report, after all, that no one present could think of any reason why Foster would kill himself, and he also said in a later deposition that when he asked Lisa if Vince was taking any medication she said that he page 116

WACKENHUT CORPORATION wasn’t. Upon further reflection and with the assistance of more public records, I have come to believe that the motivation behind the big lie that the police were turned away from the Foster home is much worse than I first thought.

Only for the most extreme reasons would the powers that be have resorted to such a blatant lie, one that they knew they would have to admit to in due time. The most likely reason is that the Foster family, or at least certain members of the family, didn’t just fail to go along with the depression thesis, they rejected the suicide conclusion as well. In all likelihood, they didn’t just reject it but they rejected it energetically and indignantly, as most people would who knew that a loved one had been murdered and it was being covered up. Time had to be bought while the recalcitrant family members were brought into line.

Those Missing Sons

And which family members might those be? The most likely candidates are the two mystery men in our little story, Vince’s two sons, 21-year-old Vincent, III, and 17-year-old John Brugh, who goes by his middle name, pronounced "brew." Oh, but didn’t we just read from the testimony of John Rolla that the sons weren’t home? That is, indeed, what he said, but then he and his organization went along with it, holding their tongues, when the newspapers told us that the police had actually been turned away. Their spokesman, Major Robert Hines, even embellished the lie a bit for me. Explaining my interest from having gone to college with Vince, I called him and asked how it would have been possible for a private lawyer to stand in the way of police carrying out an investigation. He told me that I was right, that he couldn’t, but that the newspaper had misreported the facts. He said that the police had left the residence upon determining that the widow, Lisa, was too broken up to talk to and that they had returned the next day for an interview. That version of events, like the one told by The Post, was also made "inoperative," to borrow a Watergate-era term, a year later by the released police report and the Senate testimony of Park Police investigators Rolla and Braun about their visit to the Foster home.

If we have learned anything it is that proven liars should not be trusted simply upon their word alone, which is really all that we have with respect to the absence of the sons from the Foster home on the fateful night. Later in their July 20, 1995,

Senate testimony Braun and Rolla elaborate further:

SENATOR PAUL SARBANES: Now, there also was an effort made to find the Foster sons. Were they at the house?

BRAUN. No, they were not.

ROLLA. They were in Georgetown somewhere.

SENATOR SARBANES. They were somewhere in Georgetown. I take it that extended efforts were being made to try to locate them. Obviously this story, once it reached the media, would be a lead story on the television and on the radio; correct?

BRAUN. Yes.

ROLLA. Yes.

SENATOR SARBANES. That’s very clear. These intense efforts were being made to locate the family and, as I understand page 117

WACKENHUT CORPORATION it, friends and so forth, colleagues, in order to let them know what had happened. You understood at least part of that by the time you left the Foster home; is that correct?

BRAUN. Yes.

ROLLA. Yes.

But at that point Sarbanes yields to Senator Christopher Dodd who changes to subject to the goings on in Foster’s office.

One never learns in this exchange when the Park Police established contact with the Foster sons. And Sarbanes, like everyone else who has reported on the case, missed the real importance of why it was necessary to talk to the sons. They, much more so than the widow, Lisa, or the daughter, Laura, would have been likely to know about the make and model of any guns that their father might have had. Guns, as we all know, are primarily a masculine interest. If the police were really serious about determining whether or not the gun ostensibly found in Foster’s hand was his, the sons simply had to be interviewed as soon as possible. Yet, in that July 30, 1993, Washington Post article in which it was reported that the police were turned away from the house, we are told that Lisa had been interviewed for the first time only the day before, and there is no mention of the sons. The gun, the article tells us, is being sent to a "family member" in Arkansas for possible identification, while, from all indications, the sons have not yet been called upon for possible identification.

Not only is this strange, but it is not exactly true, either. According to Kenneth Starr’s report, the sister in Arkansas, to whom the Post is probably referring here, was only shown a photograph in which she noticed some similarities in the detailing at the base of the grip, but was not shown the actual gun until April of 1995. At that time she could not positively identify it.

