AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR

-- 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 question-and-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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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

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 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.

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 Prize-winning 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:

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:

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."

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:

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:

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 back-dated, 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 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).

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:

This echoed what Frank Murray had reported in The Washington Times on July 24:

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 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.

Go To Part 12