“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.”
—Samuel Johnson

The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy bars, where dumb natives pick up his tab. His disdain for America, having begun at a very high level, only increases with time.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, perhaps the best writer in contemporary newspaper journalism, does not fit the stereotype. As chief U.S. correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, he too could have rewritten official handouts, received either directly or through the newspapers that the government controls. Instead, putting the American as well as the British press to shame, he departed Washington to spend his time in dangerous and remote places like Arkansas and Oklahoma. After direct experience of the Clinton administration, Evans-Pritchard seems to have taken the old British saying—never believe anything until it’s officially denied—as his motto. Certainly he has never accepted the federal government’s word for anything, so that in the process of turning over a whole series of boulders he has discovered that modern American democracy has a lot more in common with the tales of Suetonius than with modern civics texts.

In Evans-Pritchard’s view, the original sin of the Clinton administration was the FBI’s massacre of the Mount Carmel parishioners at Waco, using tanks, poison gas, and flames as the murder weapons. You have to go back to the federal government’s slaughter of 200 Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, he notes, to find a similar domestic event of equal infamy. “Just like at Waco, the [Indian] victims were demonized as sexual deviants. Some methods never change.” Indeed, “every salient fact put forward by the Clinton administration about Waco is a lie.” Nor has he forgotten, or forgiven. Bill Clinton’s statement that, “I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of fanatics decided to kill themselves.”

The Oklahoma bombing was different, of course. The victims were mainly federal employees, and the incident affected the American public differently as well. In fact, as Clinton told reporters riding with him on Air Force One after the 1996 elections, the bombing, by temporarily derailing the anti-government movement, served to get him reelected. But was the official story of Oklahoma City correct? To many observers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—while clearly guilty of something—had the air of patsies about them. It is in this area that Evans-Pritchard does his most important work.

The prosecutions, he shows, resembled Star Chamber proceedings, in which evidence of involvement by the two Waco agencies-the FBI and BATE-was suppressed. Evans-Pritchard agrees with the widespread speculation that the bombing may have been a government operation originally designed to test the resources of the underground paramilitaries and to discover just how far they were prepared to go. Or it may have been designed to smear the American right in its entirety. Apparently the bombers were to be caught redhanded at the last minute. That is why the bomb squad was seen at the Murrah Building by many witnesses early on the morning of the explosion. But somebody made a bad mistake.

Not everyone paid, of course. No BATE agents were in the building on the day of the bombing, despite the local BATE head’s phony tales of his own heroism. Why weren’t they there? Because the bombing was probably a failed sting operation—as a lawsuit by 300 surviving family members claims.

Working with Oklahoma reporter J.D. Cash, BATE informant Carol Howe, and the late Glen Wilburn and his wife Kathy (whose grandsons had been killed in the bombing), Evans-Pritchard shows that a commune of neo-Nazis at Elohim City, Oklahoma, though implicated in the bombing, was nevertheless protected by the FBI, despite the fact that the FBI was informed by several witnesses that the commune was sheltering a man whose looks and activities match those of John Doe II exactK, as well as another man, a mysterious illegal alien. A former German military’ intelligence officer and bomb expert named Andreas Strassmeir, this fellow was probably the agent provocateur, and doubtless also protected by the FBI.

Anyone who has hung onto the Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., view of the American political police will have lost it after finishing these two books. As the authors demonstrate, agents of the FBI, far from protecting the citizenry, serve the state by any means necessary, intimidating witnesses to change their stories to conform with the official line and smearing them when they refuse to do so. The FBI lab is not the only hotbed of bureaucratic crooks. Similarly, any reader who persists in regarding the mainstream media as “adversarial” will be disabused as well. These institutions are actively on the side of the state, defending it vociferously and attacking anyone who questions its moral innocence. The problem is not liberal but governmental bias. Just when the media seem about to do the right thing, they invariably stop short. ABC’s 20/20 was prepared to run a segment on Elohim City, but pulled it at the last minute. When assistant producer Roger Charles protested, he was fired. The story had to be suppressed, he was told, because it would “bring the country down” and lead to the “abolition of the ATF.”

Meanwhile, at a time when the FBI was conducting 25,000 interviews about the bombing, Strassmeir was not included among the interviewees; indeed, he was allowed to leave the country. He had a superduper U.S. intelligence rating as well, later erased from the INS’s computers. But he was clearly wracked with guilt, and what he admits to Evans-Pritchard after many interviews is astounding. In a recorded phone conversation, Evans-Pritchard tells Strassmeir, then in Germany, that there comes a time in a botched sting operation when the plant has to go public to save his own skin. “How can he?” shouts Strassmeir. “What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur? . . . What if he talked and manipulated the others into it? What then? The country couldn’t handle it. The relatives of the victims are going to go crazy. He’s going to be held responsible for the murders of 168 people Of course, the informant can’t come forward. He’s scared shitless right now.”

