The lack of objective, principled coverage of the war in Ukraine is a degenerate state of affairs. The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans.

It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.

 

by Patrick Lawrence*

 

  Let me try that another way: The government-supervised “New York Times” and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.
  So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission – most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.
  There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all. 
  There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.
  This majority – and it is almost certainly a majority – has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations – NPR, the BBC – serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.
  This leaves us in a sad and very parlous place.
  Sad: Is there some state more pitiful than having no genuine connection to one’s own thoughts, perceptions, experience – altogether to one’s life? If Americans are not a profoundly sad people behind all the smiles we see in advertising, idiotic comedy shows, and on Facebook, then I must be missing something.
  Parlous: Over the course of some decades – from the mid-Cold War years, I would say – Americans have been rendered highly vulnerable to the manipulations of those who control the images through which most people have come to live. Anyone who has read a history of the 20th century knows where this can lead.
  The five weeks that have passed since the Russian intervention on 24 February have been shocking on both these counts. The derelictions of the press and broadcasters are without precedent in my lifetime, and with Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the covert operation in Syria among the wreckage in the rear-view mirror, this is saying something.
  I will let the American public’s enthusiasm for the sinkhole that is Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and the ridiculous posturing of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian who is no longer funny, speak for itself.

“Questionable veracity”

Ten days into the Russian intervention, the propaganda coming out of Kiev was already so preposterous “The New York Times” felt compelled to publish a piece headlined, “In Ukraine’s Information War, a Blend of Fact and Fiction.”1 This was a baldly rendered apologia for the many “stories of questionable veracity,” as “The Times” put it, then in circulation. I do love “The Times” for its delicate phrasing when describing indelicate matters.
  There was the “Ghost of Kiev” story, featuring an heroic fighter pilot who turned out to derive from a video game. There were the Snake Island heroes, 13 Ukrainian soldiers who held out to the death on some small speck in the Black Sea, except that it turned out they surrendered, though not before Zelensky awarded them posthumous medals of honour that were not posthumous.
  After railing against disinformation for years, “The Times” wants us to know, disinformation is O.K. in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are our side and they are simply “boosting morale.”
  We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.
  There was the maternity ward the Russians supposedly bombed in Mariupol. And then the theatre, and then the art school. All filled with huddling citizens the Russian air force cynically targeted because “this is genocide,” as the ever-intemperate Zelensky does not hesitate to assert.
  All of this has been reported as fact in “The Times” and other major dailies and, of course, by the major broadcasters. There have been pictures. There have been videos, all very persuasive to the eye.
  And then, as evidence mounts that these incidents were staged as propaganda to frame the Russians and draw NATO forces directly into the war, a silence worthy of a Catholic chapel descends. We read no more of the maternity ward that turned out to be an improvised Azov base, or the theatre, where citizens were herded, photographed in raggedy blankets, and sent away. Ditto the art school: Nothing more on this since the initial reports began to collapse. No body counts, no mention of the fact that Russian jets did not fly over Mariupol on the days in question.
  Before proceeding to Bucha, the outrage of the moment, I must reproduce a quotation from that propaganda-is-O.K. piece “The Times” published in its 3 March editions. It is from a Twitter user who was distressed that it became public that the Ghost of Kiev turned out to be a ghost and the Snake Island heroes didn’t do much by way of holding the fort.
  “Why can’t we just let people believe some things?” this thoughtful man or woman wanted to know. What is wrong, in other words, if thinking and believing nice things that aren’t true makes people feel better?
  America the beautiful, or something like that.
  Bucha is a suburb of 35,000 souls a few miles north of Kiev and one of the cities Russian forces began to evacuate on 29 March as peace talks in Istanbul progressed. Two days later the mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, celebrated the city’s liberation in a selfie-speech to his citizenry. He made no mention of anything untoward in Bucha’s streets, backyards, or public spaces.
  Four days later, 2 April, a special unit of the Ukrainian national police deployed to Bucha. And suddenly the place turns out to be a hellhole: bodies in the streets – 410, according to the Prosecutor General’s office in Kiev – evidence of atrocities galore, people bound and shot point blank. The whole nine, in short.