The sons remain almost completely out of the picture during the period of the investigations by the Park Police/FBI and

Robert Fiske’s FBI team. From the official record, we never know when or if they ever find them and talk to them except that Fiske has the following bland little note at the bottom of page 38 of his report: "Foster’s children did not recognize the gun as one they had seen in their home." We don’t know how he knows that, and we can’t help but wonder if the sons had been so bland and passive in their assertion of the fact. When Kenneth Starr in his report speaks of the vague and imprecise recollections of the two sons, whom he never even names, he documents the observations with still-secret FBI interviews of the sons done on April 7, 1995, more than eight months after the completion of the Fiske Report.

It’s very clear that they don’t want us focusing upon the sons, and that is probably for a reason. So let’s see what else we can find out about them. The Johnnie-come-lately White House lawyer, Jane Sherburne, is once again a good source because she apparently never learned the case well enough to do a good job of covering up.

Marsha [Scott] and Webb [Hubbell] found Sheila Anthony at home with Vince Foster’s other sister and her daughter, who was visiting from out of town. Marsha told them what had happened. They discussed the importance of finding Beryl

Anthony, Sheila’s husband, who was out with Foster’s two sons, and also called Barbara Pryor. Eventually the group headed for the Foster house.

This, on the record, is before anyone has gone to the Foster home to make the death notification. Now let’s fast forward a few pages in Ms. Sherburne’s memorandum. The names in bold mean that that person’s account of the evening is being related:

Watkins—Between 10 and 11, the President appeared (at the Foster house) with [Mack] McLarty. At around 10:30, McLarty and Watkins, and possibly David Gergen, had a conversation during which McLarty asked if a suicide note had been found; someone said, maybe we should look for a note. page 118


McLarty -- Stayed at the Foster house for about an hour. Senator and Mrs. Pryor, Sheila Foster Anthony, Beryl Anthony, several neighbors, a physician called by Senator Pryor, David Watkins and his wife, and Webb Hubbell were there.

So, earlier in the evening Vince’s brother-in-law, Beryl Anthony, had been out with Vince’s two sons, but, from McLarty’s account, by the time he and the president arrived at the Foster home Mr. Anthony was there. Does it not stand to reason that the sons would have been there as well?

Now let’s go back and look at some more of John Rolla’s testimony of July 20, 1995. This time he is being interviewed by the chief minority counsel of the D’Amato Committee, Richard Ben-Veniste.

BEN-VENISTE. Now, there was a point where there was so many people in the house. The President had come. There were, literally, dozens of people who had come to the home spontaneously to comfort Mrs. Foster and Vincent Foster’s two sisters, who were present there as well. Is that so?

ROLLA. There wasn’t dozens. We had Mr. Watkins and his wife with us, then there was Mr. Hubbell and the two sisters and maybe one of their husbands. I think there were four or five other people besides the four of us that originally got there and, at that point, about 10:50 p.m. or somewhere around there, the President walked in with one Secret Service agent.

That husband of one of the sisters would not be Sharon Bowman’s because he was in Arkansas. That leaves Beryl Anthony, but Rolla does say "maybe" when speaking of that husband’s presence.

Let’s look at another source. This is Webb Hubbell speaking.

The little living room was filling up fast. Senator David Pryor and his wife Barbara. Beryl and Sheila and Sharon. Bruce

Lindsay. Mickey Kantor. Mac McLarty. My son Walter had heard and came to be with us. Cars were jammed in the tiny street outside. At about 11 P.M., the President arrived. Hillary was in Little Rock with her mother.

Rolla’s recollection, then, is probably correct. Beryl Anthony, the husband of Sheila Foster Anthony was there when Rolla was because Beryl was there before Bill Clinton arrived, according to this account by Hubbell.. The circumstantial evidence is growing quite strong that the two sons, with whom Beryl, for some unknown reason, had been out on the town, were also at the house. But the evidence, in the final analysis, is a bit more than circumstantial. Here Senator Barbara Boxer of the

D’Amato Committee is questioning Hubbell on July 19, the day before Officers Rolla and Braun (with coaxing from Senator

Sarbanes) told the committee that the sons were not there.

