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Pritchard: J'Accuse!
by Carol A. Valentine
Curator, Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum
"Your Majesty, the people are crying out for truth."
"Let them have half-truths . . ."
March 15, 1997 -- On March 9, 1997 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph wrote a piece Did FBI shoot in cold blood at Waco? In the piece, Ambrose promotes the new Waco flick, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement." No one would argue that some Branch Davidians were murdered on April 19, 1993. But let's look at Mr. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (just plain "Ambrose" to Internet denizens) for a moment.
Ambrose claims to have a long-standing interest in exposing the truth about what happened at Waco. I have worked with him for a number of years, furnishing him from time to time with information. He is a charming fellow.
On one occasion, Ambrose relied on me for leads concerning Kiri Jewel's testimony during the 1995 House Waco hearings. The result was his piece Sloppy Right lets Clinton off the hook, London Sunday Telegraph July 23, 1995, in which Ambrose challenged the
veracity of Kiri's testimony.
I live in the Washington, D.C. area, home of the CIA, FBI, the Pentagon, NSA, foreign embassies, and the international press corps. This area is loaded with spooks and poseurs of every size and shape. Here the question is not "Is Joe Blow an agent?" but "Who does he
work for?" (which agency).
And a number of savvy people in this town have been telling me for years that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is British military intelligence. The evaluations I heard were made without rancor (some even with benign amusement) just as a Southerner might describe a neighbor as
an employee of Southern Bell. My policy on Ambrose was this: As long as Ambrose helped expose the lies surrounding Waco, I would help him, and regard him as an ally.
Now I see Ambrose as part of the Waco cover up, and I come forward. "J'Accuse!" I say, to borrow a headline from one of Ambrose's own London Sunday Telegraph articles.
Let's look at the history:
In November, 1996, I had a lengthy conversation with Ambrose concerning the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum. I gave Ambrose the Museum's website address:
http://www.Public-Action.com/SkyWriter/Waco/Museum
and summarized the contents of the site for his convenience. On the subject of the deaths of the mothers and children, I gave him this information:
- The story concerning their deaths is phoney
- The structure in which their bodies were found did not collapse
- The bodies of the mothers and children were mutilated -- dismembered, burned, pulped-- in order to disguise the real time, cause, and manner of death
- "Body laundering" is the practice of mutilating bodies to disguise the real time, cause, and circumstances of death
- Body laundering is practiced by the Special Operations Command of the Pentagon to disguise the circumstances of those killed while serving in Pentagon/CIA black bag jobs
- Special Operations flew the black helicopters on February 28, 1993 and strafed the Mt. Carmel Center
- Contemporaneous reports stated "a child" or "children" were killed on February 28
- The state of decomposition of the corpses provides clear evidence the victims died at different times
- The state of decomposition provides clear evidence that at least some died long before the April 19, 1993 gas attack.
To my surprise, Ambrose became argumentative. He said the notion that some of the April 19 victims were dead before April 19 was at variance with what the Branch Davidian survivors said--was I calling them liars?
I explained a few simple truths:
- The government admitted to having plants living among the Branch Davidians, and has still not released the identities of the plants;
- The surviving Branch Davidians are surely people under duress--their families have been tortured and murdered, their colleagues are still in jail and at the mercy of the US.
The former Mrs. Doyle, who had lived in Waco for years, said that the Doyle grandchildren were in the Mt. Carmel Center during the siege. Ultimately no Doyle grandchildren were listed among the dead after April 19.
Provided the former Mrs. Doyle was not lying or mistaken about having grandchildren, the ramifications might be obvious to an independent observer: The lives of the youngsters are perhaps being used as bargaining chips by the FBI. "Liar" would not describe a person who succumbed to such intimidation.
An investigator would at least entertain the possibility that the Tribune report might be factual and worth follow-up investigation. But Ambrose instantly dismissed it--out of hand--as erroneous. "Why would you believe the Chicago Tribune and not Clive Doyle?" he
asked me.
On the other hand, why would Ambrose leap to the conclusion that another newspaper had necessarily done a shoddy reporting job, or that Mrs. Doyle was lying or mistaken about having grandchildren? The Chicago Tribune report of grandchildren certainly did not
discredit the Davidians or hold them up to ridicule; if the Chicago Tribune report had been accurate, and the children used as bargaining chips, obviously Clive Doyle could not admit to having grandchildren.