Exploring Arkansas, which a relative of former governor Lawrence Rockefeller once told me had the brutal and deadly politics of Montenegro, Evans-Pritchard has turned up interesting facts. Clinton clearly had a personal involvement with cocaine (he found it useful in attracting underage girls and perhaps a professional one as well. Certainly Dan Lasater, his confederate in coke, women, and song, was a major importer of the drug, as were the GIA-Contra gun suppliers at the infamous Mena airport. There are even interesting connections among Clinton, George Bush, and Ollie North.

More murders occurred in Clinton’s Arkansas circle than the mainstream media have discussed, crimes that went unpunished thanks to corrupt cops, judges, and medical examiners. One of these examiners, an Egyptian immigrant, was eventualK’ promoted by Governor Clinton after the immigrant doc ruled that Ma Clinton, a nurse-anesthetist who, according to the author, had perhaps been drinking when she cut off oxygen to a 19-year-old girl’s brain during routine surgery, was not at fault in the resultant death. The same examiner also helped cover up the horrendous stabbing deaths of two teenage boys who inadvertently came upon one of Lasater’s cocaine drops—a deed that, according to Evans- Pritchard, our President may have approved as well.

So far we have only skimmed the surface of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas as explored by Evans-Pritchard in this extraordinary book, which also considers the apparent murder of the President’s Arkansas crony, Vincent Foster. The expert on that case, however, is another star reporter, Christopher Ruddy of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The official story of Foster’s death.

Ruddy proves, is entirely phony, the cover-up having been orchestrated by executive branch operatives like Bernard Nussbaum, Webster Hubbell, and Craig Livingstone, with the assistance of the White House political police, the FBI. Ruddy is cautions in stating his conclusions, but it is clear from his book and Evans-Pritchard’s—and also from the work of the redoubtable Texas attorney Hugh Sprunt, a source for both authors—that Foster was not clinically depressed. His body was not found where the Park Police claimed it was. The firearm—a classic, untraceable drop weapon commonly used by crooked cops—was not the murder weapon. Foster’s corpse had an additional wound on the neck. The “suicide” note was forged. White House operatives, with the help of the MIG GROUP safe-cracking division of the Secret Service, went through Foster’s files and his safe, removing materials Bill and Foster’s alleged longtime lover, Hillary Clinton, did not want seen.

Witnesses who testified to having seen strange men going through Foster’s car at Ft. Marcy Park or who otherwise challenged the official story were smeared by the FBI as homosexuals or adulterers. The autopsy was a joke, as was the entire Park Police investigation. The Starr and Fiske reports were cover-ups. And that, as Ruddy shows, is only the beginning.

It is clear that Clinton knew about his “close friend’s” death before giving a happy, hour-long TV interview with Larry King. Clinton later appeared with a sad face to comfort the widow, reminiscent of the famous shot of the President leaving Ron Brown’s funeral, laughing with an aide until he spied a video camera aimed at him, whereupon he wept crocodile tears. As for the late lamented Secretary of Commerce, Ruddy has recently uncovered the fact—confirmed by two Army pathologists—that Brown, who may have been about to save his own skin at Clinton’s expense, apparently did not die of his plane crash injuries, having suffered a .45 caliber bullet wound to the head and a “lead snowstorm” in his brain. The Army, which refused to have an autopsy performed at the time, claims that the X rays showing the bullet fragments, although taken on a new machine, were defective and that later films show no such fragments. However, the X rays allegedly showing no lead in Brown’s brain have “disappeared.” (Christopher Ruddy has a superb website, by the way, for the latest on all of this and more: www.ruddynews.com).

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s and Christopher Ruddy’s books have been smeared, even in the conservative press, as the work of loons. There are, broadly speaking, two opposing ways to view the state. The first sees it as a sodality of public- spirited types dedicated to the commonweal and the national interest. Since these people are thought truly to represent us—indeed, in a democracy, to belong to us—they are presumed as well to have our best interests at heart. In pursuit of these interests they feed the hungry, educate the young, and punish evildoers here and around the world. The American government, according to this way of thinking, is a veritable font of truth. Virtually never has it done wrong, and then only by mistake.

The opposing view holds the state to be a criminal cabal, hi order to gain the consent of the governed on which all states rely, it pretends a hypocritical concern for the public welfare. The only difference between private thugs and the state, as a 19th-century anarchist pointed out, is that garden-variety crooks do not style themselves the Honorable—or tell us, as they demand our money or our life (sometimes taking both), that the forfeiture is for our own good, hi this view Washington, D.C., to keep the public from catching on to the racket of government, employs the lie as a basic tool of governance.

Messrs. Evans-Pritchard and Ruddy are not anarchists. Indeed, they are not even radicals. Their work takes a close look at several landmark events in the history of one American presidential administration. The result, a hammer blow to the public-interest notion of government, offers additional reasons for dismantling the government of the United States as it exists today.

Thus left-liberal and neoconservative publications have dismissed The Secret Life of Bill Clinton and The Strange Death of Vincent Foster as “conspiracy-minded”—a phrase typically employed to describe anyone who concludes that our government is up to no good. Like most other politically driven smear terms, it should in fact apply to anyone who simply keeps his eyes and ears open.

 

[The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing) 460 pp., $24.95]

[The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation, by Christopher Ruddy (New York: The Free Press) 316 pp., $25.00]