SENATOR BOXER. So you would say that--when you say that that night, although--there were how many people from the

White House? I think you’ve testified, I thought, to about a half dozen. Were there at least that many?

HUBBELL. At least that many. I’m sure there were more, and the days blend together, but that night, I know the President came. Mr. Gergen came. Mack was there. David Watkins was there. Bruce Lindsey was there, but I’m sure there were other people there. We were--the room was full. Senator Pryor was there and Barbara, Beryl Anthony got there later, the kids got there. It was a typical scene and as I said, the phone was ringing off the wall. People were calling from Little Rock, had seen page 119

WACKENHUT CORPORATION it on CNN in total disbelief, like the rest of us.

There you have it, Hubbell remembered "the kids," just as he recalled the presence of Beryl Anthony. Jane Sherburne must have been correct that they had been out together. Now here they were at the Foster house with the crowd, but no one on the

Senate panel takes any note of it, and the fiction continues that they were not located. Senator Boxer follows with a leading question about the unlikelihood that anyone in that circumstance would have been concerned about searching for documents, and quickly yields the rest of her time to the minority counsel, Ben-Veniste, who continues with leading questions of his own on the subject of the handling of documents in Foster’s White House office. Hubbell had let the cat out of the bag, but these two quickly stuffed it back in, and apparently no one was the wiser.

Those who think they have followed this case quite closely might recall that there was a minor stink raised at the July, 1994,

Senate Banking Committee hearings on Foster when Cheryl Braun said she had been pushed away from Sheila Anthony at the Foster house by Hubbell. In retrospect that looks like a #9, "confession and avoidance" and a #13, "create a distraction" in the Techniques for Truth Suppression. The real story, in all likelihood, is that the sons reacted quite spontaneously and naturally to the outrageous cock-and-bull story that their very stable and responsible father had committed suicide. They probably raised holy hell at the house that night. The fear must have been very great that they would blow the lid off the cover-up right off the bat if they continued in that vein. They might have even threatened that they would go to the newspapers, perhaps even to the great Watergate investigator, Bob Woodward, who was still at The Washington Post.

Somehow, the danger of the two sons had to be neutralized. It had to be demonstrated to them in no uncertain terms just how futile, how hopeless were their protests. They had to be shown just how strong and united were the treacherous powers ranged against them. What better object lesson could there have been than the Washington Post report, citing David Gergen, that the police had never even made it into the Foster home that night. The list is quite long of very powerful people, including the president and Gergen himself who knew that that was nothing but a bald-faced lie, but they let the lie stand. I later asked Gergen after a National Press Club panel discussion how he could make such a statement, which, by that time, had been revealed as untrue. He told me that he was just passing on what he had been told. I did not know at the time that

Gergen was actually at the house that night and was lying once again to cover up the original lie. If intimidating the sons with their brazenness was what they were about, the choice of Gergen instead of regular White House spokesperson Dee Dee

Myers to tell the original lie was appropriate because the sons no doubt knew that Gergen had been at the house that night.

The choice of the powerful Post to tell the lie was a good stroke as well, because the reporter the sons were most likely to know, Walter Pincus, whose wife is from Little Rock, had also been at the house that night, and had no doubt been seen by the family.

Vincent Foster III, in the summer of 1993, was preparing to start his senior year in college. John Brugh Foster was as yet a year away. But in a span of less than two weeks they would learn more about this country than they would ever learn in an

American college. They would learn that, in the United States today as it was in the old Soviet Union, the lie is king.

Post Script

I am not the only one to notice serious lying going on by key figures associated with the Foster death. Recall the reaction, discussed in "Dreyfus 5," of Detective Pete Markland of the U.S. Park Police upon hearing that White House Counsel,

Bernard Nussbaum, had reported his office finding 27 pieces of a torn-up note in Foster’s briefcase:

"Bullshit! Either it didn’t come out of the briefcase, or Nussbaum was lying that he didn’t see the note."

