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 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)

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 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 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."

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.

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 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."