Selling the Foster “Suicide” to Hillary Haters

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way. – Bertrand Russell

We have now come full circle with the latest attempt by the FBI and its favorite shill, Ronald Kessler, to sell the government and press myth that Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., committed suicide because he was depressed. I composed my “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression,” more than anything, because of my experience with the Foster death case. Number 15, added on August 10, 1999, is “Baldly and brazenly lie,” and it was provoked primarily by the performance of Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes when he looked squarely into the camera and stated in his authoritative baritone, “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.” With that statement he seemed to dispose with the quibbles that his guest, reporter Christopher Ruddy, had with the official suicide findings.

The problem with that statement is that it is flatly false. The forensic evidence shows no such thing. For starters, it could not show that, because the bullet discharged from that gun was never found. On top of that, Foster’s fingerprints weren’t on the gun.

“They wouldn’t just lie to us like that, would they?” you might be thinking, but they would and they do. The mainstream press is bad about it, but the FBI is consistently as bad or worse. Their specialty is lying about what they are told by witnesses when the witness testimony is not consistent with the conclusion they want to reach. They can get by with it easily because they don’t record the testimony electronically, using only handwritten notes, which they then transcribe in final typed form, and the witnesses are not permitted to review those notes for accuracy.

That is the primary way that they were able to perpetuate the myth that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy and they have used the same technique in the Foster case, the primary example being their falsification of witness Patrick Knowlton’s testimony. Now, in the wake of candidate Donald Trump’s observation earlier in the year in an interview by the primary salesman of the suicide story from the beginning, The Washington Post, that there was something “fishy” about Foster’s death, the FBI has trotted out a real whopper that a lot of people might well be buying, in accordance with the Bertrand Russell dictum.

After Trump’s statement about Foster in May, the London tabloid Daily Mail in early June ran a sensational article by American journalist and author Ronald Kessler in which he wrote that two FBI agents, Jim Clemente and Coy Copeland, said that Hillary Clinton had “humiliated [Foster] in front of White House staff one week before his death.” It was that incident, Kessler strongly implies, that pushed the depressed Foster over the brink and resulted in his taking his own life.

There are a couple of reasons why people of a conservative bent should readily believe this story. One is that it fits with what they have learned of Hillary’s surly and abusive nature, most recently in the book Crisis of Character by former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne. We have also written about it in our reviews of books by Kathleen Willey, L.D. Brown, R. Emmett Tyrell, and Roger Stone and Robert Morrow. “The devil’s in that woman,” is how Miss Emma, the cook at the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock quite understandably explained Hillary’s behavior. The other reason why the story might resonate is that the story was picked up and covered uncritically by a wide range of right-leaning publications.

Readers are expected not to notice the poison pill that is buried in this narrative, that is, the tired old official line that Foster committed suicide because he was depressed. It’s something of a would-you-believe? moment, in the fashion of the comic spook Maxwell Smart. Remember, it was supposed to be that merciless Washington press that drove Foster to his suicidal pit of despair.

I hint at how absurd that claim is in my poem “Solicitude.” Well, would you believe, then, that it was because the hateful Hillary played the Parris Island drill sergeant to Vince’s hapless Marine recruit in front of a number of other people at the White House?

Shades of James Forrestal

Throughout the Foster saga, various news organs have told us that Foster was the “highest ranking federal official to commit suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.” At this point the FBI is taking a page from the playbook that was used to sell the notion that the “depressed” Forrestal committed suicide in 1949. There had to have been some precipitating event that drove him over the edge. In Forrestal’s case it was supposedly his reading and, for some reason, transcribing, a morbid poem by Sophocles that suddenly overwhelmed his fragile emotions and led him to flee from his 16^th floor bedroom at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and dash across the hall to a kitchen where he took the time to tie his bathrobe belt around his neck and unsuccessfully tie the other end to a radiator beneath the window and then fall from the window after the belt came loose from the radiator. The Forrestal story’s Ronald Kessler, author Arnold Rogow, wrote fourteen years after the event that the Navy orderly watching over Forrestal had seen him transcribing the poem. Only when we were able to get the secret official investigation fifty-five years after the death through the use of the Freedom of Information Act did we learn that the lights had been off in Forrestal’s room the entire time that orderly was on duty and he had not seen Forrestal doing any reading or writing. Rogow had made the story up. Furthermore, the transcription, which, unlike the book of poems, was entered into evidence, was done in a radically different hand from Forrestal’s.

