Let me state for the record
that I was not sent to Washington as part of a British government plot to
destabilize the Clinton Administration in revenge for US meddling in Ulster. Or
at least, I don't think I was. Contrary to assertions made in a Congressional
hearing, I have never worked for British military intelligence, or MI5, or MI6,
or for that matter MI7.5 - the fabled Welsh branch!
No, I found my own way into
a spitting match with President Clinton. It was the last thing I expected upon
arriving in Washington, for I had succumbed to the Clinton charm years before at
a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council. As for Hillary, I was rather
taken by her image of flinty altruism.
Disappointment was swift,
however. I was stunned when the new President - barely installed in the White
House - repudiated his campaign promise for a tax cut. It was downhill from
there.
The Clintons look good from
a distance. As Yale Law School graduates they have mastered the language and
style of the mandarin class. It is only when you walk through the looking glass
into the Arkansas underworld they came from that you begin to realise something
is horribly wrong.
You learn that Bill Clinton
grew up in the Dixie mafia stronghold of Hot Springs, and that his brother,
Roger, was a convicted drug dealer who was once taped during under-cover
surveillance saying "got to get some for my brother, he's got a nose like a
vacuum cleaner". You learn about sworn testimony that links Clinton to
cocaine smuggling in the early 1980s. You learn that Clinton's chief of security
in Little Rock was gunned down in 1993 by assassins who seem to be enjoying
immunity.
Let us not forget the
allegation that Bill and Hillary helped empty a bank called Madison Guaranty -
but I will leave that to the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.
Bill Clinton is not the
first president with the skeletons of the mob in his closet. Harry Truman, for
instance, was a protege of the Pendergast crime machine in Kansas City. All you
have to know about Bill Clinton is that he chose Patsy Thomasson - top
lieutenant of convicted cocaine dealer Dan Lasater - to be his White House chief
of personnel.
Once that has sunk in, you
can start to understand how seriously this president has been compromised, and
how much of a threat he could pose to the democratic system if allowed to get
away with incremental abuse at a national level.
The Clintons wasted little
time taking charge of the US Justice Department. All US Attorneys were asked to
hand in their resignations. It was a move of breath-taking audacity, one that
gave the Clintons control over the prosecutorial machinery of the federal
government in every judicial district in the country.
They then set about
eliminating the Director of the FBI, William Sessions, who was known for his
refusal to countenance White House interference in the affairs of the Bureau.
The post of FBI Director is supposed to be a 10-year appointment that puts it
above politics. But Sessions was toppled in a Washington putsch, without a
murmur of protest from America's press, and replaced by the hapless errand boy
Louis Freeh. And I almost forgot, the Clintons installed their friend Webster
Hubbell as "shadow" Attorney General- until Hubbell was jailed for
Arkansas crimes.
When you are living through
events day by day it is hard to know whether you are witnessing a historic
turning point, or just mistaking the usual noise of politics for something
meaningful. But there is no doubt that strange things have been going on in
America.
The Clinton era has spawned
an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people. The last time
anything like this occurred was in the 1850s with the emergence of the southern
gun clubs. It is easy to dismiss the militia as Right-wing nuts: it is much
harder to read the complex sociology of civic revolt. At the very least the
militias reveal the hatred building up against the irksome yuppies who run the
country.
It is under this president
that domestic terrorism has become a feature of life in America, culminating in
the destruction of the Oklahama federal building on April 19, 1995. What set the
deadly spiral in motion was the Waco assault two years before, and the cover-up
that followed.
No official has ever lost a
day's pay for precipitating the incineration of 80 people, most of them women
and children, in the worst abuse of power since Wounded Knee a century ago.
Instead of shame and accountability, the Clinton administration accused the
victims of setting fire to themselves and their children, a posthumous smear
that does not bear serious scrutiny. It then compounded the injustice by pushing
for a malicious prosecution of the survivors.
Nothing does more to sap the
life of a democracy than the abuse of power. Public trust is dangerously low.
According to polls, barely a quarter of the American people now feel that they
can count on the federal government to do the right thing.
A majority refuse to accept
that Vincent Foster committed suicide, and they have good reason for their
doubts. The paramedics and crime scene witnesses in Fort Marcy Park on July 20,
1993, tell a story that flatly contradicts the official findings. A police
Polaroid shows a .22 calibre bullet wound in Foster's neck that the autopsy
somehow failed to note. Are Americans to believe that Hillary Clinton's closest
friend shot himself twice, with two different guns?
The Washington press corps
has chosen not to report on this sort of thing, of course, because it always
gives more weight to the utterings of an "official" source, with a
title, than it does to the testimony of a common citizen. It has the matter
backwards, in my opinion, because the "official" usually has the
greater interest in lying.
Even so, the truth is
getting out. Unauthorised stories are reaching the public through the samizdat
links of the Internet and talk radio. From there it disseminates by word of
mouth, spreading a thick layer of cynicism across the country.
Of all the bad things that
Clinton has done to America, the worst is turning the FBI into a federal replica
of the Arkansas State Police. Whether it is the persecution of dissident
investigators in the air disasters of Pan Am 103 and TWA 800, or allowing the
White House to peruse the secret files of political opponents, or the alledged
intimidation of key witnesses in the Foster case, the FBI is starting to look
like the enforcement arm of a police state.
The latest shocker is the
decision to punish Frederic Whitehurst, the whistle-blower who first came
forward with tales of corruption at the FBI crime labs. An internal inquiry has
conceded that the lab tilted evidence "to incriminate the defendants"
and cooked up the theory that a fertiliser bomb blew up the Oklahoma federal
building after it found fertiliser at the house of a suspect, Terry Nichols. But
the Justice Department seems more interested in denigrating Whitehurst, the lone
hero of this sorry tale, than flagellating itself.
Look at the treatment of
Carol Howe, the undercover informant who tracked the early stages of what
appears to be the Oklahoma bombing conspiracy. The moment she surfaced as a
threat to the "lone bomber" case against Timothy McVeigh, this
January, she was indicted on criminal charges.
The FBI claims that she was
dropped as an informant months before the bombing, but debriefing reports show
the Bureau continued to receive her intelligence weeks after the blast. They
also show that she named members of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell who had cased the
Oklahoma federal building in December 1994 with the intention of bombing it. Yet
the FBI did not follow up her reports. It conducted 26,000 witness interviews,
most of them irrelevant, but could not find time to pursue the suspects who were
specifically named by a paid informant.
This leaves the nasty
suspicion that the FBI is shielding this neo-Nazi group in order to cover its
own tracks. If it turns out that the bombing was a bungled sting operation by
the FBI, as some of the victims are now alleging, the only fit response is to
send bulldozers down Pennsylvania Avenue to flatten the Hoover Building once and
for all.
A monument should be raised
on the rubble of the FBI headquarters that reads Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
(Who Shall Guard the Guards?) as a warning to free-born Americans of the next
millennium.
Is Bill Clinton to blame? Of
course he is. Degradation spreads from the top down... Perhaps it is impolite
for a London newspaper to say such things about a president of the United
States. Many people think so...Critics tell me that I have invested too much
emotion in my quarrel with the Clintons. To that I plead guilty. It comes from
befriending so many of their victims. I am content to be blacklisted as the
"mad scribbler" - as the Washington Post called me this week - for I
am confident that one day historians are going to view Clinton as a the last
great cad of the 20th century, or worse.
To the American people I bid
a fond farewell. Guard your liberties. It is he trust of each generation to pass
a free republic to the next. And if I know you right, you will rouse yourself
from slumber to ensure exactly that.