Instant outrage

The outrage from Washington, London and Paris – “worldwide outrage,” this would be – was instant. No demand for an impartial inquiry, forensic inspections, or any such thing. No one asked why corpses left in the street for five days appeared to be fresh, or why the relatives of the dead left them there until Kiev’s commando unit arrived.
  António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, was level-headed enough to state, “It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability.” This is the only sound position at this point. But we know from a long history how far SGs at the UN get with this sort of talk.
  In my read this is yet another of the false flags the Kiev regime flies almost by the day now. Paying-attention people will not miss the striking similarity between these incidents and the numerous put-up jobs that featured in Washington’s covert operation in Syria and the campaign of those famous “moderate rebels” who desperately wanted to draw the US into the conflict.
  As a matter of principle, we must await evidence of what happened in Bucha, even as we know we are likely to see as much about events there as we have in Mariupol. We also know that to most people neither evidence nor its absence matters.
  We have been told once again what to think and believe, and most of us will think and believe it.
  We are to add this to various other “truths” now almost universally accepted: The Russian intervention had nothing to do with NATO expansion and was “unprovoked” – that favoured term in the Biden regime. Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians into retreat: not that the pressure on Kiev was a Russian diversionary tactic to keep Ukrainian forces away from Donbass where the fighting is.
  After the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “Lying in Politics.”2 In it she wrote of America’s slide into a sort of collective psychosis she termed “defactualisation.” Facts are fragile, Arendt wrote, in that they tell no story in themselves. They can be assembled to mean whatever one wants them to mean. This leaves them vulnerable to the manipulations of storytellers.
  “The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts,” Arendt explained in this remarkable piece of work, “that is, with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.”
  A dead body in a Ukrainian street, in other words, can be assigned a meaning that, once it is established, evidence to the contrary cannot be used to erase.
  It is a half-century since Arendt published “Lying in Politics.” And it is to that time, the 1960s and 1970s, that we must trace the formation of what now amounts to America’s great bubble of pretend. The world as it is has mattered less and less since Arendt’s time, the world as we have wished it to be has mattered more and more.
  Nine years before Arendt published her NYRB piece, Daniel Boorstin brought out “The Image: Or, What happened to the American Dream”, an unjustly neglected work. “I describe the world of our making,” he wrote, “how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”
  The press, as you can imagine, did not escape Boorstin’s scrutiny. “The reporter’s task,” he wrote memorably, “is to find a way to weave these threads of unreality into a fabric the reader will not recognise as entirely unreal.”
  This is our condition. The Ukraine crisis is the mirror that reflects us as we are.
  Now I will relate a peculiar coincidence, pertinent to our case.
  Last week I took it upon myself to watch Marcel Ophuls’ “The Sorrow and the Pity”, all four hours of it. This is the famously explosive documentary that forced the French to come to terms with the extent to which they had collaborated with the Nazis during the three years and some they occupied France.
  This film has a special meaning for me. It came out in 1969, just as I arrived in Paris for university studies. France was in an uproar over Ophuls’ film. It was banned from broadcast on French television until 1981. I did not understand much of this at the time.
  “The Sorrow and the Pity” shredded to pieces, relentlessly, unblinkingly, the national myth that the French had all been heroes of the resistance, or had aided it, or had in some way stood against the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, hero of Verdun in World War I, capitulationist in World War II. This was nothing like the case.
  Now I understand what the young student long ago could not quite grasp. The French simply could not face Ophuls’ unyielding exposure of who they had been. Ophuls had punctured the enduring bubble of pretend within which they had lived for 25 years after the 1945 victory in Europe.
  People can live in these bubbles a very long time. The unreality within them can be very persuasive. The French finally emerged from their bubble. It was painful, a passage full of angst, but they were fortunate to have escaped.
  Will we have our interim of sorrow, of pity, and emerge from our bubble the better for it? May we someday be so blest.  •

1 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/technology/ukraine-war-misinfo.html of 3 March 2022
2 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/11/18/lying-in-politics-reflections-on-the-pentagon-pape/ of 18 November 1971

Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/05/patrick-lawrence-the-us-bubble-of-pretend/ 
of 5 April 2022; with friendly permission of the author

* Patrick Lawrence is a writer, commentator, a longtime newspaper and magazine correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer and writes often on Europe and Asia. Patrick Lawrence has published five books; his most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

 

 

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There is Absolutely No Reason in the World to Believe That Bill Clinton Is a CIA Asset—Except for All the Evidence

 

 

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

 

JANUARY 3 2022

 

 

 

Clinton was allegedly recruited by the Agency in the 1960s and helped cover up for drug-and gun-running operations to the Nicaraguan Contras out of Mena, Arkansas, in the 1980s when he was Governor of Arkansas. The CIA in turn appears to have helped Clinton in his rise to power.

[This article follows in our series on the history of the CIA and its criminal activities around the world. It is also kicks off our “Clinton crime” week as we will follow up with an article on the July 1993 murder of White House Special Counsel Vince Foster, whom Clinton had brought to Washington from Arkansas where he had served as legal counsel with Hillary in the Rose Law Firm. Bill was recently in the news because he was hospitalized and appears to be in poor health. The mainstream media continues to give him and Hillary the kid gloves treatment, failing to explore the dark side of an American power couple that embodies the old adage “best is worst.”—Editors]

The 2017 Hollywood blockbuster American Made, starring Tom Cruise, spotlighted the escapades of Barry Seal, a legendary drug pilot with a CIA background who smuggled guns and drugs into Nicaragua out of Mena, Arkansas, as part of the 1980s Contra War.