Markland had been present on July 22 when Nussbaum had emptied out the briefcase and inventoried it. Since there could be no reason why Nussbaum would have lied about not seeing the note initially, the implication of the Markland remark is page 120

WACKENHUT CORPORATION obvious. The provenance of the note, like the note itself, is a fabrication. Markland’s reaction is akin to the observation of a friend of mine upon learning the official initial details of the Foster death, "It was either a murder staged to look like a suicide or a suicide staged to look like a murder."

We have observed how this note, which for a number of reasons is as obviously fraudulent as was the Panizzardi telegram in the Dreyfus Affair, was first withheld so suspense could build about its contents and, since then, has been repeatedly referred to by the authorities and the journalistic community as virtual proof of Foster’s suicidal frame of mind. The most recent example comes from the pen of The Post’s famed Bob Woodward in his best-selling Shadow: Five Presidents and the

Legacy of Watergate 1974-1999:

Foster had singled out the Wall Street Journal editors as those who "lie without consequence" in his famous suicide note in which he had concluded that he was not meant for the spotlight of public life in Washington.

Notice how, contrary to the original cautious characterization, the strangely peevish, disjointed scribbling worthy of a high school sophomore has now become "his famous suicide note," with the penultimate sentence duly emphasized. All that is missing is the ballyhooed last line, "Here ruining people is considered sport." Woodward, once portrayed by the handsome, open-faced Robert Redford as a crusading, idealistic young reporter in All the Presidents Men, has now come down to squeezing the last bit of mileage out of a bald lie in the form of a government forgery. It kind of makes you wonder about the real role of this Yale graduate and former Naval intelligence officer in the Watergate episode, doesn’t it?

Even more important to the official suicide conclusion and the media-concocted suicide "consensus" than the bogus note is the bogus Foster autopsy. We have discussed its importance and the reasons for our characterization elsewhere. Finally, though, while lying is our subject, we must share with you this exchange of letters between Foster autopsy doctor, James C.

Beyer, and the father of the late Tommy Burkett, Thomas D. Burkett. They are taken from the Burkett family’s web site at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html . They speak volumes about Dr. Beyer’s probity:

Department of Health

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

NORTHERN VIRGINIA DISTRICT

9797 BRADDOCK ROAD

SUITE 100

FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA 22032-1700

December 1, 1992

Mr. Thomas D. Burkett

13456 Muirkirk Lane

Herndon, VA. 22071

RE: Thomas C. Burkett

As I have attempted to explain in replying to your previous letters regarding photographs from the postmortem examination on Thomas C. Burkett, a photograph of the right side of his head was never taken. Therefore, I have furnished you with page 121

WACKENHUT CORPORATION copies of all available photographs which you could have viewed on January 2, 1992.

Sincerely,

James C. Beyer

Deputy Chief Medical Examiner

* * * * *

13456 Muirkirk Lane

Herndon, VA 22071

Dec. 5, 1992

Dr. James C. Beyer

Deputy Chief Medical Examiner 9797 Braddock Road

Suite 100

Fairfax, VA 22032-1700

RE: Your responses to requests for information regarding the location of and custodians of photos of the body of our son,

Thomas C. Burkett

In our letter of Nov. 29, we requested information regarding the present location of and the custodian of the photo I saw in your office on Jan, 2, 1992. The photo was of the right side of the head and the upper torso. The body was unclothed and lying on a table. You pulled that picture out after I asked why the injury to the right ear did not appear on the autopsy report even though both funeral directors and others who saw the body commented on it. On April 7, 1992, in my presence, our lawyer asked about other photos when you showed him the close-up of the face. In your answer you acknowledged the existence of other photos but said they were " police photos" and we couldn't see them. Now you say in your letter of Dec. 1 that there were no other photos and that I could not have viewed any others on Jan. 2.

You are lying.

Sincerely,

Thomas D. Burkett

Notes

1. Letter to M. Felix Faure, president of the Republic (‘J’accuse’}, in L’Aurore, 13 January 1898. Reprinted in The Dreyfus

Affair, J’accuse and Other Writings, Alain Pages, editor, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 51, 52. page 122


2. Quoted by Robert Conquest in Tyrants and Typewriters, Communiques from the Struggle for Truth. (Lexington, MA:

Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 53-54.

