-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.30/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.30/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 30 </A> ----- Laissez Faire City Times July 26, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 30 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ America’s Dreyfus Affair, Part 6 -cont- 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. Then we have this from White House attorney Jane Sherburne of Sherburne and Nemetz, prepared on May 16, 1996: "[Mickey] Kantor had been with Vernon Jordan and David Gergen at Ben Bradlee’s house when David got the news about Foster. They all wound up at Foster’s house." As you might have suspected, Gergen, we see, wasn’t just repeating what someone had told him, he was simply lying when he agreed that the police were turned away. Not only did he know it, but The Post’s Bradlee very likely knew it as well, and notice how well this little gathering illustrates what we have just observed about the coziness between The Post and the White House. So, the president, the police, and the press knew that the police did not wait nine days to talk to family members about Foster’s death, as had been widely reported as fact and was not contradicted for a year. What of it? Wouldn’t the loved ones have been too emotionally wrought up to have been of much help to the authorities? To be sure there are those who would want us to believe that, though even if it were true, it does not excuse the bald-faced lie told the public. True or not, it is what Clinton lawyer Jane Sherburne was peddling as late as May of 1996. Here she summarizes some of the doings of White House aide, David Watkins, that fateful evening: It took ten or fifteen minutes to drive to the house. When they arrived, no one else was there. They walked up to the house; the police officers, who insisted on doing the official notification themselves, walked ahead, with Watkins right behind them. As they went up the steps, another group of people, including Webb Hubbell and Foster’s sister, came up behind them. They entered the house and Mrs. Foster came down the steps. The male officer told them that Foster had committed suicide. Mrs. Foster became hysterical; she could not possibly have been interviewed. Perhaps Ms. Sherburne can claim simple ignorance, thereby admitting incompetence. If not, what we have here is another conscious lie. The following is from Rolla’s public testimony almost a year before, on July 20, 1995: Some people were not approachable. We tried to talk to different people. We talked to--I think we talked briefly to both sisters. I had more of a rapport with Mrs. Foster, so I talked to her. Cheryl talked to Laura, the daughter. The sons weren’t home. We talked to Mr. Watkins. Other than that, we didn’t talk to anyone else there. Well, now, let’s try taking Rolla at his word on this. They talked only briefly with Sheila Anthony and Sharon Bowman, and only Ms. Braun talked with the daughter, while the only other person Rolla talked to was Lisa Foster, with whom he developed a "rapport." Yet he writes in his report that he was there for more than an hour. What was he doing all that time, eating hors d’oeuvres? The first twenty-four hours after a crime has been committed are crucial. If it is not essentially solved within that period, the chance that it will ever be solved falls drastically. The Park Police obviously know that, which is why they did their proper police work and no doubt wrung as much information out of the immediate relatives of the victim as they could. Then why would they be party to this gigantic, apparently gratuitous lie that they did not? In "Dreyfus 1" I speculated that one reason might be that they didn’t hear what they wanted to hear from the family concerning Vince’s "depression," his inclination toward suicide. Rolla did say in his report, after all, that no one present could think of any reason why Foster would kill himself, and he also said in a later deposition that when he asked Lisa if Vince was taking any medication she said that he wasn’t. Upon further reflection and with the assistance of more public records, I have come to believe that the motivation behind the big lie that the police were turned away from the Foster home is much worse than I first thought. Only for the most extreme reasons would the powers that be have resorted to such a blatant lie, one that they knew they would have to admit to in due time. The most likely reason is that the Foster family, or at least certain members of the family, didn’t just fail to go along with the depression thesis, they rejected the suicide conclusion as well. In all likelihood, they didn’t just reject it but they rejected it energetically and indignantly, as most people would who knew that a loved one had been murdered and it was being covered up. Time had to be bought while the recalcitrant family members were brought into line. Those Missing Sons And which family members might those be? The most likely candidates are the two mystery men in our little story, Vince’s two sons, 21-year-old Vincent, III, and 17-year-old John Brugh, who goes by his middle name, pronounced "brew." Oh, but didn’t we just read from the testimony of John Rolla that the sons weren’t home? That is, indeed, what he said, but then he and his organization went along with it, holding their tongues, when the newspapers told us that the police had actually been turned