With the incurious and brusque dismissal of that report, it seemed to me Ambrose had clearly stepped out of his role as a reporter and revealed himself as a partisan.
During this conversation, Ambrose asked several times if I knew who had perpetrated the crimes of April 19, 1993. He seemed concerned. No, I did not say "the 'butcher-and-bolt' British commandos helped kill them," even though we are aware that the British were
accessories to the torture of the Branch Davidians. Recall the SAS spy plane over the Mt. Carmel Center, reported by the London Times on March 21, 1993?
http://www.Public-Action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum/war/fig/w_fig01.jpg
AMBROSE THEN TOLD ME THAT HE COULD NOT USE THE MUSEUM'S INFORMATION BECAUSE HIS EDITORS THOUGHT HE HAD DONE ENOUGH ON WACO ALREADY.
At a later date Ambrose called me, this time to ask questions concerning Livingstone Fagan. His editors wanted Fagan's treatment in prison covered because Fagan was British, he said. [Note: Ambrose later told me he found out Livingstone Fagan was Jamaican.] On that occasion, I again suggested Ambrose cover the evidence contained in the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum for his paper.
AGAIN AMBROSE DECLINED, SAYING HIS EDITOR ONLY AGREED TO COVER
LIVINGSTONE BECAUSE LIVINGSTONE WAS BRITISH. Otherwise, the London
readers would have no interest in Waco.
When I got off the phone, I wondered why the London Telegraph editors were not interested in the other British citizens who died in the Holocaust. Surely the scandalous cover-up and body laundering documented in the Museum would be of interest to British readership--after all, the Death Certificates issued the British victims were arguably false! Honestly reported, the US cover-up and murder of British citizens could cause international repercussions.
Surely this was news worthy.
On March 4, 1997, before Ambrose traveled to the West Coast to see "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," he called me to ask if I had seen the flick. I said no, but I had visited the film's webpage, and read the synopsis of the film. I pointed out to Ambrose:
- The flick apparently forwards the lie that the February 28, 1993 raid was a bungled law enforcement action, despite abundant evidence that the raid was a domestic Gulf of Tonkin incident, set up to provide an excuse for military escalation. I again referred Ambrose to the publicly available evidence in the Museum.
- The flick apparently makes no mention that at least some of the Branch Davidians whose remains were found in the concrete room were long dead by April 19, 1993 and that the bodies had been laundered to disguise the real time, cause, and circumstance of death.
THIS TIME AMBROSE SAID THE IDEA THAT THE BRANCH DAVIDIANS WERE
DELIBERATELY MURDERED WAS TOO MUCH FOR MOST PEOPLE TO ACCEPT,
INCLUDING HIS EDITORS. Most people still believed that the Davidians set themselves on fire, and people had to be brought up to the truth slowly, he said.
Let's apply Ambrose's logic to another atrocity: First you tell the world that 100 Jews were killed in the German Holocaust. When that is accepted, you change the number to 200. On and on, up until you hit the six million mark. Does the logic make sense? If not, why
apply it to the Davidians?
I told Ambrose that people should be directed to the evidence, including his editors. Ambrose intimated his editors were too delicate psychologically to deal with the news directly, and had to be brought up to the truth over a matter of time. I told Ambrose his editors sounded like cot cases, and Ambrose defended them, saying all editors were cot cases.
"They are newspeople. They deal in news," he explained.
Ambrose said that he was going to write a story about "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," to illustrate the "changing perceptions" about Waco.
"Changing perceptions?" Since when do newspapers chronicle "changing perceptions?" Perceptions are based on information. Newspapers used to be the source of INFORMATION. If perceptions are based on newspaper reports, and newspaper reports cover only
"perceptions," what kind of an information system do we have?
Exactly. Not an information system at all. It is a PsyOps operation, and Ambrose is right in the middle of it.
Consider: Ambrose's employers were willing to fly him across the continent, pay for airfare, lodgings, meals--all to have an article about "perceptions." Meanwhile, Ambrose's employers are uninterested in an article about cold factual evidence which would have cost them virtually nothing, evidence which had been available to them for months.
Consider: Ambrose is UNwilling to report evidence of murder as documented in the Museum, but is willing to report "changing perceptions" about the murder which the film portrays. Why is "murder" verboten in one case, but not in the other?
