AMERICA'S DREYFUS AFFAIR

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 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.

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.

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 government-implicated 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 widely-respected 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 half-brother, 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 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 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 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."

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

Notes on the Net

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.

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