away. Their spokesman, Major Robert Hines, even embellished the lie a bit for me. Explaining my interest from having gone to college with Vince, I called him and asked how it would have been possible for a private lawyer to stand in the way of police carrying out an invest igation. He told me that I was right, that he couldn’t, but that the newspaper had misreported the facts. He said that the police had left the residence upon determining that the widow, Lisa, was too broken up to talk to and that they had returned the next day for an interview. That version of events, like the one told by The Post, was also made "inoperative," to borrow a Watergate-era term, a year later by the released police report and the Senate testimony of Park Police investigators Rolla and Braun about their visit to the Foster home. If we have learned anything it is that proven liars should not be trusted simply upon their word alone, which is really all that we have with respect to the absence of the sons from the Foster home on the fateful night. Later in their July 20, 1995, Senate testimony Braun and Rolla elaborate further: SENATOR PAUL SARBANES: Now, there also was an effort made to find the Foster sons. Were they at the house? BRAUN. No, they were not. ROLLA. They were in Georgetown somewhere. SENATOR SARBANES. They were somewhere in Georgetown. I take it that extended efforts were being made to try to locate them. Obviously this story, once it reached the media, would be a lead story on the television and on the radio; correct? BRAUN. Yes. ROLLA. Yes. SENATOR SARBANES. That’s very clear. These intense efforts were being made to locate the family and, as I understand it, friends and so forth, colleagues, in order to let them know what had happened. You understood at least part of that by the time you left the Foster home; is that correct? BRAUN. Yes. ROLLA. Yes. But at that point Sarbanes yields to Senator Christopher Dodd who changes to subject to the goings on in Foster’s office. One never learns in this exchange when the Park Police established contact with the Foster sons. And Sarbanes, like everyone else who has reported on the case, missed the real importance of why it was necessary to talk to the sons. They, much more so than the widow, Lisa, or the daughter, Laura, would have been likely to know about the make and model of any guns that their father might have had. Guns, as we all know, are primarily a masculine interest. If the police were really serious about determining whether or not the gun ostensibly found in Foster’s hand was his, the sons simply had to be interviewed as soon as possible. Yet, in that July 30, 1993, Washington Post article in which it was reported that the police were turned away from the house, we are told that Lisa had been interviewed for the first time only the day before, and there is no mention o f the sons. The gun, the article tells us, is being sent to a "family member" in Arkansas for possible identification, while, from all indications, the sons have not yet been called upon for possible identification. Not only is this strange, but it is not exactly true, either. According to Kenneth Starr’s report, the sister in Arkansas, to whom the Post is probably referring here, was only shown a photograph in which she noticed some similarities in the detailing at the base of the grip, but was not shown the actual gun until April of 1995. At that time she could not positively identify it. The sons remain almost completely out of the picture during the period of the investigations by the Park Police/FBI and Robert Fiske’s FBI team. From the official record, we never know when or if they ever find them and talk to them except that Fiske has the following bland little note at the bottom of page 38 of his report: "Foster’s children did not recognize the gun as one they had seen in their home." We don’t know how he knows that, and we can’t help but wonder if the sons had been so bland and passive in their assertion of the fact. When Kenneth Starr in his report speaks of the vague and imprecise recollections of the two sons, whom he never even names, he documents the observations with still-secret FBI interviews of the sons done on April 7, 1995, more than eight months after the completion of the Fiske Report. It’s very clear that they don’t want us focusing upon the sons, and that is probably for a reason. So let’s see what else we can find out about them. The Johnnie-come-lately White House lawyer, Jane Sherburne, is once again a good source because she apparently never learned the case well enough to do a good job of covering up. Marsha [Scott] and Webb [Hubbell] found Sheila Anthony at home with Vince Foster’s other sister and her daughter, who was visiting from out of town. Marsha told them what had happened. They discussed the importance of finding Beryl Anthony, Sheila’s husband, who was out with Foster’s two sons, and also called Barbara Pryor. Eventually the group headed for the Foster house. This, on the record, is before anyone has gone to the Foster home to make the death notification. Now let’s fast forward a few pages in Ms. Sherburne’s memorandum. The names in bold mean that that person’s account of the evening is being related: Watkins—Between 10 and 11, the President appeared (at the Foster house) with [Mack] McLarty. At around 10:30, McLarty and Watkins, and possibly David Gergen, had a conversation during which McLarty asked if a suicide note had been found; someone