In one scene that the filmmakers decided to cut, a young Bill Clinton, the Governor of Arkansas, gets a lap dance at a strip club at the moment when Seal hatches a plan to enlist Clinton in the CIA-backed drug and gun running scheme. Left in, however, was a scene in which Clinton helps facilitate Seal’s release from jail so he could begin informing on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

 

Hollywood may be known for embellishment, but newly declassified documents show that Arkansas state officials were briefed about a joint CIA-Defense Department operation in Mena to assist the Contras, which Governor Clinton had to have known about. Clinton also, according to numerous whistleblower accounts, helped block investigation into the arms- and drug-running schemes.

American Made director Doug Liman stated, “we knew that somehow Barry was operating with immunity. The CIA was operating with immunity in Arkansas. So there had to have been some involvement of the governor’s office. There is a prosecutor in Arkansas who was told to back off. And so we combined that with the fact that the CIA was for sure operating in Arkansas and Clinton was the governor, to condense it down into one specific moment.”

Clinton’s ties to the CIA appear to go back to the 1960s. He was reportedly recruited while studying at Oxford University in the late 1960s as a Rhodes Scholar, or while an undergraduate at Georgetown University—a huge CIA recruiting center. He then reportedly served as an informant on the anti-war movement in England as part of the CIA’s Operation Chaos, giving the CIA the names of fellow protesters and the sources of the movement’s funding.

The CIA is further suspected of funding a March 1969 trip Clinton took to Moscow where he was allegedly part of a mission to smuggle out the memoir of ex-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which was subsequently translated into sixteen languages.

This was a coup for the CIA since Khrushchev had denounced the crimes of Stalin and presented a negative view of the Soviet Union.

An Asset of the Three Bad Words

In June 1966, newly appointed CIA Director Richard Helms expanded operations to collect intelligence on college and university campus protests against the Vietnam War. Project Resistance placed CIA recruiters on college campuses who would recruit students to infiltrate protest groups.

At Oxford’s Balliol College, where Clinton studied, the CIA recruiter may have been Richard G. Stearns. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard law, he was a committed anti-communist who was Vice President for International Affairs of the National Student Association (NSA), which Ramparts magazine showed to have received CIA funds.[1]

Clinton and Stearns were very close. A series of letters between them shows that Clinton sought Stearns’s assistance in evading the Vietnam War draft. In exchange, Stearns allegedly helped provide funding for Clinton to travel to Moscow and Eastern Europe. Later, he helped set up Clinton as the head of George McGovern’s political campaign in Texas—where Clinton made key contacts that helped him rise to power.[2]

 

 

Clinton’s Oxford roommate, Nelson Strobridge “Strobe” Talbott III, was attacked by Moscow newspapers as a “young sapling of the CIA” after he published a translation of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoir while working for Time magazine.

Talbott had come from an upper-class family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, studied Russian and wrote a thesis at Yale—a haven for CIA recruitment where he was part of the Skull and Bones secret society—on Fyodor Tyutchev, a 19th century Russian poet and diplomat. Later, from his perch as head of the Brookings Institute, he played a key role in the Russia-Gate scandal by disseminating the Steele dossier, which spread misinformation helping to trigger nation-wide paranoid and hysterical Russophobia and neo-McCarthyism. [3]

 

 

Talbott’s great-uncle, Harold E. Talbott, Jr., as Secretary of the Air Force from 1953 to 1955, had given away the Air Force’s authority to the CIA for overhead reconnaissance and worked with the CIA to promote development of the famed U-2 spy plane.[4]

 

Talbott’s wife, Brooke Shearer, and brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, who was also involved in promoting Russia-Gate, meanwhile became part of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “secret spy network.”[5]

 

As President Clinton’s top point man for Russia in the 1990s, Strobe oversaw “shock therapy,” or rapid privatization programs, that resulted in the sell-off of Russian state assets at pennies to the dollar to cronies of President Boris Yeltsin.[6]

The question lingers as to whether it was coincidence that Talbott became Clinton’s roommate or whether Talbott was a liaison to the Agency whose purpose was to recruit young Clinton, who was considered even at the time to have great future potential?

 

Whistleblower Stew Webb believes that Clinton was already recruited as an Agency asset under Project Resistance at Georgetown University where he studied as an undergraduate and that he never actually received the Rhodes scholarship—this was merely a cover.

 

Clinton’s favorite professor at Georgetown was Carroll Quigley, a Defense Department consultant and author of Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), which traced the power of a small Anglo-Saxon banking elite and how they effectively ruled the world.[7] Quigley wrote that “the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method.”

Clinton received one of only two A’s given by Quigley in the course and later quoted Quigley in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1992.[8]

 

 

Washington insider Jack Wheeler related, in his 1988 essay “How the Clintons Will Undo McCain,” how his friend Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director of Plans from 1967 to 1973 and later London station chief, told him about Clinton’s past. 

