-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- According to Capitol Hill Blue Susan McDougal Was Bill Clinton's Lover (But. . . Charles Hayes told us this years ago.) Whitewater figure Susan McDougal is a former lover of Bill Clinton and is protecting him out of love, say two people who knew her in Arkansas. "She's was head over heels in love with him while they were having an affair," says a former employee of Madison Guaranty, the failed Savings & Loan that McDougal and her husband owned. "She still is. That's why she's protecting him." Jim McDougal, Susan's husband who died in prison, also told 60 Minutes before his death that his wife had been Clinton's lover. "She was more than just another of the governor's one-night stands," said the former S&L employee, who asked not to be identified. "It was an ongoing thing. She bragged about it. Everybody who worked at Madison knew about it" The employee's story was corroborated by Arlene Reese, a bookkeeper who did some work for McDougal's husband. "Jim McDougal knew about the affair and it was tearing him apart," said the former Miss Reese, who has since married and left Arkansas. "He was caught between a rock and a hard place. Clinton was supposed to be his friend and he was sleeping with his wife." Mrs. McDougal has steadfastly refused to talk to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's prosecutors, saying they are trying to get her to lie about a loan her S&L made to Clinton. She was jailed for contempt before a judge ordered a release for "medical reasons." But those who knew Mrs. McDougal in Arkansas say her protection of the President is driven by love, not fear of the Whitewater prosecutors. "She was a star-struck woman sleeping with the most powerful man in Arkansas," says the former Miss Reese. "Now she's a star-struck woman protecting the most powerful man in the the country. That's pretty heady stuff don't you think?" Calls for comment to Mrs. McDougal's attorneys and the White House were not returned Thursday. Capitol Hill Blue, March 26, 1999 Central America Hot and Sweaty Jungle Romance (But can Coppola compete with Laissez Faire City?) What has happened to the world's torpid and seedy back-waters? In the days when eminent families still paid their black sheep to stay far away, when scandal at home demanded long voyages overseas, when young men sought adventure or consolation in lonely and hellish places, such spots were commonplace. Somerset Maugham built a career out of them. In that not-so-distant past, one had only to board a slow boat to China, to Mozambique or Valparaiso, and jump ship at the first insalubrious tropical port. Perspiration and slowly revolving ceiling fans in such places were de rigueur. Whisky sodas and cheroots in louche company were likely. Dissolute romance was hardly avoidable. Physical turpitude and moral disintegration were practically guaranteed. But, alas, of late the world has become a smaller, neater, more civilised place. Globalisation, mass tourism and air-conditioning have done their dirty work. Such romantic days are over and such adventurous places are gone. Or are they? Not entirely. If scandal-makers now stay at home and serialise their indiscretions in the Sunday papers, there are other men who continue to seek out overly warm and obscure places. I have recently returned from Belize, just such a place, and can report that sweaty, far-flung, romantic adventure is alive and well. Why else would a man such as Francis Ford Coppola choose to buy Blancaneaux Lodge, a retreat deep in the hills of this humid and jungly little country? Surely the cinema legend who created Apocalypse Now has the wherewithal to settle in more comfortable hills. What is wrong with the Hollywood Hills? Yet there his lodge sits hidden in the forests of Belize's Mountain Pine Ridge, the last word in isolated getaways. Not so long ago Belize was a place where only outcasts or the downright desperate ended up. So unappealing, so swampy, muggy and snaky was this small territory on the Caribbean coast that only outlaw English sea pirates and their rough-living descendants, the Baymen, could be bothered to colonise it. Those who joined them to cut tropical hardwood in these steamy jungles - enslaved Africans and Maya Indian refugees fleeing Spanish atrocities in the Yucatan to the north - certainly did not come for their health, prosperity or enjoyment. For more than 300 years Belize, poor and unenvied, slumbered fitfully on, a neglected place of strange bird calls and forest silences. What was it, I wondered as I bumped my way to Blancaneaux, that now encourages people to unlikely, end-of-the-earth spots like Mountain Pine Ridge? The answer, I discovered over the next few days, is old-style adventurism. Today it is called eco-tourism, a fashionable, politically correct term that Somerset Maugham would not have approved of. Call it what you will - its impulse springs from the same innate need Maugham's character's themselves acted upon: the urge everyone feels now and then simply to get away from it all. In the Coppola vision of adventure, getting away from civilisation does not necessarily mean getting away from comfort. When the director stumbled across Blancaneaux, an abandoned hunting lodge, in 1981 he was, he wrote, "searching for a lost paradise rumoured to be hidden in the mountains". He renovated paradise and for a decade used it as a private retreat for friends and family, a secluded place in which he could write in peace. Today, the lodge, with a staff of 50 and a guest capacity of 45, is a small, luxury hideaway for travellers