said, maybe we should look for a note. McLarty -- Stayed at the Foster house for about an hour. Senator and Mrs. Pryor, Sheila Foster Anthony, Beryl Anthony, several neighbors, a physician called by Senator Pryor, David Watkins and his wife, and Webb Hubbell were there. So, earlier in the evening Vince’s brother-in-law, Beryl Anthony, had been out with Vince’s two sons, but, from McLarty’s account, by the time he and the president arrived at the Foster home Mr. Anthony was there. Does it not stand to reason that the sons would have been there as well? Now let’s go back and look at some more of John Rolla’s testimony of July 20, 1995. This time he is being interviewed by the chief minority counsel of the D’Amato Committee, Richard Ben-Veniste. BEN-VENISTE. Now, there was a point where there was so many people in the house. The President had come. There were, literally, dozens of people who had come to the home spontaneously to comfort Mrs. Foster and Vincent Foster’s two sisters, who were present there as well. Is that so? ROLLA. There wasn’t dozens. We had Mr. Watkins and his wife with us, then there was Mr. Hubbell and the two sisters and maybe one of their husbands. I think there were four or five other people besides the four of us that originally got there and, at that point, about 10:50 p.m. or somewhere around there, the President walked in with one Secret Service agent. That husband of one of the sisters would not be Sharon Bowman’s because he was in Arkansas. That leaves Beryl Anthony, but Rolla does say "maybe" when speaking of that husband’s presence. Let’s look at another source. This is Webb Hubbell speaking. The little living room was filling up fast. Senator David Pryor and his wife Barbara. Beryl and Sheila and Sharon. Bruce Lindsay. Mickey Kantor. Mac McLarty. My son Walter had heard and came to be with us. Cars were jammed in the tiny street outside. At about 11 P.M., the President arrived. Hillary was in Little Rock with her mother. Rolla’s recollection, then, is probably correct. Beryl Anthony, the husband of Sheila Foster Anthony was there when Rolla was because Beryl was there before Bill Clinton arrived, according to this account by Hubbell.. The circumstantial evidence is growing quite strong that the two sons, with whom Beryl, for some unknown reason, had been out on the town, were also at the house. But the evidence, in the final analysis, is a bit more than circumstantial. Here Senator Barbara Boxer of the D’Amato Committee is questioning Hubbell on July 19, the day before Officers Rolla and Braun (with coaxing from Senator Sarbanes) told the committee that the sons were not there. SENATOR BOXER. So you would say that--when you say that that night, although--there were how many people from the White House? I think you’ve testified, I thought, to about a half dozen. Were there at least that many? HUBBELL. At least that many. I’m sure there were more, and the days blend together, but that night, I know the President came. Mr. Gergen came. Mack was there. David Watkins was there. Bruce Lindsey was there, but I’m sure there were other people there. We were--the room was full. Senator Pryor was there and Barbara, Beryl Anthony got there later, the kids got there. It was a typical scene and as I said, the phone was ringing off the wall. People were calling from Little Rock, had seen it on CNN in total disbelief, like the rest of us. There you have it, Hubbell remembered "the kids," just as he recalled the presence of Beryl Anthony. Jane Sherburne must have been correct that they had been out together. Now here they were at the Foster house with the crowd, but no one on the Senate panel takes any note of it, and the fiction continues that they were not located. Senator Boxer follows with a leading question about the unlikelihood that anyone in that circumstance would have been concerned about searching for documents, and quickly yields the rest of her time to the minority counsel, Ben-Veniste, who continues with leading questions of his own on the subject of the handling of documents in Foster’s White House office. Hubbell had let the cat out of the bag, but these two quickly stuffed it back in, and apparently no one was the wiser. Those who think they have followed this case quite closely might recall that there was a minor stink raised at the July, 1994, Senate Banking Committee hearings on Foster when Cheryl Braun said she had been pushed away from Sheila Anthony at the Foster house by Hubbell. In retrospect that looks like a #9, "confession and avoidance" and a #13, "create a distraction" in the Techniques for Truth Suppression. The real story, in all likelihood, is that the sons reacted quite spontaneously and naturally to the outrageous cock-and-bull story that their very stable and responsible father had committed suicide. They probably raised holy hell at the house that night. The fear must have been very great that they would blow the lid off the cover-up right off the bat if they continued in that vein. They might have even threatened that they would go to the newspapers, perhaps even to the great Watergate investigator, Bob Woodward, who was still at The Washington Post. Somehow, the danger of the two sons had to be neutralized. It had to be demonstrated to them in no uncertain terms just how futile, how hopeless were their protests. They had to be shown just how strong and united were the treacherous powers ranged against them. What better object lesson could