I asked Ambrose if he had read the Museum yet, and he allowed he'd popped in quickly, but had not really read it closely because he had not written anything about Waco since. Yet here he was getting ready to go on a plane to do . . . an article on Waco.
Ambrose has developed the non sequitur to high art form.
Since the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum was posted on the World Wide Web, many thousands of people around the world have read it and downloaded the material to their own computers. Surely this is evidence of changing perceptions? No matter. Apparently the London Sunday Telegraph wants London readers to hear about movie-generated
changing perceptions but not Internet-generated changing perceptions.
In this March 4 conversation Ambrose called the new flick "damning." Considering that Ambrose had not seen the movie yet, it sounded like he had the story already drafted before he got on the plane.
Folks, I think what is going on is this:
* The powers-that-be don't want to publicize the fact that the February 28, 1993 raid was a set-up, a phoney, a domestic Gulf of Tonkin incident, courtesy of the US military looking to secure a broadened role for itself in civilian US life.
* The powers-that-be don't want to publicize the fact that some of the mothers and children were long dead by the April 19, 1993 gas attack. They don't want us to know the real time, cause, and circumstances of death of the victims.
* If public attention is diverted to the murder of adult Davidians, people will forget about the murders of the mothers and children. The adults, remember, are accused of shooting at the agents, and as active combatants, do not hold the same victim status as three-dozen-odd mothers and children and babies.
* The British are in it up to their ears, much like The LondonTimes reported, and much like Linda Thompson and George Zimmerlee have been reporting. Kiri Jewel's statements did not impact on the interests of the British government. Ambrose's article on her testimony made him an opinion leader on Waco, at no expense to the British. But the nature of the military involvement in the initial attack and the dates of the mothers and children's deaths are
British sensitivities. That's why they can't be reported and attention must be taken off that information and placed elsewhere. And that's where Ambrose comes in.
Next time you speak to Ambrose, he may tell you I have mischaracterized our conversations. In response, just challenge him to tell his British readers about the Waco Holocaust Electronic
Museum and give them its website address. See what he says.
If he agrees to do the story and actually does one, I will eat these words. Until then: "J'Accuse!"
British sensitivities. That's why they can't be reported and attention must be taken off that information and placed elsewhere. And that's where Ambrose comes in.
Next time you speak to Ambrose, he may tell you I have mischaracterized our conversations. In response, just challenge him to tell his British readers about the Waco Holocaust Electronic
Museum and give them its website address. See what he says.
If he agrees to do the story and actually does one, I will eat these words. Until then: "J'Accuse!"
The Pied Piper
_____O F_ T H E_ C L I N T O N_ C O N S P I R A C I S T S
BRITISH JOURNALIST AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD THINKS THE PRESIDENT IS GUILTY OF EVERYTHING. AND HE HAS THE TWISTED FACTS AND DISTORTED REPORTING TO PROVE IT.
BY GENE LYONS | In the past, whenever lunatic Clinton-haters were accused of being beyond the pale, they would point to one particular journalist -- a veteran foreign correspondent who wrote for a respected British newspaper and whose dispatches from Washington and Arkansas, they proudly claimed, bore out their most incendiary charges.
The correspondent's name is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Much to the regret of our home-grown kooks and conspiracists, he has since departed these shores to become the London Daily Telegraph's "roving European correspondent." As a parting gift, however, Evans-Pritchard has bequeathed us a book, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," just published by Regnery.
The temptation, in addressing so manifestly absurd and error-filled a piece of work, is to raillery. In form, Evans-Pritchard's book is a feverish concatenation of what his countryman, Guardian Washington correspondent Martin Walker, calls "the Clinton legends" into one vast, delusional epic. In effect, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton" is a militiaman's wet dream. Evans-Pritchard nowhere advocates violence against the president or the United States government, but he does provide the impressionable True Believer with a rationale. Publishing this book is the moral equivalent of leaving a loaded revolver in a psychiatric ward. And that, perhaps, requires an approach other than satire.
Accompanied by pseudo-scholarly "documentation," Evans-Pritchard's disarmingly glib narrative essentially portrays the president as a criminal psychopath. There is no evidence so contrary, nor tragedy so solemn that Evans-Pritchard will not distort it to this end.
The book's first 100-odd pages accuse federal agencies of knowing complicity in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that took 169 lives. According to Evans-Pritchard, it wasn't just the work of terrorist freelancers like the convicted Timothy McVeigh and his alleged accomplice Terry Nichols: It was, he suspects, an ATF/FBI "sting" gone bad, followed by a Justice Department cover-up. He doesn't directly accuse Clinton of being part of the plot, but does hint darkly that he has profited politically from the tragedy.