He wrote: “Back in the 1990s, years after he retired, if Cord drank a little too much scotch he would laugh derisively at those conspiracists who accused Bill Clinton of being connected with the KGB. They all darkly point to Bill’s participation in anti-war peace conferences in Stockholm and Oslo and his trip to Leningrad, Moscow, and Prague while he was at Oxford. ‘Who could have paid for this,’ they ask, ‘it had to be KGB?’” Cord would shake his head. “What rot—we paid for it. We recruited Bill the first week he was at Oxford. Bill’s been an asset of the Three Bad Words ever since.”[9]

 

Corroborated by at least two other CIA officers, Meyer’s admission helps put into context many of Clinton’s actions as Governor of Arkansas and President of the United States.

Mr. Casey’s Fair-Haired Boy: Covering Up the Crimes of Mena 

The 1992 presidential election was unique in that both major party candidates were caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal. George H.W. Bush as Vice President under Ronald Reagan had played a key role in the illicit shipment of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras—a counter-revolutionary army funded by the CIA that was seeking to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government—as declassified government records have revealed.

 

Bill Clinton might have used this against Bush in the campaign, except that he was also caught up in the scandal. Many arms shipments to the Contras were carried out from Arkansas’s soil during his governorship; specifically, from the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport in southwestern Arkansas’s Ouachita mountains, “an outlaw’s paradise, home to generations of moonshiners and red-dirt marijuana farmers,”[10] which happened to be in the congressional district of John Hammerschmidt (1967-1993), George H.W. Bush’s former campaign manager (1976 and 1980).

 

Mark Swaney, head of the Arkansas Committee, which campaigned to have the Mena scandal investigated, concluded that Clinton at a minimum “knew all along about Mena,” and it is “possible and even highly probable, based on a mountain of circumstantial evidence, that he was directly involved.”[11]

 

This involvement would have been through the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), the state’s chief economic development agency, established under Clinton, which provided bonds to stimulate business in the state.

According to whistleblower Larry Nichols, the ADFA was used as a vehicle to launder CIA and drug money from flights departing from the Mena airport.[12] Though branded by Clinton’s defenders as a “Clinton crazy”[13]—obsessed with dethroning a liberal icon—Nichols was in a position to know this. Not only did the Vietnam vet serve as marketing director for the ADFA, but he had also worked as an intelligence analyst in Honduras for the Contras, which is what first put him in contact with Clinton and led to his hiring by the ADFA.

 

Back in the 1970s, the Mena airport had been used to train guerrillas who were being sent on clandestine missions backed by the CIA in Africa. By the early 1980s, Mena had become a hub for gun-running operations to the Contras, Operation Centaur Rose, carried out in violation of the 1982, 1983 and 1984 Boland amendment aiming to limit U.S. government assistance to the Contras.

 

The plane of Eugene Hasenfus–which exposed the Contra operation after being shot down over Honduras—had flown out of Mena and belonged to Seal.[14]

 

Seal retrofitted his planes at a hangar at the Mena airport, and paid cash to local merchants for guns that he flew to the Contras, including 250 automatic pistols with silencers, that was a special order of the CIA.

A corpulent man with ties to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, Seal brought in at least 36 metric tons of cocaine, 104 tons of marijuana and 3 tons of heroin to the U.S., dropping much of it off chutes in the forests surrounding Mena. Many of his flights were part of Operation Centaur Rose, though for every drug flight that Seal made for the government, according to an Arkansas police report, he made two for himself.[15]

 

Clinton, despite his alleged hippie background, was a backer of the Contras, deploying the Arkansas National Guard on a joint military training mission in Honduras on Nicaragua’s border.

 

New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D) had boycotted the exercise, calling it a “provocation.” Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin (D) called it a “’backdoor escalation’ of the American military presence in Central America.”[16]

 

Arkansas and the area around Mena at this time became a hub for firms producing weapons and weapons parts along with electronic components used in weapons systems.

ADFA loans went to Missouri Research Labs Inc. (MRL) in the northeast corner of the state, which produced untraceable circuit boards and critical electronic components used in Stinger-missile guidance systems.

Iver Johnson’s Arms Inc., which was producing sniper rifles, and Brodix Manufacturing (weapons producers) were further given tax breaks by the state and other incentives as part of their reward for supplying Seal’s network and providing a cover for clandestine work.[17]

Governor Clinton welcomed and even encouraged—notably at Pine Bluff and Pea Ridge—military arsenals and storage of dangerous materials that other governors of both parties spurned.

He also, according to Terry Reed, allowed the CIA to bring Contra guerrillas and pilots for training in Arkansas, in effect, turning his state into a CIA proprietary.