there have been than the Washington Post report, citing David Gergen, that the police had never even made it into the Foster home that night. The list is quite long of very powerful people, including the president and Gergen himself who knew that that was nothing but a bald-faced lie, but they let the lie stand. I later asked Gergen after a National Press Club panel discussion how he could make such a statement, which, by that time, had been revealed as untrue. He told me that he was just passing on what he had been told. I did not know at the time that Gergen was actually at the house that night and was lying once again to cover up the original lie. If intimidating the sons with their brazenness was what they were about, the choice of Gergen instead of regular White House spokesperson Dee Dee Myers to tell the original lie was appropriate because the sons no doubt knew that Gergen had been at the house that night. The choice of the powerful Post to tell the lie was a good stroke as well, because the reporter the sons were most likely to know, Walter Pincus, whose wife is from Little Rock, had also been at the house that night, and had no doubt been seen by the family. Vincent Foster III, in the summer of 1993, was preparing to start his senior year in college. John Brugh Foster was as yet a year away. But in a span of less than two weeks they would learn more about this country than they would ever learn in an American college. They would learn that, in the United States today as it was in the old Soviet Union, the lie is king. Post Script I am not the only one to notice serious lying going on by key figures associated with the Foster death. Recall the reaction, discussed in "Dreyfus 5," of Detective Pete Markland of the U.S. Park Police upon hearing that White House Counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, had reported his office finding 27 pieces of a torn-up note in Foster’s briefcase: "Bullshit! Either it didn’t come out of the briefcase, or Nussbaum was lying that he didn’t see the note." Markland had been present on July 22 when Nussbaum had emptied out the briefcase and inventoried it. Since there could be no reason why Nussbaum would have lied about not seeing the note initially, the implication of the Markland remark is obvious. The provenance of the note, like the note itself, is a fabrication. Markland’s reaction is akin to the observation of a friend of mine upon learning the official initial details of the Foster death, "It was either a murder staged to look like a suicide or a suicide staged to look like a murder." We have observed how this note, which for a number of reasons is as obviously fraudulent as was the Panizzardi telegram in the Dreyfus Affair, was first withheld so suspense could build about its contents and, since then, has been repeatedly referred to by the authorities and the journalistic community as virtual proof of Foster’s suicidal frame of mind. The most recent example comes from the pen of The Post’s famed Bob Woodward in his best-selling Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate 1974-1999: Foster had singled out the Wall Street Journal editors as those who "lie without consequence" in his famous suicide note in which he had concluded that he was not meant for the spotlight of public life in Washington. Notice how, contrary to the original cautious characterization, the strangely peevish, disjointed scribbling worthy of a high school sophomore has now become "his famous suicide note," with the penultimate sentence duly emphasized. All that is missing is the ballyhooed last line, "Here ruining people is considered sport." Woodward, once portrayed by the handsome, open-faced Robert Redford as a crusading, idealistic young reporter in All the Presidents Men, has now come down to squeezing the last bit of mileage out of a bald lie in the form of a government forgery. It kind of makes you wonder about the real role of this Yale graduate and former Naval intelligence officer in the Watergate episode, doesn’t it? Even more important to the official suicide conclusion and the media-concocted suicide "consensus" than the bogus note is the bogus Foster autopsy. We have discussed its importance and the reasons for our characterization elsewhere. Finally, though, while lying is our subject, we must share with you this exchange of letters between Foster autopsy doctor, James C. Beyer, and the father of the late Tommy Burkett, Thomas D. Burkett. They are taken from the Burkett family’s web site at http://www.clark.net/pub/tburkett/pacc/PACC.html . They speak volumes about Dr. Beyer’s probity: Department of Health Office of the Chief Medical Examiner NORTHERN VIRGINIA DISTRICT 9797 BRADDOCK ROAD SUITE 100 FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA 22032-1700 December 1, 1992 Mr. Thomas D. Burkett 13456 Muirkirk Lane Herndon, VA. 22071 RE: Thomas C. Burkett As I have attempted to explain in replying to your previous letters regarding photographs from the postmortem examination on Thomas C. Burkett, a photograph of the right side of his head was never taken. Therefore, I have furnished you with copies of all available photographs which you could have viewed on January 2, 1992. Sincerely, James C. Beyer Deputy Chief Medical Examiner * * * * * 13456 Muirkirk Lane Herndon, VA 22071 Dec. 5, 1992 Dr. James C. Beyer Deputy Chief Medical Examiner 9797 Braddock Road Suite 100 Fairfax, VA 22032-1700 RE: Your responses to requests for