Sidney Blumenthal, Vince Foster, and the Deep State

It’s the shadowy real power as opposed to the duly constituted power as laid out by the laws of the land. What outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against, the military-industrial complex, is certainly an important part of it, but that doesn’t go far enough. Looking at who is behind so much of our foreign policy and to whom our elected representatives seem to be most deferential, at the very least we have to call it the military-industrial-Zionist complex. More recently former GOP staffer in the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, Mike Lofgren, as seen here in an interview by Bill Moyers, using the coinage of Cal Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott calls it the Deep State.

However one might define it and whatever one might call it, no characterization is complete without including the nation’s near monolithic news media in a central role. You name the major outrage, from the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, to 9/11 and our Mideast wars, to our overly permissive trade laws and the onslaught of immigration and you will find them, as one, lining up on the wrong side of the question. Sidney Blumenthal, a man who epitomizes our corrupted media, has recently come in for some corrupted media attention on account of his unofficial but influential work for Hillary Clinton related to Libya when she was secretary of state.

On November 3 The Washington Post appeared to put him under the microscope with a lead article in its Style section. Clicking on his name in that article leads one to what appears to be a more probing piece entitled deceptively, “So who exactly is Sidney Blumenthal?” Back in May, prompted by the same Libya matter, National Public Radio appeared to go even more deeply into Blumenthal’s background with “Who Is Clinton Confidant Sidney Blumenthal?” The work of each of the news organs is most noteworthy for what it leaves out.

NPR gets closest to a key fact with the following passage:

After Clinton became president, Blumenthal became the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, a prestigious position that gave him wide latitude to report on the new era and the new administration. He did not see it as his job to report on various controversies that emerged early on, such as the White House Travel Office firings and then the Whitewater investigation. That fell to other New Yorker reporters, of whom Blumenthal was subsequently critical.

Blumenthal on “The Suicide”

To be sure Blumenthal did not write critically of the Clinton scandals, but he did indeed report on perhaps the biggest controversy of all, if his writing on the matter can properly be called reporting. It was that writing, in fact, that first brought him to my attention. The following passage is from my first installment of “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster”:

[Walter] Pincus's theme of [Vincent] Foster as fragile victim of the merciless press was picked up on by Sidney Blumenthal in his August 9 [1993] New Yorker article: 

Foster sought perspective through a number of conversations with Walter Pincus, a reporter for the Washington Post, whose wife is from Little Rock. "He couldn't understand why the press was the way it was," Pincus said. "It was a sense that people would print something that was wrong, and that other people would repeat it. I'd say, 'You can't let the press get your goat; you have to go on. This is how the game is played.' He'd say, 'Fine.' " 

The article is titled simply “The Suicide,” and it can most fairly be described as a very vigorous sales job for the notion that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr. committed suicide because this experienced courtroom litigator couldn’t take the public scrutiny of his new job in Washington. While masquerading as an objective journalist, Blumenthal, it is clear, was already doing the work for which he would be openly paid within the year when he went to work for the White House; he was acting as a shill for the Clintons.

Foster’s body had been discovered at an obscure Civil War relic named Fort Marcy Park off the George Washington Parkway on the Virginia side of the Potomac River late in the day on July 20. The nearest federal facility to it is the CIA headquarters complex perhaps a mile away as the crow flies, a fact never mentioned in the press. I had lived in Fairfax County, where the park is located, since 1982 and I had never heard of it. Foster, who had only been in town a few months living in Georgetown, had reported for work as usual on that Tuesday and was reported to have had a cheeseburger for lunch at his desk. Then, according to the known narrative at the time, he had left the office and wasn’t seen again until his body was discovered around 6 pm in a remote spot in this remote park that there was no record of his having previously visited.

It is quite obvious that Blumenthal hadn’t bothered to check out the park and the unlikely spot where they tell us Foster chose to blow his brains out with an untraceable nondescript .38 caliber revolver made up of the parts of two guns, because he wrote in his New Yorker piece that the park overlooks the Potomac River. It does not. It’s somewhat near the river, but you can’t see it from there. Chain Bridge Road runs between the park and the river, and you can’t see the river from that road either until you get near to the Potomac-crossing bridge that gives the road its name, a bit further to the south.

For the first few days, even though the entire press called Foster’s death an “apparent suicide,” for no good reason that I could see, no one seemed to have any idea as to what might have been the motivating factor. “Friends and colleagues in Arkansas,” I wrote in “Dreyfus,” “expressed astonishment that such a solid, stable, even-tempered and responsible person would take such a drastic and ultimately irresponsible action.”