3. Zola, op. cit., pp. 51, 52.

4. "Report of the Independent Counsel In Re Vincent W. Foster, Jr.," Washington, D.C., June 30, 1994, p. 50. (Fiske Report)

5. "Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., by the Office of Independent Counsel in Re: Madison Guaranty Savings &

Loan Association," Filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Oct. 10, 1997, (Starr

Report) p. 59.

6. Fiske Report, p. 8.

7. "Fifteenth Report by the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Investigation of the White House

Travel Office Firings and Related Matters," September 26, 1996, p. 667.

8. Ibid., p. 665. Ms. Sherburne is actually uncritically relaying the first-hand account of White House aide David Watkins here, so he is really the more culpable liar of the two.

9. "Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters

(D’Amato Committee), Vol. I, The Inquiry into Whether Improper Conduct Occurred Regarding the Way in which White

House Officials Handled Documents in the Office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., Following His

Death," p. 175.

10. Ibid. pp. 205-206.

11. The role of the FBI in the original investigation has been downplayed by all concerned, including the putative critic of the government, Christopher Ruddy. Note, however, that when the initial suicide conclusion was reached on August 10,

1993, one of the people making the announcement and taking questions was Robert Bryant of the FBI. The FBI also sent investigators to the White House and the Old Executive Office Building in the days immediately after Foster’s death. Fiske’s primary investigators came from the ranks of the FBI and then, as we noted in "Dreyfus 3," Kenneth Starr kept Robert

Fiske’s FBI men on the job. In essence, there have not been three investigations but only one big investigation/cover-up by the FBI from the beginning.

12. Starr Report, pp. 83, 84

13. "Fifteenth Report" op. cit., p. 659.

14. Ibid., p. 665 page 123


15. Ibid.

16. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 163.

17. Webb Hubbell, Friends in High Places (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), p. 250.

18. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 101.

19. In a previous article on the Foster case entitled "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," I made note of the fact that a surprising number of people involved in the Foster case cover-up had also been involved in Watergate and/or had gone toYale University. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to overlook David Gergen. He is not only a Yale graduate, but his tenure as White House adviser covers not only Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, but Richard Nixon as well.

20. Dan E. Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (Washington,

DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998), p. 104. In addition to Markland’s report contradicting Nussbaum, recounted in

"Dreyfus 5," we have this from Moldea on p. 87, "Markland has a clear view of Foster’s briefcase through the opening in the late deputy counsel’s desk and observes Nussbaum each time he handles it. At one point, Markland watches Nussbaum as he tilts the briefcase back and forth while it’s still on the floor, apparently making sure that it’s empty.

21. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 303. Surveying the index we find that Woodward mentions the Foster death on 22 pages. It certainly deserves to be put on the list of major Foster cover-up books by prominent journalists. The quote we have given is quite representative. Here are some more: p. 232, when he first mentions the discovery of Foster’s body: "...from all indications it was a suicide. p. 249, "Clinton reminisced on Foster’s suicide." p. 260, Pathologist Charles S. Hirsch, working for Robert Fiske, describes the case as a "...no brainer. The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a suicide." p. 270, "[Kenneth Starr] would walk over every inch of ground to assure the public that Fiske’s findings had been correct." p. 355, "In July, Starr announced that after an exhaustive investigation he had concluded that Vince Foster committed suicide." p. 416, "On June 25...the Supreme Court closed off the last possible avenue for Starr to get new information on the Vince page 124


Foster suicide." p, 435, "[President Clinton] recalled his mother’s reaction to Vince Foster’s suicide, "Every man has his breaking point. We just don’t know where it is."

Curiously, to those who have not yet figured out the deception that goes into America’s cover-up game, as of the date of this writing, the leading recommended book on Christopher Ruddy’s prominent "conservative" web site, http://www.newsmax.com , is none other than Woodward’s Shadow. Not far down the list is Front Row at the White House:

My Life and Times, by Helen Thomas. This latter book, which routinely refers to the Foster "suicide" in at least two places, came out several months after Ms. Thomas has been personally presented the suppressed Knowlton addendum disproving the suicide thesis by my friend, Turley. Continuing his strange love affair with The Washington Post, Ruddy also touts

Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, by perhaps the leading media conspirator in the Foster cover-up, Michael Isikoff.