 

Wardens in the backwoods tellingly reported seeing contingents of foreigners in camouflage armed with automatic weapons, and caches of weapons secreted in highway culverts.[18]

A secret CIA report disclosed the CIA’s participation in a Pentagon training exercise at Mena’s Rich Mountain airport.[19]

Employees at the airport said they were forced to stay in their offices because airplanes would land and strange faces would be around and people of Spanish origin who had never been seen before.[20] They also said they saw an unusual number of cash transactions in which the cash was left in drawers and people working all hours of the night to get planes out.[21]

 

Arkansas was chosen for these clandestine operations because it was rural, under-populated and inland, and had a governor who supported the CIA. Mena was also located 70 miles south of a major military base at Fort Smith.[22]

 

Local farmers were bought off through government subsidies that did not originate in the Department of Agriculture.

According to Terry Reed, one of the agents who trained Contra paramilitary operatives in Nella, Arkansas, was Luis Posada Carriles, a right-wing Cuban terrorist nicknamed “Ramon Medina,” who had planned the bombing of a Cuban airliner in October 1976, that killed all 73 on-board, and was subsequently freed from prison, with CIA support.

Reed wrote that he got chills when he heard Posada Carriles give a briefing in which he said that key Sandinista leaders would “soon disappear.”[23]

 

Larry Douglas (L.D.) Brown, an Arkansas state trooper who worked as Clinton’s personal bodyguard, wrote in his memoir that Clinton helped him write a paper supporting the U.S. position in Central America to gain admittance into the agency (CIA records confirm Brown’s application).[24]

 

Brown then said that he flew missions with Seal, which he later realized were drug-running missions. When he reported this to Clinton, Bill asked him “are you having fun yet? Just do what you’re told and don’t ask questions.” He also stated: “That’s Lasater’s deal,” a reference to Dan Lasater a bond trader and owner of a chain of restaurants, thoroughbred horses and a ski lodge thought to be a drug-smuggling front whose ties with Clinton enabled him to become a multi-millionaire.

 

Seal himself, who had an intelligence background, referred to Clinton as “the Guv,” indicating a close relationship. A lot of his drug money was laundered through the ADFA via Lasater’s brokerage house in the First National Bank of Mena and Worthen Bank, which was owned by two major Clinton donors, Jackson Stephens and Mochtar Riady, and in which the Rose Law Firm—where Hillary was a partner—held stock.[25]

The Governor’s protection helped these banks evade the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 which required currency transaction reports to be filed in connection with cash deposits in amounts of $10,000 or more at banking institutions.

Besides Seal, Clinton was on a first-name basis with a number of other high-profile CIA agents, including Donald Gregg (alias Dan Magruder), a top confidante of George H.W. Bush who worked with Brown, and Félix Rodríguez (alias Max Gomez), the murderer of Che Guevara, who allegedly knew his way around the Governor’s mansion and came in through the back door.

 

Terry Reed—an Air Force intelligence officer during the Vietnam War who insists that he trained Contra fliers at a makeshift airfield and helped Seal drop cash onto a farm near Little Rock—claims in his 1995 book, Compromised, that he met with Clinton in July 1984 outside the Cantina Mexican restaurant in Little Rock, where Clinton gave him his blessing to undertake clandestine operations in Mexico with Barry Seal and Oliver North (aka “Cathy”) in support of the Contras.

 

According to Reed, Clinton was glassy-eyed and smoked a joint while seated on a captain’s chair on the street side of a van whose interior revealed a mobile command post equipped with an array of electronics. He urged Reed to toke on the joint, telling him “go on, I’m the commander-in-chief here, you won’t get busted,” and said, related to his mission, that it was good he was going.[26]

Reed said that the first day he met Seal he was “in the company of Dan Lasater and Roger Clinton” (Bill’s brother was the driver for Dan Lasater at the time).[27]

Reed also wrote that Clinton attended a meeting in an army bunker outside Mena whose guests included North, Félix Rodríguez, and one of CIA Director William Casey’s top lieutenants, “Robert Johnson,” who is thought to be future Attorney General William Barr.

 

The latter threatened to shut down the Mena operation because too much money was being skimmed off the top (the reason Seal was probably killed), and Clinton was giving out too many contracts through the ADFA to Arkansas “good ole boys” who lacked security clearances. The arrest of Clinton’s brother Roger on cocaine charges had also brought unwanted scrutiny.[28]

 

Johnson significantly in the meeting, according to Reed’s account, referred to Clinton as “Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy” and said that “you and your state have been our greatest asset.” He added that “The beauty of this, as you know, is that you’re a Democrat, and with our ability to influence both parties, this country can get beyond partisan gridlock. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re no. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job you’ve always wanted.”[29]

 

 

These comments—if true—would speak volumes about the forces that control American politics and were behind Clinton’s political ascendancy. 