In slow and awkward stages the story of the mysterious, motiveless suicide began to change. The first attempt at changing the story amounted to something of a false start. The little-read Washington Times of Saturday, July 24, four days after Foster's death, carried an inside article about depression in which Ms. Myers was quoted as saying of Foster, "His family says with certainty that he'd never been treated (for depression)." But on the front page was a story based upon information from an anonymous "source close to the Foster family" who said that Foster was, indeed, experiencing emotional problems and had turned to other family members for psychiatric recommendations. Among the family members mentioned to the reporter was brother-in-law, former Arkansas Congressman Beryl Anthony. The reporter had telephoned Anthony and asked him about the allegation and Anthony had responded, "That's a bunch of crap. There's not a damn thing to it," and angrily hung up the phone. (I wrote a short letter to the Washington Times on July 26 wondering aloud who this anonymous source might be and what he might be up to and concluding that from all we were being told about Foster, in the existing moral climate, he seemed a better candidate for murder than for suicide. The letter was not printed. It was the first of several that I have written to the Washington Times on the Foster case. None have been printed.)

Blumenthal’s article is full of the sort of anonymous sources that are behind the Washington Times article. One of them told him that the handwritten list of psychiatrists that The Post, when it first reported its existence on July 28, said was found in Foster’s office and on July 30 said was found in his car, was done in Foster’s hand. Actually, the handwriting of this list has never been officially authenticated, and no explanation has ever been ventured as to why the first of the three names was printed in block letters, in contrast to the other names written in cursive. (Read more about this question in “Vince Foster’s Valuable Murder.”)

In Part 5 of “Dreyfus” we reported some unsourced intelligence from Blumenthal that was not only never verified, but turned out not to be true:

One other major apparent lie embellishing the suicide-from-depression conclusion before the August 10 official announcement is worthy of comment. Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the August 9 issue of The New Yorker that Foster had lost 15 pounds. He gives no source for his information, and the 15-pound weight loss is later cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and many other places as clear evidence of Foster's depression. Later we learn through examination of the public record, that at a physical exam in Little Rock in December of 1992 he had weighed 194 pounds and that the naked body at autopsy, after having lost blood and drying out on a hot July day had weighed 197 pounds.

Blumenthal and the Clintons

The recent mainstream articles about Blumenthal, almost in spite of themselves, do have some useful information. Here’s something from NPR that I didn’t know:

In 1988, when Bill Clinton was still governor of Arkansas, Blumenthal was already writing flattering pieces about him in The Washington Post. He had already met both Bill and Hillary Clinton at one of their Renaissance Weekend gatherings.

In light of his subsequent record, we don’t doubt that Blumenthal wrote the Clinton puff pieces that NPR speaks of. The implication that he did so because they impressed him at that weekend gathering is another matter, though. Bill Clinton’s promotion to national prominence has always been something of a mystery. By 1988 he was already carrying around the reputation in Arkansas of a ravenous womanizer. For some reason he had been chosen to make the nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the Democratic convention, and the speech had been a boring, overlong disaster. The audience had cheered when he came to “in conclusion.”

But as Roger Stone and Robert Morrow describe in exhaustive detail in their new book The Clintons’ War on Women, Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas was doing yeoman’s work for the criminal Deep State, providing cover for the smuggling of illicit drugs through the state by the CIA. Furthermore, they tell us, Bill, himself, was CIA:

The Bushes and Clintons share their deepest bonds in common with the CIA. Cord Meyer, Roger Morris, and Christopher Hitchens said that in the summer of 1968, while at the University of Oxford, young Bill Clinton was recruited by the agency to infiltrate left-wing anti-war groups in Eastern Europe and snitch on their activities to the boys at Langley.

“I think he was a double,” Hitchens says. “Somebody was giving information to [the CIA] about the anti-war draft resisters, and I think it was probably him. We had a girlfriend in common—I didn’t know then—who’s since become a very famous radical lesbian.”

Washington insider Jack Wheeler related in his 1988 essay “How the Clintons Will Undo McCain” how his friend told him an important nugget about this history of Bill Clinton. He wrote:

Back in the ‘90s, years after he retired, if Cord Meyer drank a little too much Scotch he would laugh derisively at those conspiracists who accused Bill Clinton of being connected with the KGB. They all darkly point to Bill’s participation in anti-war peace conferences in Stockholm and Oslo, and his trip to Leningrad, Moscow and Prague while he was at Oxford. “Who could have paid for this?” they ask. “It had to be the KGB!” they claim. Cord would shake his head. “What rot—we paid for it. We recruited Bill the first week he was at Oxford. Bill’s been an asset of the Three Bad Words ever since.”

We might also remind readers that both Bill and Hillary are products of Yale University, albeit the Law School, unlike the two George Bushes and John Kerry, who were not only undergraduates there but members of the secret Skull and Bones society.

