Brazile, Foster, and the Look Up Factor

Now that longtime Democratic Party official Donna Brazile has apparently decided to break ranks permanently with the Clinton crime family it may be a good time to have another look at an essay that I wrote back in 1995 before I had a web site, in fact, before I was even online, entitled:

The Look Up Factor

These days I have come to believe that ethical behavior is all too often situational, based on self-preservation or loyalty to a personality at the expense of integrity. Telling the truth or standing on principle can be tantamount to professional suicide…”

Maj. Michael V. Trujillo, U.S.M.C.

Navy Times, December 19, 1994

When I tell people about the various cover-ups of major, appalling crimes that are currently going on around our once great country, the standard incredulous response is that too many people would all have to be engaged in an improbable conspiracy of silence for such alleged cover-ups ever to succeed. People who respond that way either just don’t know or don’t want to admit to themselves how pervasive in our society today is the kind of bureaucratic cowardice described so aptly and so courageously by Major Trujillo. It is not confined to the military, either, but, ironically, this particular spinelessness before corrupt authority does, as pointed out by former DEA agent Michael Levine in The Big White Lie, appear to be most prevalent in professions that require extraordinary physical courage.

As a notable example, let us look at the U.S. Park Police and one episode related to the mysterious death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., whose body was found in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993, The Washington Post wrote the following:

It

Police who arrived at Foster’s house the night of the death were turned away after being told Lisa Foster and family members were too distraught to talk. Investigators were not allowed to interview her until yesterday. “That was a matter between her lawyers and the police.” [White House spokesman] David Gergen said, and the White House had no role in it.

It is now on the public record that virtually everything in that statement was a lie. * A large number of people in the Park Police, the White House, the Justice Department, the Foster family, and probably The Washington Post, knew that it was a lie, and yet it remained the official version of events, believed by almost everyone in the country, for almost an entire year. None of those people who knew the real truth broke the silence.

As a concerned former college mate of Foster I took the liberty to call Park Police spokesman Major Robert Hines, and I asked him how it was possible for any private citizen to deflect law enforcement authorities from a legitimate investigation in the way we were being told it was done. He told me that the news report was not accurate and that the police had talked briefly with the widow, Lisa Foster, that night, and after quickly concluding that she was too “broken up” to be helpful, they left, but they returned the next morning and questioned her.

Major Hines has a down-home, engaging manner, but he wasn’t telling the truth, either, if a written contemporaneous report, released by the Park Police without critical comment by the national news media in early July, 1994, and the sworn testimony of two Park Police officers before the Senate Banking Committee on July 29, 1994, are to be believed. What they say is that the police did follow the standard procedure and two of them spoke for more than an hour, not only with the widow and her children, but also with the Foster sisters Sheila Anthony and Sharon Bowman, who arrived shortly after the police did.

From the observations of Major Trujillo and Mr. Levine (which I would like to call the “Look Up” factor, after the accompanying poem) we needn’t even bother to ask how the fabricated cover story could have been maintained for such a long time. If the government hadn’t decided to change it, it would still, in all likelihood, be as “officially true” as the conclusion that Vince Foster, Tommy Burkett, and quite a few other people murdered themselves. The more interesting question is why the story was foisted on the public in the first place. One can only speculate that it was to avoid having to deal with what actually took place at the Foster home that night. ** We don’t yet know what that really was, but the spare half-page report that was finally released concluded that no one present had any idea why Foster would have taken his own life, a revelation that is very much out of line with what we have been led to believe.

The authorities need not have worried about the press reaction because only Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph of London made any mention of the belatedly released contents of the police document.

Look Up

Look up to the organization

With the proper awe and fear;

Bow down to your earthly betters,

And safeguard your career.

Neither sun nor moon will smite you

In daytime or at night,

If you keep your waters waveless,

Regardless of what’s right.

Your temporal protectors

Will neither slumber nor sleep,

As long as you are one

With the company that you keep.

With sovereignty unchecked

By any Higher Power,

The purposeful collective

Displays its finest flower.

That purpose is whatever

Our vulgar fancy wills

When no one’s eyes are lifted

Unto the Psalmist’s hills.

(Based on Psalm 121)

* Since 2016, false information such as that put out by The Washington Post in that instance goes by the name of “fake news.”

** I would later explore the question of what went on at the Foster house that night further in Part 6 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.” The press story is that Vince’s two sons, Vincent III and Brugh, had been out on the town with Sheila Anthony’s husband Beryl during the police visit. We later learned from the Senate testimony of Webster Hubbell, who was also there, that Beryl was, in fact, present at the house that night and therefore Vince’s sons must have been there as well. We were left to speculate that the sons must have been airbrushed out of the picture because they were not yet onboard with the official “suicide” story.

David Martin

November 8, 2017

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