who enjoy pampering as much as adventuring. Perched on the steep banks of Privassion Creek, secluded cabins and villas - all built on wooden stilts of forest materials - provide a sybarite's stay in the Belize wilds. My villa - Coppola's own when he is there - was a delightful fantasy of polished tropical hardwood floors, bamboo walls and high palm-thatched roofs covering airy spaces. Inside, the furniture was handmade and solid, the Guatemalan rugs and bedspreads colourful and exotic, the bath deep, tiled and vast. Outside, broad wooden decks hung over the black boulders and splashing blue-green falls of the creek below. When guests are not swimming in the creek's pools, drinking Jaguar Juice cocktails at the bar, or sampling bruschetta and one of Coppola's own Napa Valley wines in the restaurant, they are out being eco-tourists. There are rainforest hikes, excursions to Maya ruins, visits to 1,000ft-high waterfalls, and searches for medicinal jungle plants, jaguars and bright tropical butterflies. There are other remarkable creatures out there, too - human ones. Over the years all sorts of small groups of non-conformist outsiders have settled the wilds of Belize, finding in its humid isolation the freedom they failed to find elsewhere. Hardly Coppolaesque but equally colourful and exotic, they are also doing their best to get away from it all to the stillness of the Belize jungles. A few miles down the muddy road from Blancaneaux, at Barton Creek, an entire Mennonite community leads an existence divorced from the modern world. Disillusioned by what they saw as other Mennonites' gradual surrender to mechanisation, electricity, computers, zippered clothing and other conveniences, they fled to the jungle two decades ago. Drive through their community today and young men in straw hats, braces, breeches and cotton shirts buttoned to the neck will exchange friendly smiles and waves. But that is all they want from you. Living in the purest orthodox simplicity of an earlier era, they make a subsistence living from the earth. Barefooted young girls in scarves and long skirts hoe the fields by hand. Harnessed mules pull ploughs. Bearded old men drive unconcernedly about in horse-drawn buggies. None of them, in fact, takes the slightest notice of the last, rapidly disappearing century of this millennium. "But they'll help you out in a hurry if you need them," Mike Bogart said as we stood on the upper reaches of Barton Creek. Harrison Ford may have played the rainforest pioneer from the big city in the screen version of The Mosquito Coast, but Bogart is playing the same role in real life. He had little idea of what he was doing when he began clearing land and building a house with his wife three years ago - in a previous existence he was a financial services employee in a suburban Canadian bank. With a little help from his Mennonite neighbours he is now on firmer ground, and setting up his own eco-tourism business in jungle pony trekking. Bogart's young daughter, Eden, is anonpareil among eco-tourists. "She can sniff the air and tell us what kinds of forest trees are in bloom over the next hill," he says in wonder. But the first adventurers came to these hills long before flamboyant film directors, rebel bank employees or even dissident Christians existed. About 2,000 years ago Mayan Indians began using the Upper Barton Creek Caves as a passage to climb from the natural to the supernatural world. With Blancaneaux guide Coolie Holland paddling in the stern of our canoe, I made my way some two miles up a Bar-ton Creek that had now become an underground river flowing from the heart of the earth. It was eerie and somewhat frightening. There were strange things to be seen there in the beams of our flashlights: stalactites and stalagmites poised like so many rows of sharp teeth; bizarre and glittering rock formations disappearing upwards to a cave roof 150ft above our heads; natural bridges stretching across the river; blind fish; spiders with feelers a foot long. But the strangest sights of all were the skulls and bones of long departed Mayas lying on narrow rock shelves above the water. "The Mayas believed the stalactites were the protruding underground roots of the Tree of Life," Holland explained. "What they wanted was to get to the top. If they could be buried here by these roots, they had an easy and guaranteed ascent - it was like taking an express elevator straight to heaven." Even for the Maya, then, there was no real paradise on earth. But there is always a second option. On the drive back to Blancaneaux, I noticed signs advertising forest lots for sale. Those who are interested had better hurry. Romantic adventure being the booming business it is these days, even the quiet backwaters of Belize might not be quiet for that much longer. * Francis Ford Coppola's Blancaneaux Lodge, Central Farm, PO Box B, Cayo district Belize. Tel: +501 92 3878, fax 3919. It costs from $160 a night for a single room and includes breakfast. Government hotel tax is 7 per cent extra and service tax 10 per cent. * Belize is less than two hours by air from Houston, New Orleans and Miami. The Financial Times, March 27, 1999 Clinton the War-Monger U.S., NATO Consider Sending Ground Troops into Kosovo Another Act of Mad Folly The deteriorating situation in Kosovo has prompted discussions among senior NATO and U.S. officials about the possibility of introducing U.S. and allied ground forces into the three-day-old air campaign against the Yugoslav military. Senior officials said a decision on a deployment was still unlikely and the subject has not yet been