Clinton claimed he was unaware of any problems at Mena until 1988, however, L.D. Brown’s daybook records Clinton visiting Mena on May 21, 1984, many people reported seeing him at Mena airport, and Clinton insider Betsey Wright admitted that the Governor’s office had in the early 1980s “received repeated calls about drug trafficking there [in Mena].”[30]

A CIA secret report, only partially declassified in 2020, specifies that “certain Arkansas state and local officials were informed” about CIA activities at Mena, and that unnamed officials “personally briefed the supervisor of the Arkansas State Police district” for Mena, “the Mayor of Mena,” “the Mena Chief of Police or the county sheriff, and the person responsible for operating Mena Intermountain Airport” about the joint-training exercise with the CIA. With Clinton famously wired into everything happening in the state, he would have had to have been briefed.[31]

 

Terry Reed quoted “Robert Johnson” as stating that, shortly after the ADFA got its initial funding, the CIA agreed to use the ADFA to launder the black money it received through arms sales to the “freedom fighters.”

The deal allegedly “cut” with the Clinton administration in 1985 was that the CIA would pay 10% of the funds it received from Operation Centaur Rose to ADFA in exchange for the state’s cooperation at all levels. For that percentage of the take, Clinton would ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies would not expose the CIA’s operations, prompting Seal to joke that Arkansas was “the only country north of Mexico where drug smugglers could get a police escort.”[32]

 

An informant told author George Carpozi, Jr., that “Clinton was so much on the take, demanding under the table payments for sanitizing the drug money at the ADFA before it went to pay for the Contra arms that his angels (the CIA) became disenchanted over the greed of his.”[33]

The first company to receive ADFA funding, Park-O-Meter, which had developed the first parking meters in the U.S., had secret military contracts with the Stormont Labs of Woodland, California, and Wackenhut Corporation to make weapons parts and guns that were sent to the Contras as well as chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed in guerrilla warfare and devices to transport them on C-130s, according to Michael Riconosciuto, a CIA computer expert.

 

Riconosciuto said that he supervised high-tech equipment transfers to POM and developed software to help launder the Mena drug money. An army reserve chemical warfare company was conveniently based next to POM’s facility, on land previously owned by it.

Company owner Seth Ward—a fighter pilot in the Pacific and Korean Wars and an associate of James McDougal, Bill Clinton’s partner in the infamous Whitewater land deal—had allegedly allowed his ranch to be used as a drop zone for Seal’s drug deliveries.[34

 

Ward was the father-in-law of Webster Hubbell, POM’s lawyer and a partner of Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm, who was later appointed by President Clinton as Associate Attorney General.[35

 

A U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1989 called the available evidence about Mena sufficient for indictments on money-laundering charges, however, Clinton ensured that this never happened. Nine state and federal probes–headed by IRS agent Bill Duncan and “Razorback Columbo” Russell Welch, an Arkansas police investigator who had served as an army medic in Vietnam– were halted under higher orders and Welch was diagnosed with anthrax poisoning after a plot on his life.[36]

 

Duncan had a 3,000-page file and prepared 35 indictments for the U.S. Attorney but they were never acted upon and in 1988 the Arkansas state police began shredding its Mena files. The DEA was conspicuously absent from the investigation and Clinton and his aide Betsey Wright told former Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant in 1990 to back away from the case.[37]

 

State police officers testified that, when they submitted a warrant to arrest Seal, they were told by Colonel Tommy Goodwin, head of the Arkansas state police, to leave Seal alone, and to cancel the warrant. Goodwin told them Clinton ordered them to stand down.[38]

 

And State Trooper Larry Patterson stated that he was in Clinton’s presence when Clinton was told about large quantities of cocaine coming into Mena airport and money and guns, and that Clinton did or said nothing.

 

When Charles Black, a prosecutor for Polk County (Mena is the county seat) asked for a state probe, Clinton said he would “get a man on it” and furnish him with the $25,000 requested, though he never followed up.

 

Authors Roger Stone and Robert Morrow write that “Clinton provided the official political protection for the cocaine and drug smuggling [at Mena] while Lasater took care of the nuts and bolts of laundering the hundreds of millions of dirty drug money. And in their spare time it was drugs, parties and corrupting teenage girls.”[39]

The Mena cover-up extended to the murder of Kevin Ives and Don Henry, two high school seniors who were killed and then run over by a train on August 23, 1987, after probably witnessing cocaine drops or cash, gold or platinum payments to persons working with U.S. intelligence or theft of it.

 

The police investigation was so bad that Ives’s foot was found on the train tracks days after the murder. State Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak–whom Clinton had long protected because he had helped his mother, Virginia, a nurse, avoid criminal liability for the death of a young woman after botching a reintubation procedure—advanced the theory that the boys fell asleep on the tracks after smoking 20 marijuana joints and were run over by a train accidentally.