information regarding the location of and custodians of photos of the body of our son, Thomas C. Burkett In our letter of Nov. 29, we requested information regarding the present location of and the custodian of the photo I saw in your office on Jan, 2, 1992. The photo was of the right side of the head and the upper torso. The body was unclothed and lying on a table. You pulled that picture out after I asked why the injury to the right ear did not appear on the autopsy report even though both funeral directors and others who saw the body commented on it. On April 7, 1992, in my presence, our lawyer asked about other photos when you showed him the close-up of the face. In your answer you acknowledged the existence of other photos but said they were " police photos" and we couldn't see them. Now you say in your letter of Dec. 1 that there were no other photos and that I could not have viewed any others on Jan. 2. You are lying. Sincerely, Thomas D. Burkett ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notes 1. Letter to M. Felix Faure, president of the Republic (‘J’accuse’}, in L’Aurore, 13 January 1898. Reprinted in The Dreyfus Affair, J’accuse and Other Writings, Alain Pages, editor, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 51, 52. 2. Quoted by Robert Conquest in Tyrants and Typewriters, Communiqués from the Struggle for Truth. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 53-54. 3. Zola, op. cit., pp. 51, 52. 4. "Report of the Independent Counsel In Re Vincent W. Foster, Jr.," Washington, D.C., June 30, 1994, p. 50. (Fiske Report) 5. "Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr., by the Office of Independent Counsel in Re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association," Filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Oct. 10, 1997, (Starr Report) p. 59. 6. Fiske Report, p. 8. 7. "Fifteenth Report by the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Investigation of the White House Travel Office Firings and Related Matters," September 26, 1996, p. 667. 8. Ibid., p. 665. Ms. Sherburne is actually uncritically relaying the first-hand account of White House aide David Watkins here, so he is really the more culpable liar of the two. 9. "Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters (D’Amato Committee), Vol. I, The Inquiry into Whether Improper Conduct Occurred Regarding the Way in which White House Officials Handled Documents in the Office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., Following His Death," p. 175. 10. Ibid. pp. 205-206. 11. The role of the FBI in the original investigation has been downplayed by all concerned, including the putative critic of the government, Christopher Ruddy. Note, however, that when the initial suicide conclusion was reached on August 10, 1993, one of the people making the announcement and taking questions was Robert Bryant of the FBI. The FBI also sent investigators to the White House and the Old Executive Office Building in the days immediately after Foster’s death. Fiske’s primary investigators came from the ranks of the FBI and then, as we noted in "Dreyfus 3," Kenneth Starr kept Robert Fiske’s FBI men on the job. In essence, there have not been three investigations but only one big investigation/cover-up by the FBI from the beginning. 12. Starr Report, pp. 83, 84 13. "Fifteenth Report" op. cit., p. 659. 14. Ibid., p. 665 15. Ibid. 16. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 163. 17. Webb Hubbell, Friends in High Places (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), p. 250. 18. D’Amato Committee Hearings, op. cit., p. 101. 19. In a previous article on the Foster case entitled "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," I made note of the fact that a surprising number of people involved in the Foster case cover-up had also been involved in Watergate and/or had gone to Yale University. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to overlook David Gergen. He is not only a Yale graduate, but his tenure as White House adviser covers not only Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, but Richard Nixon as well. 20. Dan E. Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998), p. 104. In addition to Markland’s report contradicting Nussbaum, recounted in "Dreyfus 5," we have this from Moldea on p. 87, "Markland has a clear view of Foster’s briefcase through the opening in the late deputy counsel’s desk and observes Nussbaum each time he handles it. At one point, Markland watches Nussbaum as he tilts the briefcase back and forth while it’s still on the floor, apparently making sure that it’s empty. 21. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 303. Surveying the index we find that Woodward mentions the Foster death on 22 pages. It certainly deserves to be put on the list of major Foster cover-up books by prominent journalists. The quote we have given is quite representative. Here are some more: p. 232, when he first mentions the discovery of Foster’s body: "...from all indications it was a suicide. p. 249, "Clinton reminisced on Foster’s suicide." p. 260, Pathologist Charles S. Hirsch, working for Robert Fiske, describes the case as a "...no brainer. The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a suicide." p. 270, "[Kenneth Starr] would walk over every inch of ground to assure the public that Fiske’s findings had been correct." p. 355, "In July, Starr announced that after an exhaustive investigation he