In the past, Newsmax has touted Spin Cycle, by The Post’s "media critic," Howard Kurtz, a book that belittles the reporting efforts of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London and buys in completely to the "Communications

Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" attributing all serious scandal inquiry to right-wing fanatics financed by Richard Mellon

Scaife. Newsmax also used to list "conservative" Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors along with a blurb, "Chris

Ruddy recommends this book." High Crimes has an entire cover-up chapter on Foster that begins with the observation that

Kenneth Starr had laid to rest all doubts that the death was anything but a suicide. I like to think that my repeated reminders of that fact on the Internet had something to do with its removal from the site, but as we see from these other books being touted, a man bent on covering-up cannot be kept down.

Oh, by the way, now that Bob Woodward has finally jumped into the Foster cover-up with both feet, he, who did not yet qualify when I wrote "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," now moves to the head of the list of those people who have been players in both the Watergate and "Fostergate" episodes and are also graduates of Yale University.

Appendix

Here are two letters that I sent to Robert Anderson, the producer of the infamous October 8, 1995, Mike Wallace interview of reporter Christopher Ruddy on 60 Minutes.

November 10, 1995

Mr. Robert Anderson

CBS

555 W. 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Dear Mr. Anderson:

I see that your man Mike Wallace has taken exception to some things said about your 60 Minutes program in Marlin

Fitzwater’s book, even going so far as to accuse Fitzwater of telling "bald-faced lies." Speaking of which, in his by-now infamous, skillfully edited piece featuring journalist Christopher Ruddy as a sly, dishonest money grubber Mr. Wallace makes the following statement: "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger." page 125


You surely must know that as lies go that one is a big time whopper, one of the most egregious ever told on prime time television, and worse, it is an intentional misrepresentation of the facts that goes right to the heart of the Vince Foster death case. The known forensic evidence does nothing of the sort. Without the bullet, which is still yet to be found, there is simply no way of connecting the apparent head wounds to the revolver found in Foster’s hand. All that could be said from Dr.

Beyer’s autopsy is that there is a possibility that the wounds were made by a large caliber weapon firing a high-velocity bullet corresponding to the revolver with the spent shell casing found in Foster’s hand, and that the weapon’s barrel was deep in the mouth at the time the trigger was pulled. But there is much evidence, both within the autopsy and without, which doesn’t just fail to support that conclusion, but actually contradicts it.

A .38 caliber Colt revolver has a high sight and a large recoil. That combination almost guarantees chipped teeth if the gun was fired as Wallace so authoritatively says it was, especially if the gun and the hand are to end up all the way down by the side of the leg. No such chipped teeth were noted in the autopsy. Dr. Beyer did record the presence of powder burns in the soft palate of the mouth, but curiously, the Fiske panel of pathologists, who, ostensibly, relied exclusively on Dr. Beyer’s report, said there were no "flame burns," which is essentially the same thing, in the mouth. The gaping exit wound which Dr.

Beyer depicted in his autopsy diagram is characteristic of the .38, but all other known evidence appears to contradict Beyer’s observations. No other person known to have seen the body has described such a wound. Chief Medical Examiner Donald

Haut said the wound appeared to have been made with low velocity bullet. Others thought there was no exit wound at all.

Still others thought they saw a small wound below the ear such as one might expect from the entrance of a small caliber bullet. The blown out skull and brain matter of the Beyer diagram were nowhere in evidence at the site where the body was found. To further confuse matters, one witness, known as CW, says there was no gun in the hand when he saw the body and another, emergency worker Richard Arthur, insists that the gun he saw was an automatic and not a revolver. He even drew a picture of the automatic for his Senate interviewers.