 

However, smoking 20 marijuana joints would make one euphoric, not incapacitated, and the toxicology reports found the boys had smoked only two joints. Several witnesses placed two police officers –thought to be Pulaski County narcotics officers Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell, both good friends of Dan Lasater whose private jet they flew on—beating up two boys at a grocery store near where they found the boys’ bodies. The deaths were eventually determined by an out-of-state examiner to have taken place before the train ran them over: Don Henry was stabbed in the back and Kevin Ives was struck with a rifle butt in the face.[40]

 

When Deputy Prosecutor Jean Duffey found witnesses who observed low-flying aircraft and drug pick-ups at the train tracks where Ives and Henry were killed, she was told by her supervisor, Gary Arnold, not to investigate any public officials for drug trafficking and then was fired on a fraudulent pretext—as the Arkansas police determined—and forced to flee Arkansas out of fear for her safety.[41]

 

Many key witnesses in the case turned up dead, including bar owner Keith McKaskle who passed on information to Police Deputy Cathy Carty, the only Saline County deputy on the tracks the night the boys died who strongly disagreed that the deaths were an accident, and Greg Collins, 26, who had been with the boys on the night of their deaths and was subpoenaed in the case.

 

Sharline Wilson, who was supposed to make a drug pickup that night but was too high so she waited in the car, stated that Dan Harmon, the Saline County prosecutor and a Clinton ally later sentenced to 11 years in prison for drug racketeering, was present when the boys were killed and that they were killed by police, and that high ranking officials [associated with the Mena smuggling operation] were involved.”[42]

 

Consistent with his role as protector of the corrupt “Old Boys Network,” Clinton refused to meet with Kevin Ives’s mother Linda and retained Malak as state medical examiner despite his false conclusions in this case.

 

Clinton further ordered the resignation of all 93 U.S. Attorneys when he became president, which—though perhaps normal for any new president—conveniently helped hamstring this and other investigations.

Philip Weiss, a freelance magazine journalist, told Linda at Clinton’s victory speech when he won the gubernatorial election for the last time that, “For all Clinton’s bright promise and fine beliefs, he long ago made a deal with a benighted political organization that had thugs among its operatives. If you wonder why people hate him, it’s because they recognize that training, they sense those crude values, that ruthlessness and lack of moral center. And they want an old-fashioned accounting.”[43]

Bringing the Old Risk-Taking Spirit Back 

Study of Clinton’s background helps place into context many of his policies as president.

These included his expansion of America’s covert empire of overseas surveillance outposts and spying and increasing the budget for secret intelligence spending and private military contractors, which employed many ex-CIA agents.[44]

Journalist James Risen reported that, after CIA Director George Tenet (1996-2004) won major budget increases and reopened stations in Africa, “the CIA’s old risk-taking spirit began to return.”[45]

 

This risk-taking spirit was seen in the adoption of rendition or kidnapping programs and drone surveillance in the War on Terror beginning in the late 1990s, and in covert operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cuba, Georgia, and the Balkans, where the National Security Council was accused of helping to run an illegal arms pipeline to Muslim-Croat forces fighting against the Serbs through Iran in violation of a UN arms embargo.[46]

To make the deliveries in the latter case, U.S. officials used cargo aircraft associated with a CIA front company, Southern Air Transport in an operation that Clinton formally approved.[47] Because the secret Iranian flights were landing with such frequency at Zagreb’s Pleso airport (three flights per week at its peak), aircraft were diverted to the island of Krk in the Adriatic, where the CIA reportedly operated a base, to deflect awkward questions. The Croats used helicopters to fly the weapons and munitions from Krk after dark to bases in Bosnia for distribution to Muslim forces.[48]

 

Clinton’s story is important to tell in full because it exposes the dark underbelly of American society and politics and hidden ruling powers. Clinton’s own folksy and liberal public personae masks a corrupt and ruthless man who embodies all the sinister features of the American empire.

 

 

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BY MAIA SILBER

 

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As Lily Geismer argues in her new book, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Harden served as an archetype of the “deserving poor,” a contrast both to Ronald Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” caricature and Clinton’s own racialized representations of criminal offenders. Like those of the black graduates of Public School 56, her achievements represented the possibility of individual triumph over racism and poverty.

For both certain Progressive Era reformers and the New Democrats, the idea of the deserving poor served not only as a rejoinder to negative stereotypes of poor people but also as a means of understanding and addressing inequality. Outraged by the conditions of immiseration that workers experienced, many Progressives nevertheless believed that corporations could advance the common good: if made to recognize the moral and actual value of treating hardworking employees humanely, employers would cease the practices of discrimination and exploitation that caused them harm.

These reformers had to resolve the tension between their observations of the widespread suffering caused by industrial capitalism and their faith in its ultimate capacity to bring about human flourishing. Some of the poor, they reasoned, suffered as a result of vice or idleness. Others did abstain from immoral temptations, but their continued suffering was an aberration — the result of poor luck, unhappy circumstance, or exceptional corporate greed.