had concluded that Vince Foster committed suicide." p. 416, "On June 25...the Supreme Court closed off the last possible avenue for Starr to get new information on the Vince Foster suicide." p, 435, "[President Clinton] recalled his mother’s reaction to Vince Foster’s suicide, "Every man has his breaking point. We just don’t know where it is." Curiously, to those who have not yet figured out the deception that goes into America’s cover-up game, as of the date of this writing, the leading recommended book on Christopher Ruddy’s prominent "conservative" web site, http://www.newsmax.com/ , is none other than Woodward’s Shadow. Not far down the list is Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times, by Helen Thomas. This latter book, which routinely refers to the Foster "suicide" in at least two places, came out several months after Ms. Thomas has been personally presented the suppressed Knowlton addendum disproving the suicide thesis by my friend, Turley. Continuing his strange love affair with The Washington Post, Ruddy also touts Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, by perhaps the leading media conspirator in the Foster cover-up, Michael Isikoff. In the past, Newsmax has touted Spin Cycle, by The Post’s "media critic,&qu ot; Howard Kurtz, a book that belittles the reporting efforts of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London and buys in completely to the "Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" attributing all serious scandal inquiry to right-wing fanatics financed by Richard Mellon Scaife. Newsmax also used to list "conservative" Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors along with a blurb, "Chris Ruddy recommends this book." High Crimes has an entire cover-up chapter on Foster that begins with the observation that Kenneth Starr had laid to rest all doubts that the death was anything but a suicide. I like to think that my repeated reminders of that fact on the Internet had something to do with its removal from the site, but as we see from these other books being touted, a man bent on covering-up cannot be kept down. Oh, by the way, now that Bob Woodward has finally jumped into the Foster cover-up with both feet, he, who did not yet qualify when I wrote "The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys," now moves to the head of the list of those people who have been players in both the Watergate and "Fostergate" episodes and are also graduates of Yale University. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Appendix Here are two letters that I sent to Robert Anderson, the producer of the infamous October 8, 1995, Mike Wallace interview of reporter Christopher Ruddy on 60 Minutes. November 10, 1995 Mr. Robert Anderson CBS 555 W. 57th Street New York, NY 10019 Dear Mr. Anderson: I see that your man Mike Wallace has taken exception to some things said about your 60 Minutes program in Marlin Fitzwater’s book, even going so far as to accuse Fitzwater of telling "bald-faced lies." Speaking of which, in his by-now infamous, skillfully edited piece featuring journalist Christopher Ruddy as a sly, dishonest money grubber Mr. Wallace makes the following statement: "The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger." You surely must know that as lies go that one is a big time whopper, one of the most egregious ever told on prime time television, and worse, it is an intentional misrepresentation of the facts that goes right to the heart of the Vince Foster death case. The known forensic evidence does nothing of the sort. Without the bullet, which is still yet to be found, there is simply no way of connecting the apparent head wounds to the revolver found in Foster’s hand. All that could be said from Dr. Beyer’s autopsy is that there is a possibility that the wounds were made by a large caliber weapon firing a high-velocity bullet corresponding to the revolver with the spent shell casing found in Foster’s hand, and that the weapon’s barrel was deep in the mouth at the time the trigger was pulled. But there is much evidence, both within the autopsy and without, which doesn’t just fail to support that conclusion, but actually contradicts it. A .38 caliber Colt revolver has a high sight and a large recoil. That combination almost guarantees chipped teeth if the gun was fired as Wallace so authoritatively says it was, especially if the gun and the hand are to end up all the way down by the side of the leg. No such chipped teeth were noted in the autopsy. Dr. Beyer did record the presence of powder burns in the soft palate of the mouth, but curiously, the Fiske panel of pathologists, who, ostensibly, relied exclusively on Dr. Beyer’s report, said there were no "flame burns," which is essentially the same thing, in the mouth. The gaping exit wound which Dr. Beyer depicted in his autopsy diagram is characteristic of the .38, but all other known evidence appears to contradict Beyer’s observations. No other person known to have seen the body has described such a wound. Chief Medical Examiner Donald Haut said the wound appeared to have been made with low velocity bullet. Others thought there was no exit wound at all. Still others thought they saw a small wound below the ear such as one might expect from the entrance of a small caliber bullet. The blown out skull and brain matter of the Beyer diagram were nowhere in evidence at the site where the body was found. To further confuse matters, one witness, known as