Hillary's Secret War
The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists by
Richard Poe
A review by David Martin
Thumbing
through this 2004 book, with a foreword by Jim Robinson, founder of
FreeRepublic.com, one gets the impression that this is a much harder hitting
and genuine effort than Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary: What
She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President.
Harder
hitting? Yes. More genuine? No.
The tip-off
as to who is expected to read this book is at the top of the dust jacket:
"This book is required reading," it says in bold
italics. And right under the quote in bigger, bolder, all capital letters
is the name of the professional polarizer being quoted, none other than Ann
Coulter. With such a recommendation, the publisher is assured that the
only people likely to spend more than five minutes with the book are hard core Fox News junkies. And Poe gives them a lot
more raw meat than Klein or even Coulter, herself, ever did.
Recall that I faulted Klein for pulling his punches on Hillary
Clinton's likely lesbianism and the various Clinton scandals, particularly the
death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster. Hillary's domestic
life is not a topic of his book, so her sexual orientation is, appropriately,
not addressed. * As for the scandals, Poe can hardly be said to have gone
easy on Hillary. Though both Klein's and Poe's books are aimed
principally at conservatives, Poe's is obviously meant for only a small subset
of that audience. The giveaway is that Klein's book got tons of publicity and Poe's
book got absolutely none. I didn't even know of the existence of Poe's
book until I stumbled across it at a used book store a couple of months ago,
even though it actually mentions me and references my "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of
the Death of Vincent Foster." It is safe for Poe to tell his readers about
some of the worst of the Clinton scandals, because only a very select group of
people who already hate the Clintons with a passion are likely ever to read it.
That is not
to say that Poe tells the whole truth. Far from it.
His job is clearly to play right-wing shepherd and to herd his assigned flock
away from the corruption that envelopes both the
Democrats and the Republicans as well as our ruling media elite.
Poe
describes a shocking manifestation of the corruption in his apparent gloves-off
treatment of the murder and cover-up in the Foster case. Revealing more
than journalist Christopher
Ruddy,
whom he praises to the skies and ridiculously likens to Emile Zola in the
Dreyfus case, he describes here the reaction of Kenneth Starr's
"investigative" team to the terrifying harassment** that the
inconvenient witness, Patrick Knowlton, whom British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
had ferreted out, received after being subpoenaed to appear before a grand
jury:
No one knows
who ordered the harassment team to begin its operation against Patrick Knowlton
on October 26, 1995. However, someone close to the Starr investigation
must have tipped them off that Knowlton had received a subpoena.
Throughout
Knowlton's ordeal, Starr's team treated the beleaguered witness with
extraordinary contempt.
When the
street harassment began, Knowlton called the FBI and requested witness
protection. Nothing happened for two days. Finally, Agent Russell Bransford—the same FBI agent who had delivered
Starr's subpoena—showed up. "He had this smirk on his face, as
if he thought the whole thing was amusing," says Knowlton. "I
told him to get the hell out of my house."
At the same
time Knowlton was calling the FBI, Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard called Deputy
Independent Counsel John Bates to report the intimidation of a grand jury
witness. Bates's secretary jotted down some
notes. "An hour later I called again," says Evans-Pritchard.
"She let out an audible laugh and said that her boss had received the
message...Bates never called back.
What did
Starr's people find so funny about the situation?
As a last
resort, Knowlton prepared a "Report of Witness Tampering" and took it
personally to the Office of the Independent Counsel. "It was their
responsibility, at the very least, to find out who leaked word of his
subpoena," notes Evans-Pritchard. According to Evans-Pritchard, John
Bates responded by calling security and having Knowlton removed from the
building.
Perhaps the
most telling indication of Starr's attitude toward Knowlton is the humiliating
cross-examination to which this brave man was subjected before the grand
jury. Knowlton says that he was "treated like a suspect."
Prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be trying to
imply that Knowlton was a homosexual who was cruising Fort Marcy Park for
sex. Regarding the suspicious Hispanic-looking man he had seen guarding
the park entrance, Kavanaugh asked, Did he "pass you a note?" Did he "touch
your genitals?"
Knowlton
flew into a rage at Kavanaugh's insinuations.
Evans-Pritchard writes that several African American jurors burst into laughter
at the spectacle, rocking "back and forth as if they were at a Baptist
revival meeting. Kavanaugh was unable to
reassert his authority. The grand jury was laughing at him. The
proceedings were out of control."
It was at
that point, reports Evans-Pritchard, that Patrick Knowlton was finally
compelled to confront the obvious: "the Office of the Independent Counsel
was itself corrupt." (pp. 106-107)
Indeed it
was, which explains how it could come to the conclusion that Foster committed
suicide in Fort Marcy Park against the compelling testimony of Knowlton that
the extra car in the park parking lot was not that of the already dead Foster,
plus a ton of additional suicide-contradicting evidence.
Where Poe
intentionally misleads us, to his eternal discredit, has to do with the nature,
the depth and breadth, and the origin of the corruption of Starr and his
team. Consistent with his book's title and its general orientation, Poe
would have us believe that the Clintons were behind the cover-up and that
George H.W. Bush's former solicitor general, Kenneth Starr, went along with it
out of simple timidity and cowardice:
As Ruddy
paints him, Starr was the sort of man who makes police states work. He
may well have been the decent fellow whom his friends describe, upright and
diligent in his work. But Starr had a vice that outweighed all his
virtues. He was a coward, so paralyzed with fear in the face of naked
evil that he would look the other way and pretend not to see it. He was
just the sort of man that Bill and Hillary needed. (p. 103)
Actually,
it's not quite that simple. Really effective police states need effective
propaganda that is believed by a high percentage of the population.
That's where the layers of propagandists, from the mainstream journalists, to
the Edward Kleins, the Ann Coulters, the Christopher Ruddys, the Richard Poes, and the
various "persecuted," "heroic," Internet journalists in
Poe's book, Joseph Farah, Jim Robinson, Matt Drudge, David Horowitz, and a host
of others come in (entering stage right, of course). And here's the proof
of the pudding.
Note
carefully the names of those two Starr underlings involved in the harassment of
the witness, Knowlton. They are John Bates and Brett Kavanaugh. On page 143 Poe
says, not surprisingly, "Like most Americans I support George W. Bush and
his War on Terror." But Poe conveniently neglects to tell his
readers that this president, whom he praises as a "decent, God-fearing
man," has made federal judges--with the approval of the United States
Senate--of these two accomplices after the fact of a high-level murder.
Poe's
omission of this fact is surely intentional. To impart this information
would be to completely undermine his simple-minded message aimed at
simple-minded readers, that is, that the deep, pervasive national corruption
that he reveals in his book essentially begins and ends with Bill and Hillary
Clinton, and that his right-wing heroes are free of the taint. His
editors apparently recognized the risk he was taking of giving the game away by
telling us of the cover-up role of Bates and Kavanaugh
in the Foster murder, because neither name appears in the book's detailed,
extensive index.
Again, this
omission could hardly be unintentional. Even the brief mention of my
"America's
Dreyfus Affair"
got my name into the index. Poe must be pretty sure that the true
believers who read his work are not going to go to the trouble to track down my
six-part Internet article and actually read it. Were they to do so, they
would see how his beloved "conservative" crowd did as least as much
as the hated, pro-Clinton liberals to cover up the Foster murder. These
include Ann Coulter, FBI agent Gary
Aldrich, and the late Barbara Olson, whom Poe praises so highly in his
book. On the role of conservatives in particular, see "Vince Foster's Valuable Murder." With this
broader education, one should not be at all surprised that George Bush should
reward obstructers of justice by giving them positions of great importance in
our "justice" system. Who is a nominal Democrat or Republican
in this corrupt apparatus is completely beside the point.