Spook Journalist Blumenthal

But what about Sidney Blumenthal? Blumenthal, we learn from The Post, was not a Yale man. A native of Chicago, he graduated from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and, says The Post, he immediately began working for the tabloid weekly Boston After Dark as a journalist. Wikipedia says, instead, that he wrote for the alternative weeklies The Boston Phoenix and The Real Phoenix. According to Wikipedia he majored in sociology; The Post says his Brandeis degree was in American studies. Neither hints at any particular training or student newspaper experience that might have qualified him for those immediate journalism jobs.

Most telling, in all likelihood, is that American studies major. Yale history professor Robin Winks, in his classic Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 tells us that American studies departments in colleges around the country have been prime recruiting grounds for the CIA. That is because foreign students, many of whom might turn out to be future leaders in their countries, gravitate toward American studies majors. As a matter of fact, a professor of American studies at Brandeis, Jacob Cohen, wrote what I can only describe as a cover-up review in the National Review in 1997 of Christopher Ruddy’s The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. Ruddy was the only American journalist to consistently raise questions about Foster’s death. Whether or not Cohen was the professor who recruited Blumenthal for the CIA, Blumenthal’s journalistic career certainly carries all the earmarks of an eager Operation Mockingbird recruit.

The picture that begins to emerge is not of a man who has touted the Clintons as a journalist and then worked for them, but a man who has been on the same team with them from his college graduation day right up to the present. A passage from Part 5 of my “America’s Dreyfus Affair” further fleshes out the picture:

[Christopher] Ruddy raised his exercise in futility to new heights recently in an article in the May 17, 1998, issue of The Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Rather than taking the obvious step of assaulting those opinion-molding organs that are his greatest nemesis, he went a long way out of his way to build them up. Any reasonable, dispassionate and objective student of the series of assassinations and attempted assassinations that have had such a major effect on public life in this country over the past 35 years can see that the routine, official "lone-crazed-gunman" explanation of events is exceedingly weak, but, as with the Foster case, it prevails because it has the unanimous support of our news media right across the political spectrum. To ridicule the critics is to build up the credibility of precisely those people who stand between Ruddy-on-Foster and the American public, but that's precisely what Ruddy does in his May 17 article, and he does it in tones reminiscent of Jacob Cohen. 

The chosen critic to scoff at is none other than Sidney Blumenthal, currently a controversial high-level White House advisor but formerly journalist for The New Yorker, in which capacity, Ruddy neglects to tell us, he wrote in the September 9, 1993, issue the first magazine article that made the case for Foster having committed suicide from depression. Blumenthal, in fact, was the source of the fiction that Foster had lost 15 pounds. Ruddy has discovered an obscure book that the young Blumenthal co-edited in 1976 entitled Government by Gunplay: Assassination Theories from Dallas to Today. 

"Because of his own conspiracy thinking," says Ruddy, "Blumenthal has been nicknamed Grassy Knoll' by White House insiders." He then proceeds to lampoon Blumenthal for the latter's apparent belief that the government--perish the thought--might have had something to do with the murders of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the shooting of George Wallace. 

"The world knows that Blumenthal is a radical left-winger. His book demonstrates that. Its introduction is written by former CIA agent Philip Agee, who became something of an icon for the left as he fled the country to find safe haven in Castro's Cuba and later Europe." 

Thus does Ruddy burnish the obverse of the line he and both his public supporters and detractors have cultivated in the Foster case, that it is all a matter of right-wing versus left-wing. While only the political "extremists," of one stripe or its opposite, are permitted under the color of their blinding and self-discrediting ideological bias to point the finger at the most awful goings-on, the "responsible mainstream" is able to appear to rise above the fray, dismissing them all as marginal "nutcases."

That passage takes on added poignancy in light of the fact that Ruddy has now come out of the closet, so to speak, as a supporter of the Clintons, which I detail in my March 2014 article, “Double Agent Ruddy Reaching for Media Pinnacle.” What this development strongly suggests is that Blumenthal, Ruddy, and the Clintons have all been on the same team all along. Concerning which, that book co-edited by the 28 year-old Blumenthal, not mentioned in the profiles of him by The Post and NPR, is also of interest. One of the reasons it is of interest is the very fact that, like that New Yorker article on Foster’s “suicide,” these mainstream news organs don’t mention it. Just as Ruddy was sheep-dipped, as they say in the spook profession, as a young radical right-wing journalist by being permitted to write a lot of truth about the Foster murder, Blumenthal had previously been sheep-dipped as a young radical left-wing journalist by being permitted to write the truth about previous high-level murders. Mirror-image agents, we might call them, playing off one another. And don’t forget the young Bill Clinton, sheep-dipped as a genuine anti-Vietnam War activist. While we are at it, Hillary’s conversion from a Barry Goldwater supporter in high school to a radical leftist supporter of the Black Panthers while at Wellesley College begins to look a lot like sheep dipping as well.