That truckloads of actual hard evidence have been produced at the McVeigh and Nichols trials impresses him very little. He spends page after page amplifying the baseless canard that ATF agents were warned against reporting to work in the Murrah Building that terrible morning. In reality, several were badly injured in the blast. That none died was purely fortuitous. Their offices lay on the side of the building opposite the bomb. A reporter for the Daily Oklahoman interviewed two ATF agents as they staggered out of the still-smoking rubble.
At his best, Evans-Pritchard practices journalism the way creationists interpret science. Was the "Piltdown Man" a hoax? Very well then, Darwin and a century's worth of supporting evidence stand refuted, and creationism is proved. Do inconsistencies exist among the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the Oklahoma City tragedy? They do. Were there ongoing investigations of other white supremacist, anti-government extremists in the region at the time of the bombing? Absolutely. To Evans-Pritchard, these constitute all the evidence he needs to posit a massive government conspiracy. In the real world, of course, eyewitness accounts of so devastating an event are often confusing and contradictory, and wild rumors inevitable. The hard work of law enforcement (and journalism) comes in sorting things out. Seamless consistency is a state achieved only by conspiracy theorists, assisted by the twisted reporting of an Evans-Pritchard.
The real energy in this opus, however, is devoted to the more traditional themes of Clintonphobia: sex, drug-smuggling, money laundering and murder. Of the many homicides he lays at the president's feet, "the Rosetta Stone" is what Evans-Pritchard calls the "extra-judicial execution" of White House counsel Vince Foster. He sees in this "murder," allegedly carried out at the behest of the White House inner circle and possibly on the direct orders of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a sign of "incipient fascism" in the United States.
Never mind that the sprawling, Arkansas-based criminal conspiracy Evans-Pritchard purports to have uncovered would require the complicity of the Little Rock Police Department, numerous county sheriffs and district attorneys, the Arkansas State Police, the FBI, DEA, CIA, several Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys and federal judges, Arkansas Sens. David Pryor and Dale Bumpers, not to mention Oliver North, the late William Casey, Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and Whitewater independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr (dubbed by Evans-Pritchard the "Pontius Pilate of the Potomac"). His methodology remains everywhere the same. If two dozen witnesses, crime scene photographs and an autopsy attended by a half dozen investigators confirm the existence of, say, an exit wound made by a .38 caliber slug in the back of poor Vince Foster's skull, this intrepid reporter can be counted upon to track down an ambulance attendant who failed to see it, and from that failure deduce that all the others have perjured themselves and the cover-up has been exposed. In the footnotes, that source turns out to be a "confidential informant."
When necessary, Evans-Pritchard resorts to even more questionable methods. He quotes a Little Rock funeral director named Tom Wittenberg asking, "What if there was no exit wound at all? ... I'm telling you it's possible there wasn't." By way of support, in yet another of the book's roughly 500 footnotes, Evans-Pritchard claims to have a tape recording to that effect, surreptitiously made by an unidentified Arkansas private eye. Puzzled, I phoned Wittenberg, an old friend and neighbor for more than 20 years. To my knowledge, the Tommy Wittenberg I know has never spoken to any reporter about a body entrusted to his care. Sure enough, Wittenberg insisted vehemently to me that Evans-Pritchard made the whole thing up. He not only refused to be interviewed, but told the reporter that out of personal feelings for the deceased, he'd never looked at Vince Foster's body at all.
Rookie reporters and probationary cops quickly learn that anybody can say absolutely anything about anybody else. If Evans-Pritchard ever absorbed this cautionary lesson, it's one he has strived successfully to overcome. He wanders the remote and fabulous land of Arkansas like some credulous Gulliver at large among the Houyhnmhnms. (On Swift's island of philosophical talking horses, it will be recalled, no word existed for the concept of falsehood.) Evans-Pritchard treats the wild inventions of Arkansas penitentiary inmates like Holy Writ. The concluding chapter linking Foster's "murder" to Iran-contra drug dealing, to the president's alleged cocaine use, to his sexual abuse of teenage girls and to three unsolved Arkansas homicides, consists almost entirely of double and triple hearsay from two dead men. One of those men is apparently Foster himself, with whom Evans-Pritchard's source claims once to have shaken hands. "At times the moral imperatives of reportage," the author proudly announces, "require one to violate the Columbia School codex."