There is, as you surely must know, additional reason to question Dr. Beyer’s honesty. He checked on the gunshot wound chart that he took X-rays, while the attending policeman wrote that "Dr. Byer (sic)" reported that the X-rays showed no bullet fragments in the head (This is not a minor point. A bullet fragment of sufficient size might have been traceable to the gun which fired it.). Yet Dr. Beyer maintains that he took no X-rays, which is quite convenient for him if they, as seems likely from all the other evidence, contradict his diagram. In addition, his performance in two other recent autopsies, one of which apparently involves dastardly political corruption similar to the Foster case, seems at the very least criminally negligent.

The final assertion that the evidence shows that Foster’s thumb pulled the trigger is just silly. How did he handle the gun without leaving his fingerprints on it? And if there was an indentation on his thumb such as that which Rep. Clinger says he saw in the Polaroids, it could easily have resulted from rigor mortis setting in after the pistol’s trigger had been wedged against the thumb by someone else post mortem. In fact, that is the most likely explanation. The trigger recoil that some have hinted at simply doesn’t exist, and if it did, a livid thumb would quickly spring back to its original configuration.

So why, Mr. Anderson, would Mr. Wallace tell us such a bald-faced lie over a matter of such consequence to the nation, and when do you plan to correct it? Now that the most expert opinion available to date tells us quite confidently that the "suicide note" was not even a particularly good forgery, I would say the time for you people to salvage what’s left of your reputation is growing short.

Sincerely,

David Martin

P.S. I didn’t even get into the matter of the improbable, if not impossible, grip Foster would have had to have had on the page 126

WACKENHUT CORPORATION weapon to produce the front cylinder gap powder smudges on his fingers that Dr. Beyer reported and photos apparently show.

* * * * *

Jan. 2, 1996

Mr. Robert Anderson

CBS

555 W. 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

I have been reflecting on our telephone conversation which you initiated as a response to my November 10, 1995, letter to you charging that in a 60 Minutes piece that you produced Mike Wallace made false statements concerning the forensic evidence in the Vince Foster death case.

Before my memory of the conversation fades I’d like to get the gist of it down in writing, both for the sake of the record and because I have found, after the fashion of Sir Francis Bacon ("...writing maketh an exact man..."), that it helps me greatly to clarify by thinking.

My recollection is that, rather than addressing yourself point by point to the issues I raise in my letter, you made two main points in your defense. You invoked the authority of the four pathologists whom Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske had employed, saying that they had provided to you incontrovertible evidence of suicide, and you wrapped yourself in the prestige of CBS News, saying that because you have no particular axe to grind, if, in your professional opinion a thing is adjudged to be true, we should all accept it as true.

Another, and perhaps the principal, reason for my deciding at this time to set pen to paper again was that I was suddenly struck by the consistency , not in the substance of your argument but in the technique you employ both in the 60 Minutes piece and in your oral defense of it. A few of the Foster case characters are there, but they are out of place, invoked as authorities outside their expertise or experience while much better authorities are passed up. If you had been the producer of

The Wizard of Oz, I get the impression you would have cast Judy Garland as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ray Bolger as a munchkin.

Recall that I suggested to you that, because Fiske’s doctors had had to rely upon Dr. James Beyer’s autopsy report for the lion’s share of their analysis, eschewing, as they did, exhumation of the body, you would do better to cite Dr. Beyer as your authority. You responded that there would be a problem with that because Dr. Beyer had told "five different stories." You were admitting, it seems to me, that the man that most reasonable people would agree was in the best position to know about the nature of the wounds and their possible connection to Foster’s voluntary actions is wholly unreliable. This is a very serious concession, indeed, which I’m sure would interest the viewers of 60 minutes. You went on to say that you had seen persuasive evidence that the four doctors had come up with independently, but when I asked why they didn’t include such evidence in the Fiske Report you had no explanation that I can recall.

Though the Fiske doctors are not the best authorities on the nature of Foster’s wounds, their opinion might have carried weight on the significance of a groove or depression on the inside of Foster’s right thumb that Rep. William Clinger says he saw in the Polaroids taken by the Park Police. On 60 Minutes Rep. Clinger says that more than anything convinced him that page 127


Foster pulled the trigger. Yet, in their three and one half pages in the Fiske Report, the doctors have nothing to say about it and none are interviewed on the program. Could it be that a doctor might hurt his professional reputation making such a claim while a layman, albeit a ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives, can say whatever he pleases?