Now let’s take one last look at that 1993 New Yorker article. One of his few attributed sources, we see, was Walter Pincus. The Pincus beat at The Washington Post was, and still is, the Central Intelligence Agency. It would be very hard for a journalist to cover the CIA without being CIA. Pincus came out with his own suicide-selling article in The Post on August 5 entitled “Vincent Foster, Out of His Element,” but Blumenthal, in referring to what Pincus said Foster said to him, was apparently not quoting that article. For what it is worth, Pincus revealed in that article that he was at the Foster home in Georgetown on the night of July 20 after Foster’s body had been found at the park. His newspaper had reported a few days before that the Foster family lawyer, as unlikely as it sounds, had turned the police away from the house. As we discuss in “Dreyfus,” Part 6, Pincus had to have known that that was not true because it was later revealed that the police had, in fact, spent quite a while at the house that night interviewing people.

Blumenthal’s spook credentials are tied up in a neat bow by the latest developments:

Revelations from emails purloined by a Romanian hacker show that Hillary Clinton was being secretly advised about Libya — before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack — by an off-the-shelf private spook group associated with controversial former Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal that claimed to be helping the Libyan opposition and considered placing ground operatives near the border.

What’s this all about?

It’s not completely clear, but apparently the goal of the rogue group, which included a former high level CIA covert operative and a former U.S. General, was, at the very least, to gather and provide sensitive reports to the Secretary of State from foreign intelligence sources in Libya, Algeria, and Europe.

A Sorry Lot

At this point it should be abundantly obvious even to the most benighted American flag-waver that Sidney Blumenthal is not now and never has been a real journalist. But what about all those others who have never been on the Clinton payroll? When it comes to the case of the Foster death, they have all acted—or failed to act—as if they were.

When the three-judge panel that appointed Kenneth Starr ordered included in his report an appendix that completely demolished his suicide conclusion, the entire press blacked out that news, and therefore failed to report what was in that appendix. One crucial fact established in the appendix is that, contrary to what Blumenthal wrote right at the beginning of his New Yorker article, Foster did not drive his car to the park. In Part 3 of “Dreyfus” I called the press blackout “The Great Suppression of ’97.”

When aggrieved witness Patrick Knowlton and his lawyer John Clarke released tape recordings of Starr’s dissident lead investigator Miguel Rodriguez describing his frustration with his task and his inability to get anyone in the press to write about it, the recordings were ignored by the press, with the small exception of the online World Net Daily, which had a short article on the first tape, but did no follow-up.

When I published the resignation letter that Rodriguez had submitted in disgust because he was not permitted to conduct a real investigation, they turned a blind eye to that as well. They continued to play ostrich when I published and analyzed Rodriguez’s memorandum laying out the many reasons why what he was being asked to do what amounted to a cover-up. Just this past May the same silence greeted my revelation of the attempt by Starr and his top aides to intimidate Rodriguez’s assistant into going along with the cover-up.

Clearly, the press is an absolutely integral part of America’s criminal Deep State. In the Foster death case we have seen that within the government there were at least a few people who tried to do the right thing. We don’t know of even one journalist who has done so. In their recent book to which we have referred, Roger Stone and Robert Morrow mention several government officials who tried to reign in the smuggling of illicit drugs by the CIA, but their efforts were quashed by higher-ups. We know of one journalist, Gary Webb, who tried to bring the matter to public attention, and look what happened to him. Government officials have also tried to do the right thing in bringing the lucrative and socially disruptive criminal alien smuggling business under control, but they have also been thwarted by higher-ups and by the press blackout.

Sidney Blumenthal may be the poster boy for press participation in the criminal Deep State, but he is no anomaly.

David Martin

November 12, 2015

Addendum

A reader has informed me that Sidney Blumenthal is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. According to their web site, there are over 4,900 such members, so I am not sure how significant that might be. If it is important, it would also be of interest that the man the University of North Carolina chose to attempt to “investigate” their big athletic cheating scandal, Kenneth Wainstein, is also a member.

The leadership of the CFR, as opposed to its membership, is another matter. One might say that the list of its leaders reads like a who’s who of the Deep State. Right up at the top, for instance, we see Goldman Sachs man Robert Rubin as co-chairman. Rubin had many positions in the Clinton administration, including Secretary of the Treasury. A perhaps surprising name on the board of directors list is energy guru Daniel Yergin, who turns up in my “Who Killed James Forrestal?” as having parroted lies in a 1977 book about Forrestal’s manifestation of mental derangement prior to Forrestal’s own highly suspicious “suicide.”

In this YouTube clip, Hillary comes very close to admitting that the CFR tells the nation’s elected leadership what to do.

David Martin

November 15, 2015

Addendum 2

My correspondent has informed me further that Hillary’s speech to the CFR, referred to above, was apparently largely drafted by her off-the-books adviser, Blumenthal. The entire speech can be found here.

David Martin

November 16, 2015

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