Speaking of moral imperatives, it's time to unmask. Evans-Pritchard has designated this reviewer a "collaborator" in the Evil Clinton Empire, claiming to discern the dread hand of the White House in my Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columns. (For the record, I had no knowledge of this when I agreed to write about his book.) Oddly, he cites no particulars, not even in a footnote. He does, however, expound at modest length about articles I've written elsewhere. It turns out that our conscientious friend not only misrepresents others' work as it suits him, but, as need be, even his own.
Central to Evans-Pritchard's scenario about Foster's death is an unlikely tale he first broke in the Sunday Telegraph on April 9, 1995. His sources were a pair of Arkansas state troopers named Roger Perry and Larry Patterson. I summarized Evans-Pritchard's account in what he calls the "ultraserious" New York Review of Books as follows: "Perry and Patterson ... [said] that a White House aide named Helen Dickey phoned the Arkansas Governor's Mansion hours before Foster's body was discovered in a Washington park. Supposedly Dickey told them Foster had shot himself that afternoon in a White House parking lot, which could only mean -- so deduced the Telegraph reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard -- that the body had been moved and a White House cover-up begun."
Based upon a U.S. Senate hearing transcript, I went on to add that "when Perry and Patterson were subpoenaed to appear before Sen. Alphonse D'Amato's Whitewater committee on February 16, 1996, they suddenly decided they didn't want to repeat that story under oath. D'Amato even apologized to Ms. Dickey for the pain and embarrassment his own credulousness ... had caused her." I continued: "It's the timing that's significant here. Because if such a phone call had, indeed, come from the White House on July 20, 1993 -- the day Foster died -- then you'd think the troopers would have mentioned it to [the American Spectator's David] Brock and the others who reported the 'Troopergate' stories five months later. But either they kept it to themselves, or the reporters did. Either way, it gives the troopers something of a credibility problem."
My summary of his story incensed Evans-Pritchard. In a scathing letter in the Nov. 28, 1996, issue of the NYRB, he contended that I'd "traduce[d]" his original article, which he claimed concerned itself only with the timing of Helen Dickey's alleged call. "The article," he huffed, "did not examine the question of where Foster died ... It should have been clear to anybody reading the Telegraph that the focus of our investigation was the timeline."
Evans-Pritchard also (correctly) pointed out that the troopers hadn't refused to testify before D'Amato's committee. Minority counsel Richard Ben Veniste had misspoken. What actually happened, I acknowledged in a response to his letter, was that the troopers' lawyers kept postponing their deposition until the absurdity of their story became sufficiently evident that even Republicans on the Whitewater committee no longer wished to hear it. Possibly to imply that I am indifferent to facts, Evans-Pritchard now contends that far from correcting the error, I repeated it in Harper's magazine. He cites the alleged incident as "an interesting insight into the way that consensus is manufactured in the Washington media culture."
Problem is, no Harper's article of mine exists regarding the Dickey episode. As for traducing Evans-Pritchard's meaning, all that was necessary by way of response was to quote his original text. What made Dickey's alleged call significant, he'd written, was its close similarity to an erroneous Secret Service memo that night that reported that "the 'U.S. Park Police discovered the body of Vincent Foster in his car.'" Then, Evans-Pritchard asks ominously: "The memorandum was wrong, of course, or was it? When rescue workers and park police found the body ... Foster's corpse was deep inside a Washington park."
In reality, the actual Secret Service memo and the troopers' apocryphal tale aren't very similar at all. But why quibble? The point is that Evans-Pritchard's insinuation that Foster's body had been moved could hardly have been clearer. What puzzled me then was why he denied it. What amazes me now is that he's turned the tale inside-out all over again. In "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," Evans-Pritchard couldn't be more explicit. "The hard evidence," he writes, "indicates that the crime scene was staged, period." Whether or not Foster suffered from depression, he argues, "somebody still inflicted a perforating wound on his neck, his body still levitated 700 feet into Fort Marcy Park without leaving soil residue on his shoes, and he still managed to drive to Fort Marcy Park without any car keys" (Page 226).