On your TV program we were also told that the numerous, many-colored carpet fibers found on Foster’s clothing came from new carpets installed in Foster’s Georgetown townhouse that he could have easily picked up merely by walking on them.

And is it someone from a police laboratory who tells us this? No, it is the "Foster family lawyer," James Hamilton.

Unmentioned is the fact that Hamilton was also an important member of the Clinton political transition team and the author of a memo to Clinton counseling stonewalling in the Whitewater case. His word, which is not only tainted, but is in this case obvious nonsense if you just think about it a little, is simply taken as final.

The criminal lawyer Hamilton is also cited by Mike Wallace as his authority that Foster was depressed, but when interviewed on screen Hamilton hardly corroborates the characterization, saying only that he "had been told" that Foster had been experiencing bouts of anxiety, or something to that effect. Was there no doctor in the house? Were you unable to interview Dr. Larry Watkins of Little Rock, Arkansas, the man who Fiske tells us prescribed an anti-depressant to Foster after talking to him on the phone, or are you as lacking in confidence in him as you are Dr. Beyer?

Then there is the matter of the impure motives, the profiteering which you strongly suggest is impelling the critics of the government. A couple of weeks ago I heard a blindly pro-Clinton local talk show host say that "the Western Journalism

Center has made a half million dollars on the sale of its Foster case videos." I called him on it and he cited 60 Minutes as his authority. I had to remind him that your authority, in turn, was the lawyer for the U.S. Park Policeman, Kevin Fornshill, whose suit against Chris Ruddy and the WJC was thrown out by a judge because of the officer’s irrelevance to Ruddy’s assertions. You no doubt know that Jim Davidson, the editor of the newsletter Strategic Investment whose video was the actual one in question, has offered to pay Mike Wallace five times his independently verified profits on the video if Wallace will appear with him to defend his charges in a public forum. Wallace’s failure to respond tells us all we need to know about the truth of this particular charge.

Speaking of Officer Fornshill, he is your authority on the condition of the death (?) scene even though he was not a part of the Park Police investigative team, such as it was, and as the discoverer of the body (the second time), was so unobservant that he claims never to have seen a gun in Foster’s hand even thought the light would have been quite good shortly after 6:00 pm daylight time on July 20. Surely you could have found more reliable witnesses to query about the scene of the body’s discovery.

Continuing your pattern, when I reminded you of the three handwriting experts having declared the oddly-discovered, fingerprintless, torn-up note a forgery you told me that you would rather believe the widow who has ostensibly said she thought the note was authentic. By the standards which you have set for yourself, I should surely think you would.

When all else fails Mr. Wallace himself becomes the authority, as with his statement I noted in the earlier letter about the

"proof" that the gun in the hand was the death weapon and his assertion of the great difficulty anyone would have transporting the body to its discovery site undetected. He can make that latter assertion only because he works out of New

York and not Washington. If he were stationed here he would encounter every day people who could easily drive out to fort

Marcy Park and see for themselves, as I have done many times, what a ridiculous statement he had made. Wallace also performs a pretty neat mind reading trick, explaining what Lisa Foster meant when she told The New Yorker that Vince was

"feeling trapped." Wallace says that it was because he knew he had to go to a psychiatrist, but he feared for his career should people learn of it. Lisa does not explain what she means by the "feeling trapped" statement, but since she also says in the interview she was unaware of any depression, Wallace’s gratuitous interpretation is almost certainly erroneous as well.

Taken all in all what you have accomplished is exactly the opposite of what you set out to do. You tell me, implicitly, that I should go with the people who have no political agenda, who are politically non-partisan. They’re the ones to believe. Well, that’s me. Until November, ‘94, I had voted Democratic all my life, including for Bill Clinton in 1992. I also watch the CBS page 128


Evening News, and that’s another reason why I think I’ll just trust myself on this one. You obviously want the American people to believe that this was a simple suicide, but I can’t help telling myself that if this the best case CBS, with its vast, though deservedly dwindling resources, can make, then it surely must have been murder.

Sincerely,

David Martin page 129

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