CW, says there was no gun in the hand when he saw the body and another, emergency worker Richard Arthur, insists that the gun he saw was an automatic and not a revolver. He even drew a picture of the automatic for his Senate interviewers. There is, as you surely must know, additional reason to question Dr. Beyer’s honesty. He checked on the gunshot wound chart that he took X-rays, while the attending policeman wrote that "Dr. Byer (sic)" reported that the X-rays showed no bullet fragments in the head (This is not a minor point. A bullet fragment of sufficient size might have been traceable to the gun which fired it.). Yet Dr. Beyer maintains that he took no X-rays, which is quite convenient for him if they, as seems likely from all the other evidence, contradict his diagram. In addition, his performance in two other recent autopsies, one of which apparently involves dastardly political corruption similar to the Foster case, seems at the very least criminally negligent. The final assertion that the evidence shows that Foster’s thumb pulled the trigger is just silly. How did he handle the gun without leaving his fingerprints on it? And if there was an indentation on his thumb such as that which Rep. Clinger says he saw in the Polaroid's, it could easily have resulted from rigor mortis setting in after the pistol’s trigger had been wedged against the thumb by someone else post mortem. In fact, that is the most likely explanation. The trigger recoil that some have hinted at simply doesn’t exist, and if it did, a livid thumb would quickly spring back to its original configuration. So why, Mr. Anderson, would Mr. Wallace tell us such a bald-faced lie over a matter of such consequence to the nation, and when do you plan to correct it? Now that the most expert opinion available to date tells us quite confidently that the "suicide note" was not even a particularly good forgery, I would say the time for you people to salvage what’s left of your reputation is growing short. Sincerely, David Martin P.S. I didn’t even get into the matter of the improbable, if not impossible, grip Foster would have had to have had on the weapon to produce the front cylinder gap powder smudges on his fingers that Dr. Beyer reported and photos apparently show. * * * * * Jan. 2, 1996 Mr. Robert Anderson CBS 555 W. 57th Street New York, NY 10019 I have been reflecting on our telephone conversation which you initiated as a response to my November 10, 1995, letter to you charging that in a 60 Minutes piece that you produced Mike Wallace made false statements concerning the forensic evidence in the Vince Foster death case. Before my memory of the conversation fades I’d like to get the gist of it down in writing, both for the sake of the record and because I have found, after the fashion of Sir Francis Bacon ("...writing maketh an exact man..."), that it helps me greatly to clarify by thinking. My recollection is that, rather than addressing yourself point by point to the issues I raise in my letter, you made two main points in your defense. You invoked the authority of the four pathologists whom Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske had employed, saying that they had provided to you incontrovertible evidence of suicide, and you wrapped yourself in the prestige of CBS News, saying that because you have no particular axe to grind, if, in your professional opinion a thing is adjudged to be true, we should all accept it as true. Another, and perhaps the principal, reason for my deciding at this time to set pen to paper again was that I was suddenly struck by the consistency , not in the substance of your argument but in the technique you employ both in the 60 Minutes piece and in your oral defense of it. A few of the Foster case characters are there, but they are out of place, invoked as authorities outside their expertise or experience while much better authorities are passed up. If you had been the producer of The Wizard of Oz, I get the impression you would have cast Judy Garland as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ray Bolger as a munchkin. Recall that I suggested to you that, because Fiske’s doctors had had to rely upon Dr. James Beyer’s autopsy report for the lion’s share of their analysis, eschewing, as they did, exhumation of the body, you would do better to cite Dr. Beyer as your authority. You responded that there would be a problem with that because Dr. Beyer had told "five different stories." You were admitting, it seems to me, that the man that most reasonable people would agree was in the best position to know about the nature of the wounds and their possible connection to Foster’s voluntary actions is wholly unreliable. This is a very serious concession, indeed, which I’m sure would interest the viewers of 60 minutes. You went on to say that you had seen persuasive evidence that the four doctors had come up with independently, but when I asked why they didn’t include such evidence in the Fiske Report you had no explanation that I can recall. Though the Fiske doctors are not the best authorities on the nature of Foster’s wounds, their opinion might have carried weight on the significance of a groove or depression on the inside of Foster’s right thumb that Rep. William Clinger says he saw in the Polaroid's taken by the Park Police. On 60 Minutes Rep. Clinger says that more than anything convinced him that Foster pulled the trigger. Yet, in their three and one half pages in the Fiske