As a trigger for his supposed suicide, the bogus Hillary tongue-lashing of Foster is still weak beside the bogus reading of the morbid poem by Forrestal. It requires us to believe that Foster managed to nurture his fatal pout over his public reaming by the First Lady for a full week. That requires a suspension of the use of one’s critical faculties that goes beyond even that of the average gullible consumer of what passes for news from the 21^st century American news media. But, as it turns out, the story is not just preposterous; it is impossible.

Dogged Foster-death researcher, Hugh Turley, quickly dug up evidence to show that Hillary had been out of the country for a full two weeks prior to Foster’s death and that meeting a week before in the White House simply could not have taken place. World Net Daily, one of the conservative organs that had repeated the Hillary-tongue-lashing story from the Daily Mail, published Turley’s article, but they virtually hid it away on their web site. Accuracy in Media did somewhat better, prominently displaying Turley’s revelations on its site. One can read the full Turley article and an analysis of the article’s handling on my web site.

As far as the purveyors of America’s news are concerned, though, Turley could have saved himself his truth-telling effort. At this point, the first of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression became the operative one: “Dummy up. If it’s not reported, it’s not news. It didn’t happen.” Even one of the best of the alternative news sites, LewRockwell.com, had run the Daily Mail story as if it were valid news. I emailed Rockwell a copy of Turley’s article with the hope that at least he would set the record straight. He thanked me, but he didn’t write a correction.

FBI Doubles Down on Lie

So effective were the public opinion molders in preventing Turley’s revelations from reaching the general public that on August 23 the FBI felt confident in doubling down on its bald-faced lie with an even more sensational story, once again, with Kessler writing in the Daily Mail. This time the story was that the memos that the two FBI agents had written memorializing the fateful public bashing of Foster had “vanished” from the National Archives. One almost has to admire them for the clever way in which they explained away the absence from the public record of memos that were never written in the first place. If they had been written they would have been fabrications, but, as we noted in our article about Turley’s discoveries, such a fabrication obviously had not occurred to the FBI at the time, or FBI agent Gary Aldrich would have certainly have included it in his heavily publicized Clinton-bashing book.

Such wide coverage did this new story receive, though, that a half dozen or so of my email correspondents called my attention to it. It was all over Twitter, and one of the people who tweeted it uncritically was James Corbett of the generally very informative Corbett Report. No less a serious personage than former member of Congress and former presidential candidate for the Green Party Cynthia McKinney retweeted Corbett’s tweet. When I publicly tweeted that she had been taken in by an FBI lie and referenced Turley’s earlier article she publicly responded most encouragingly, “OMGosh! You've given me too much and now I'll spend all day with this! Thank you—kinda!” That’s how I would expect a real person to respond. Corbett, on the other hand, remained silent.

This time, World Net Daily performed better than before in service to the truth and did not routinely repeat Kessler’s whopper and then scramble to get it right. Rather, one of its own reporters, Leo Hohmann, responded by writing “Did Hillary Really Drive Vincent Foster to Suicide?” and, using Turley’s discoveries, answered the question with a resounding “No.”

One may consider that article as a definitive statement on the matter, but, in fact, it has made hardly a dent in that giant myth-making machine that the CIA’s Frank Wisner dubbed “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” One reason is that this second FBI lie made even further inroads into the media, both mainstream and alternative, than did the first one. In addition to Corbett, Chris Ruddy’s Newsmax, Alex Jones’s Infowars, Zero Hedge, RT, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, National Enquirer, Esquire, Washington Free Beacon, World Tribune, Free Republic, Patriot Tribune, KFSO.com, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, and, most inexcusably, Lew Rockwell, all reported this latest FBI lie as if it were plain, factual news. None of them, to my knowledge, has bothered to set the record straight based upon the Hohmann article in World Net Daily. Jeff Rense at Rense.com and Mike Rivero at WhatReallyHappened.com both carried the Hohmann article, but they are swimming against the tide. As far as our Soviet-style myth-making machine is concerned, Hillary’s public berating of Foster and the disappearance of the FBI memos about that event are now every bit as true as is the story that Foster committed suicide because he was depressed.

It really is a mountain of misinformation that we are up against. If you use your favorite search engine and look for “Vince Foster suicide” or “Vince Foster murder” you will see this false FBI story featured prominently. You might have to dig a bit to find Hohmann’s World Net Daily article. By far the best single site for reliable information on the Foster death is that of the aforementioned witness Knowlton at FBICover-up.com, including coverage of this episode, but you will have to dig even more to find that one. According to the directory at ARIWatch.com, by latest count this writer had published on the Internet, before this one, 65 articles on the subject of Vince Foster’s death. Good luck on finding any of them using an Internet search engine.

David Martin

September 2, 2016

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