Almost needless to say, every one of these allegations has been conclusively proved false in independent counsel Kenneth Starr's final report on the Foster suicide, reaching precisely the same conclusions as Robert Fiske did in his 1994 investigation. The Starr report disposes of the troopers' allegations about the timing of the Dickey call in a footnote, citing telephone records and the testimony of other witnesses.
Oddly, Starr's sleuths neglected to interview the ultimate recipients of Dickey's message, former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and his wife, Betty, who remember the call coming at roughly 9 p.m. in Little Rock. This accords with all the available evidence that Dickey telephoned the Governor's Mansion with the terrible news some time after 10 p.m. Washington time, more than three hours later than the two troopers claimed.
Since then, of course, the Whitewater independent counsel has convicted Jim Guy Tucker of making a false statement on a 1986 loan application, making him a convicted felon. Maybe that's why Starr's investigators neglected to interview the couple -- although Betty Tucker hasn't been charged with any crimes. Or just maybe Kenneth Starr has reasons of his own for not wishing to state plainly that so pliable a witness as Trooper Patterson, who has testified before Starr's Whitewater grand jury, lied about so grave a matter. That's merely a suspicion, not a fact. Nevertheless, I offer it free of charge to Evans-Pritchard. He will know exactly what to do with it.
SALON | Dec. 23, 1997
Gene Lyons is a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and author of "Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater" (Franklin Square Press, 1996).
_____O F_ T H E_ C L I N T O N_ C O N S P I R A C I S T S
BRITISH JOURNALIST AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD THINKS THE PRESIDENT IS GUILTY OF EVERYTHING. AND HE HAS THE TWISTED FACTS AND DISTORTED REPORTING TO PROVE IT.BY GENE LYONS | In the past, whenever lunatic Clinton-haters were accused of being beyond the pale, they would point to one particular journalist -- a veteran foreign correspondent who wrote for a respected British newspaper and whose dispatches from Washington and Arkansas, they proudly claimed, bore out their most incendiary charges.
The correspondent's name is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Much to the regret of our home-grown kooks and conspiracists, he has since departed these shores to become the London Daily Telegraph's "roving European correspondent." As a parting gift, however, Evans-Pritchard has bequeathed us a book, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," just published by Regnery.
The temptation, in addressing so manifestly absurd and error-filled a piece of work, is to raillery. In form, Evans-Pritchard's book is a feverish concatenation of what his countryman, Guardian Washington correspondent Martin Walker, calls "the Clinton legends" into one vast, delusional epic. In effect, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton" is a militiaman's wet dream. Evans-Pritchard nowhere advocates violence against the president or the United States government, but he does provide the impressionable True Believer with a rationale. Publishing this book is the moral equivalent of leaving a loaded revolver in a psychiatric ward. And that, perhaps, requires an approach other than satire.
Accompanied by pseudo-scholarly "documentation," Evans-Pritchard's disarmingly glib narrative essentially portrays the president as a criminal psychopath. There is no evidence so contrary, nor tragedy so solemn that Evans-Pritchard will not distort it to this end.
The book's first 100-odd pages accuse federal agencies of knowing complicity in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that took 169 lives. According to Evans-Pritchard, it wasn't just the work of terrorist freelancers like the convicted Timothy McVeigh and his alleged accomplice Terry Nichols: It was, he suspects, an ATF/FBI "sting" gone bad, followed by a Justice Department cover-up. He doesn't directly accuse Clinton of being part of the plot, but does hint darkly that he has profited politically from the tragedy.
That truckloads of actual hard evidence have been produced at the McVeigh and Nichols trials impresses him very little. He spends page after page amplifying the baseless canard that ATF agents were warned against reporting to work in the Murrah Building that terrible morning. In reality, several were badly injured in the blast. That none died was purely fortuitous. Their offices lay on the side of the building opposite the bomb. A reporter for the Daily Oklahoman interviewed two ATF agents as they staggered out of the still-smoking rubble.
At his best, Evans-Pritchard practices journalism the way creationists interpret science. Was the "Piltdown Man" a hoax? Very well then, Darwin and a century's worth of supporting evidence stand refuted, and creationism is proved. Do inconsistencies exist among the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the Oklahoma City tragedy? They do. Were there ongoing investigations of other white supremacist, anti-government extremists in the region at the time of the bombing? Absolutely. To Evans-Pritchard, these constitute all the evidence he needs to posit a massive government conspiracy. In the real world, of course, eyewitness accounts of so devastating an event are often confusing and contradictory, and wild rumors inevitable. The hard work of law enforcement (and journalism) comes in sorting things out. Seamless consistency is a state achieved only by conspiracy theorists, assisted by the twisted reporting of an Evans-Pritchard.