Report, the doctors have nothing to say about it and none are interviewed on the program. Could it be that a doctor might hurt his professional reputation making such a claim while a layman, albeit a ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives, can say whatever he pleases? On your TV program we were also told that the numerous, many-colored carpet fibers found on Foster’s clothing came from new carpets installed in Foster’s Georgetown townhouse that he could have easily picked up merely by walking on them. And is it someone from a police laboratory who tells us this? No, it is the "Foster family lawyer," James Hamilton. Unmentioned is the fact that Hamilton was also an important member of the Clinton political transition team and the author of a memo to Clinton counseling stonewalling in the Whitewater case. His word, which is not only tainted, but is in this case obvious nonsense if you just think about it a little, is simply taken as final. The criminal lawyer Hamilton is also cited by Mike Wallace as his authority that Foster was depressed, but when interviewed on screen Hamilton hardly corroborates the characterization, saying only that he "had been told" that Foster had been experiencing bouts of anxiety, or something to that effect. Was there no doctor in the house? Were you unable to interview Dr. Larry Watkins of Little Rock, Arkansas, the man who Fiske tells us prescribed an anti-depressant to Foster after talking to him on the phone, or are you as lacking in confidence in him as you are Dr. Beyer? Then there is the matter of the impure motives, the profiteering which you strongly suggest is impelling the critics of the government. A couple of weeks ago I heard a blindly pro-Clinton local talk show host say that "the Western Journalism Center has made a half million dollars on the sale of its Foster case videos." I called him on it and he cited 60 Minutes as his authority. I had to remind him that your authority, in turn, was the lawyer for the U.S. Park Policeman, Kevin Fornshill, whose suit against Chris Ruddy and the WJC was thrown out by a judge because of the officer’s irrelevance to Ruddy’s assertions. You no doubt know that Jim Davidson, the editor of the newsletter Strategic Investment whose video was the actual one in question, has offered to pay Mike Wallace five times his independently verified profits on the video if Wallace will appear with him to defend his charges in a public forum. Wallace’s failure to respond tells us all we need to know about the truth of this particular charge. Speaking of Officer Fornshill, he is your authority on the condition of the death (?) scene even though he was not a part of the Park Police investigative team, such as it was, and as the discoverer of the body (the second time), was so unobservant that he claims never to have seen a gun in Foster’s hand even thought the light would have been quite good shortly after 6:00 pm daylight time on July 20. Surely you could have found more reliable witnesses to query about the scene of the body’s discovery. Continuing your pattern, when I reminded you of the three handwriting experts having declared the oddly-discovered, fingerprintless, torn-up note a forgery you told me that you would rather believe the widow who has ostensibly said she thought the note was authentic. By the standards which you have set for yourself, I should surely think you would. When all else fails Mr. Wallace himself becomes the authority, as with his statement I noted in the earlier letter about the "proof" that the gun in the hand was the death weapon and his assertion of the great difficulty anyone would have transporting the body to its discovery site undetected. He can make that latter assertion only because he works out of New York and not Washington. If he were stationed here he would encounter every day people who could easily drive out to fort Marcy Park and see for themselves, as I have done many times, what a ridiculous statement he had made. Wallace also performs a pretty neat mind reading trick, explaining what Lisa Foster meant when she told The New Yorker that Vince was "feeling trapped." Wallace says that it was because he knew he had to go to a psychiatrist, but he feared for his career should people learn of it. Lisa does not explain what she means by the "feeling trapped" statement, but since she also says in the interview she was unaware of any depression, Wallace’s gratuitous interpretation is almost certainly erroneous as well. Taken all in all what you have accomplished is exactly the opposite of what you set out to do. You tell me, implicitly, that I should go with the people who have no political agenda, who are politically non-partisan. They’re the ones to believe. Well, that’s me. Until November, ‘94, I had voted Democratic all my life, including for Bill Clinton in 1992. I also watch the CBS Evening News, ant that’s another reason why I think I’ll just trust myself oh this one. You obviously want the American people to believe that this was a simple suicide, but I can’t help telling myself that if this the best case CBS, with its vast, though deservedly dwindling resources, can make, then it surely must have been murder. Sincerely, David Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David Martin may be reach by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 30, July 26, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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