broached with President Clinton, who said this week that he did not intend to send U.S. troops to Kosovo to fight. But officials said some senior NATO and U.S. military commanders fear that the ongoing bombing campaign cannot stop the offensive by Serbian-led forces against Albanian villages in the rebellious province, and that ground forces might be needed to stop the Serbs or prevent the war from spreading to neighboring countries. Officials said the very fact that a ground war is under consideration is a measure of the seriousness of the difficulties now facing the commanders of Operation Allied Force. "Nobody at anything like a senior level, the principals' committee or deputies' committee, has looked the president or the secretary of state in the eye and said, 'This isn't going to work; we have to reconsider,'�" said a senior administration official involved in the planning. "Here, and in Brussels, people have said, 'What if the limitations of air power are such, and the atrocities are such, that we have to consider [troops]?'�" Because the U.S. military traditionally plans for worst-case scenarios, certain commanders are being briefed on military contingency plans for combat and preparing their troops for entry into Yugoslavia in a hostile environment, said U.S. officials. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. "You have to make a distinction between what they are told to plan for and what they prudently plan for," said one military officer. A NATO force that includes 4,000 British, 2,800 German and 2,500 French troops is already deployed in Macedonia, a country that borders on Kosovo, in anticipation of peacekeeping duty under a Western peace plan. In recent days, it has been reorganized with a new command-and-control structure and with additional reconnaissance and intelligence assets, officials said. New levels of supplies have been flown in to accommodate a longer stay by the force, whose deployment in Kosovo has been repeatedly rejected by Serb leader and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Also, 38 U.S. officers, including a U.S. brigadier general who is the assistant chief of staff for operations, will be in Macedonia to help direct troops in NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the headquarters for a contingency force planned by the alliance that could be assembled from units stationed around Europe. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, made up of 2,200 Marines, will arrive in the vicinity soon, on its way to relieve the current Marine unit afloat in the Adriatic. Another 350 U.S. soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division-Mechanized that were part of a separate U.N. peacekeeping force in Macedonia are now on scouting missions on the Macedonia-Kosovo border. Yesterday, 100 combat-equipped Marines flew to Macedonia to augment U.S. Embassy security there. In Bosnia, where the United States has 9,800 troops from the 1st Cavalry Division in the international peacekeeping force there, U.S. forces are on what one senior official described as a ready-to-go stance. The 1st Cavalry is one of the most heavily equipped divisions in the U.S. Army, and it is now deployed in Bosnia in unusually large numbers because of a scheduled rotation. The units now in Bosnia include 13 combat companies and 30 tanks, 60 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles and one Apache helicopter battalion of 24 combat attack helicopters. Also, elements of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division have begun training at one of Europe's premier combat training fields, at Hohenfels in Germany, for possible deployment as peacekeepers in Kosovo. U.S. military officials are in a particularly awkward spot. From the beginning of the Kosovo crisis, officials said, senior commanders have warned Clinton and his top advisers that air power has its limits. Now the events of the past two days, which have seen Yugoslav forces step up their attacks in Kosovo in spite of NATO bombing raids, may be proving them right. To avoid a last-minute scramble to get ground forces ready for combat in Kosovo or neighboring countries in the event the situation deteriorates further, officials said, NATO commanders have begun taking quiet steps on their own, hoping they will not disrupt NATO's fragile political consensus on Kosovo or provoke opposition in Congress. Military officials said the heightened Serb atrocities in Kosovo � again a scenario NATO and U.S. military planners anticipated � have cast the limits of an air war into clearer focus. To avoid pilot casualties, military planners have focused the first several days of bombings on the Yugoslav air defense system, rather than on Serb troops. Yesterday, facing reports of mass killings in Kosovo by Serb special police, the Clinton administration urged NATO to increase the pace of the bombing campaign so it can more quickly begin to target the troops and tanks involved in the reported atrocities. But administration and defense officials say such targets will remain difficult to destroy from the air because the perpetrators are often small gangs of special police using guerrilla tactics, including mixing deeply within populated civilian areas. In fact, it is just this type of urban, guerrilla warfare that is more effectively countered by ground troops. "We're going to do everything we can through air operations," said one senior military official, speaking to this fact. The Washington Post, March 27, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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