The real energy in this opus, however, is devoted to the more traditional themes of Clintonphobia: sex, drug-smuggling, money laundering and murder. Of the many homicides he lays at the president's feet, "the Rosetta Stone" is what Evans-Pritchard calls the "extra-judicial execution" of White House counsel Vince Foster. He sees in this "murder," allegedly carried out at the behest of the White House inner circle and possibly on the direct orders of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a sign of "incipient fascism" in the United States.
Never mind that the sprawling, Arkansas-based criminal conspiracy Evans-Pritchard purports to have uncovered would require the complicity of the Little Rock Police Department, numerous county sheriffs and district attorneys, the Arkansas State Police, the FBI, DEA, CIA, several Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys and federal judges, Arkansas Sens. David Pryor and Dale Bumpers, not to mention Oliver North, the late William Casey, Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and Whitewater independent counsels Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr (dubbed by Evans-Pritchard the "Pontius Pilate of the Potomac"). His methodology remains everywhere the same. If two dozen witnesses, crime scene photographs and an autopsy attended by a half dozen investigators confirm the existence of, say, an exit wound made by a .38 caliber slug in the back of poor Vince Foster's skull, this intrepid reporter can be counted upon to track down an ambulance attendant who failed to see it, and from that failure deduce that all the others have perjured themselves and the cover-up has been exposed. In the footnotes, that source turns out to be a "confidential informant."
When necessary, Evans-Pritchard resorts to even more questionable methods. He quotes a Little Rock funeral director named Tom Wittenberg asking, "What if there was no exit wound at all? ... I'm telling you it's possible there wasn't." By way of support, in yet another of the book's roughly 500 footnotes, Evans-Pritchard claims to have a tape recording to that effect, surreptitiously made by an unidentified Arkansas private eye. Puzzled, I phoned Wittenberg, an old friend and neighbor for more than 20 years. To my knowledge, the Tommy Wittenberg I know has never spoken to any reporter about a body entrusted to his care. Sure enough, Wittenberg insisted vehemently to me that Evans-Pritchard made the whole thing up. He not only refused to be interviewed, but told the reporter that out of personal feelings for the deceased, he'd never looked at Vince Foster's body at all.
Rookie reporters and probationary cops quickly learn that anybody can say absolutely anything about anybody else. If Evans-Pritchard ever absorbed this cautionary lesson, it's one he has strived successfully to overcome. He wanders the remote and fabulous land of Arkansas like some credulous Gulliver at large among the Houyhnmhnms. (On Swift's island of philosophical talking horses, it will be recalled, no word existed for the concept of falsehood.) Evans-Pritchard treats the wild inventions of Arkansas penitentiary inmates like Holy Writ. The concluding chapter linking Foster's "murder" to Iran-contra drug dealing, to the president's alleged cocaine use, to his sexual abuse of teenage girls and to three unsolved Arkansas homicides, consists almost entirely of double and triple hearsay from two dead men. One of those men is apparently Foster himself, with whom Evans-Pritchard's source claims once to have shaken hands. "At times the moral imperatives of reportage," the author proudly announces, "require one to violate the Columbia School codex."
Speaking of moral imperatives, it's time to unmask. Evans-Pritchard has designated this reviewer a "collaborator" in the Evil Clinton Empire, claiming to discern the dread hand of the White House in my Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columns. (For the record, I had no knowledge of this when I agreed to write about his book.) Oddly, he cites no particulars, not even in a footnote. He does, however, expound at modest length about articles I've written elsewhere. It turns out that our conscientious friend not only misrepresents others' work as it suits him, but, as need be, even his own.
Central to Evans-Pritchard's scenario about Foster's death is an unlikely tale he first broke in the Sunday Telegraph on April 9, 1995. His sources were a pair of Arkansas state troopers named Roger Perry and Larry Patterson. I summarized Evans-Pritchard's account in what he calls the "ultraserious" New York Review of Books as follows: "Perry and Patterson ... [said] that a White House aide named Helen Dickey phoned the Arkansas Governor's Mansion hours before Foster's body was discovered in a Washington park. Supposedly Dickey told them Foster had shot himself that afternoon in a White House parking lot, which could only mean -- so deduced the Telegraph reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard -- that the body had been moved and a White House cover-up begun."