Finally, and
again, not surprisingly, a name that you will not find anywhere in either Poe's
or Ruddy's account of the cover-up of the Foster murder
is that of George Bush's current head of the Department of Homeland Security,
Michael Chertoff. He was minority counsel in the first Senate
investigation related to the death of Vincent Foster and majority special
counsel in the second such Senate inquiry. Readers can see how cleverly
he labored to prevent the truth from getting out at "Michael Chertoff, Master of the
Cover-up.
David
Martin
September
9, 2007
* Poe later
more than made up for that omission in spades with his glowing review of
Klein's phony Hillary attack book on FrontPage
Magazine.
** For a
detailed account of that harassment, see the statement that Knowlton and his
lawyer, John Clarke, prepared and a 3-judge panel had Kenneth Starr append to
his report on Foster's death over Starr's strenuous objections.
Addendum
It has been
called to my attention that the names of future federal judges John Bates and
Brett Kavanaugh were not the only ones strategically
left out of the book's index. The long passage above ends at the bottom
of page 107. Here we pick up the narrative at the top of page 108,
without skipping a word. As you read it, see if you can guess the name
that didn't make the index:
Ken Starr's
lead prosecutor Miquel Rodriguez had reached that
same conclusion seven months earlier (that Starr's investigation was corrupt
ed.). Starr hired him as a lead prosecutor in September 1994. Soon
after, Rodriguez was told that he was expected to back up the conclusion of the
earlier Fiske report—that Foster had committed suicide. Rodriguez
refused. He insisted on conducting a real investigation. But the
harder he tried, the more resistance he got from Starr's team.
The last
straw came on January 5, 1995, when the Scripps Howard News Service ran a story
claiming that "sources familiar with the Starr inquiry," said that
Kenneth Starr was ready to announce that Vincent Foster "committed suicide
for reasons unrelated to the Whitewater controversy."
Rodriguez
was furious. He had just begun grand jury proceedings the day
before. Who on earth would have leaked the news that the probe was finished?
Rodriguez stuck it out for a few more weeks but finally resigned in March,
returning to his former job as assistant US attorney in Sacramento.
"As an ethical person, I don't believe I could be involved with what they
were doing," he told Ruddy.
Rodriguez's
sudden resignation could have exploded in scandal. But Big Media
virtually ignored it. Indeed, Rodriguez claims that he tried to go public
with his story, giving extensive interviews to reporters from Time,
Newsweek, ABC's Nightline, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, and the NewYork
Times. Rodriguez says he spent six hours with the New York Times reporter
alone. To all of them, Rodriguez told the same story: Starr's probe of
Vincent Foster's death was a sham.
"I was
told what the result [of the Starr investigation] was going to be from the
get-go," Rodriguez later said in a taped conversation, excerpted in WorldNetDaily.com. "This is
all so much nonsense; I knew the result before the investigation began, that's
why I left. I don't do investigations to justify a result."
None of the
news organizations that interviewed Rodriguez aired or published his
account. Several reporters admitted to Rodriguez that their editors had
spiked the story. Rodriguez also claims that FBI agents bullied him,
making threats against his "personal well-being," if he did not shut
up. "The FBI told me back off, back down. I have been communicated
with again and been told to be careful where I tread," says Rodriguez.
To this day,
Rodriguez still serves as an assistant US attorney in Sacramento.
On July 15,
1997, Starr reached his inevitable conclusion. He issued a two-paragraph
statement, saying, "Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy
Park, Virginia, on July 20, 1993." (pp.
108-109)
You guessed it, the additional name missing from the index is
"Miguel Rodriguez." Book editors, like newspaper editors, can
be leaned upon.
Knowlton and
his lawyer supplied three more tapes to World Net Daily, and the reporter
promised a follow-up story, but none was ever forthcoming. You can read
the transcripts of the additional tapes, which came from telephone
conversations with Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, at http://www.fbicover-up.com/Miquel/Miquel.htm.
David
Martin
February
23, 2009
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