Based upon a U.S. Senate hearing transcript, I went on to add that "when Perry and Patterson were subpoenaed to appear before Sen. Alphonse D'Amato's Whitewater committee on February 16, 1996, they suddenly decided they didn't want to repeat that story under oath. D'Amato even apologized to Ms. Dickey for the pain and embarrassment his own credulousness ... had caused her." I continued: "It's the timing that's significant here. Because if such a phone call had, indeed, come from the White House on July 20, 1993 -- the day Foster died -- then you'd think the troopers would have mentioned it to [the American Spectator's David] Brock and the others who reported the 'Troopergate' stories five months later. But either they kept it to themselves, or the reporters did. Either way, it gives the troopers something of a credibility problem."
My summary of his story incensed Evans-Pritchard. In a scathing letter in the Nov. 28, 1996, issue of the NYRB, he contended that I'd "traduce[d]" his original article, which he claimed concerned itself only with the timing of Helen Dickey's alleged call. "The article," he huffed, "did not examine the question of where Foster died ... It should have been clear to anybody reading the Telegraph that the focus of our investigation was the timeline."
Evans-Pritchard also (correctly) pointed out that the troopers hadn't refused to testify before D'Amato's committee. Minority counsel Richard Ben Veniste had misspoken. What actually happened, I acknowledged in a response to his letter, was that the troopers' lawyers kept postponing their deposition until the absurdity of their story became sufficiently evident that even Republicans on the Whitewater committee no longer wished to hear it. Possibly to imply that I am indifferent to facts, Evans-Pritchard now contends that far from correcting the error, I repeated it in Harper's magazine. He cites the alleged incident as "an interesting insight into the way that consensus is manufactured in the Washington media culture."
Problem is, no Harper's article of mine exists regarding the Dickey episode. As for traducing Evans-Pritchard's meaning, all that was necessary by way of response was to quote his original text. What made Dickey's alleged call significant, he'd written, was its close similarity to an erroneous Secret Service memo that night that reported that "the 'U.S. Park Police discovered the body of Vincent Foster in his car.'" Then, Evans-Pritchard asks ominously: "The memorandum was wrong, of course, or was it? When rescue workers and park police found the body ... Foster's corpse was deep inside a Washington park."
In reality, the actual Secret Service memo and the troopers' apocryphal tale aren't very similar at all. But why quibble? The point is that Evans-Pritchard's insinuation that Foster's body had been moved could hardly have been clearer. What puzzled me then was why he denied it. What amazes me now is that he's turned the tale inside-out all over again. In "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," Evans-Pritchard couldn't be more explicit. "The hard evidence," he writes, "indicates that the crime scene was staged, period." Whether or not Foster suffered from depression, he argues, "somebody still inflicted a perforating wound on his neck, his body still levitated 700 feet into Fort Marcy Park without leaving soil residue on his shoes, and he still managed to drive to Fort Marcy Park without any car keys" (Page 226).
Almost needless to say, every one of these allegations has been conclusively proved false in independent counsel Kenneth Starr's final report on the Foster suicide, reaching precisely the same conclusions as Robert Fiske did in his 1994 investigation. The Starr report disposes of the troopers' allegations about the timing of the Dickey call in a footnote, citing telephone records and the testimony of other witnesses.
Oddly, Starr's sleuths neglected to interview the ultimate recipients of Dickey's message, former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and his wife, Betty, who remember the call coming at roughly 9 p.m. in Little Rock. This accords with all the available evidence that Dickey telephoned the Governor's Mansion with the terrible news some time after 10 p.m. Washington time, more than three hours later than the two troopers claimed.
Since then, of course, the Whitewater independent counsel has convicted Jim Guy Tucker of making a false statement on a 1986 loan application, making him a convicted felon. Maybe that's why Starr's investigators neglected to interview the couple -- although Betty Tucker hasn't been charged with any crimes. Or just maybe Kenneth Starr has reasons of his own for not wishing to state plainly that so pliable a witness as Trooper Patterson, who has testified before Starr's Whitewater grand jury, lied about so grave a matter. That's merely a suspicion, not a fact. Nevertheless, I offer it free of charge to Evans-Pritchard. He will know exactly what to do with it.
SALON | Dec. 23, 1997
Gene Lyons is a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and author of "Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater" (Franklin Square Press, 1996).
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