With training and effort, these deserving subjects could transcend poverty. Even as they fought to eliminate the worst abuses of corporations, reformers also tried to make workers better suited to corporations’ needs by imparting the values of an industrial work ethic and thrifty spending.

While Progressives typically saw the aberration of poverty as the evil of capitalism’s excess, Geismer argues that the New Democrats saw it as evidence that capitalism had not spread far enough. Little Rock, Arkansas, was, in their formulation, one of the places “left behind” by globalization, its poor, aid-dependent residents unable to take advantage of a booming market’s opportunities for prosperity.

But if they understood its problems somewhat differently, reformers at the beginning and end of the twentieth century shared an agenda for capitalism’s improvement. Like the founders of industrial training schools, the New Democrats believed that they could persuade investors and employers to uplift the poor, if only the poor first uplifted themselves through education and thrift. Meager substitutes for large-scale redistribution, these programs of individual empowerment made inequality worse rather than better.

 

Welfare as We Know It

Historians of US politics have often traced the arc of the twentieth century as the “rise and fall of the New Deal order.” During the Progressive Era, that narrative goes, reformers lacking a consistent political base made slow progress, mostly on the state level, toward the regulation of business and the support of the poor. It took the crisis of the Great Depression to unite a coalition of rural farmers and urban industrial workers behind the Democratic Party, which would move beyond incremental reform to build a new industrial relations system and create a comprehensive social safety net.

The New Democrats saw the aberration of poverty as evidence that capitalism had not spread far enough.

To be sure, historians have long seen the New Deal order as both fragile and flawed. The welfare state that Depression-era Democrats created is often characterized as “two-track”: with an upper track of generous, mostly invisible benefits (such as housing and health care) conferred through the private sector, sometimes through the labor movement, and a lower track of direct but stingy and stigmatized government support.

That divide enabled many of the recipients of upper-track benefits — namely, white heterosexual men and their dependents — to see their own prosperity as the product of their own effort. When deindustrialization, inflation, and outsourcing eroded the material security of the workers that federal policy deemed deserving, many of them were ready to embrace a Republican Party that denounced supposedly freeloading “welfare queens.”

Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College, agrees with aspects of this narrative, but thinks it fails to fully explain the political outcomes of the last half century.

After all, if the Republican Party emerged from the 1970s so thoroughly victorious, how have the Democrats managed to secure the presidency for nearly half of the past forty years? And if the Democrats merely co-opted the Republicans’ free-market values, then what have the parties been fighting about so bitterly in Congress and the media for all this time?

Geismer’s first book, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, argues that liberal knowledge workers in places such as the Route 128 suburbs of Boston did not merely cop to conservative, free-market ideology or turn away from economic issues entirely. Instead, they advocated for a combination of “equal opportunity” and individualist meritocracy, a formula they believed would ensure electoral success.

Turning from the grassroots to the Democratic elite, Geismer finds a similar pattern of thinking among the party’s intellectual and political leaders in her new book. Al From, one of the founders of the agenda-setting Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), began his career investigating the implementation of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the Deep South. While Johnson pledged to extend the New Deal’s reach to poor black Americans, black communities often had to wrest control over programs like Head Start from local, white power structures. Watching activists like Fannie Lou Hamer fight for the autonomy of aid recipients, From came to believe that a top-down, bureaucratic welfare state harmed marginalized groups.

 

This undoubtedly selective interpretation of the activists’ agenda — Hamer and others fought for greater government assistance, not less — led From to seek an alternative to direct cash assistance. Like his era’s conservatives, From saw the War on Poverty as a failure. But unlike them, he believed that the government still had a role to play in “empowering” the poor.

The DLC would ultimately find one alternative to welfare in the provision of microloans to the small businesses of the poor. Geismer traces the history of microlending in the United States to a little-known organization called ShoreBank, a commercial bank that sought to spur redevelopment in Chicago’s impoverished South Shore neighborhood. Like From, the founders of ShoreBank became disillusioned with top-down anti-poverty programs, and they found some success in funding “ma-and-pa rehabbers” to improve South Shore’s dilapidated housing stock.

 

The organization, along with simultaneous efforts to finance women’s informal enterprises in the Global South, captured the imagination of Bill Clinton, who became the DLC’s champion. As Governor of Arkansas and then as president of the United States, Clinton promoted microlending and a broader array of programs designed to encourage entrepreneurialism as an alternative to welfare.

But outside of the South Shore, microlenders struggled to find willing lenders. The nation’s poorest residents usually lacked the means to start a business even with up-front capital, and many who tried weren’t successful. Microlending’s rare successes made compelling human-interest stories for the press, but it hardly met the broad needs of the welfare recipients whose direct aid Clinton simultaneously slashed.

Shortly after the Rose Garden signing, Harden suffered a stroke, lost her job, and found herself unable to pay for her prescription drugs. She gave a damning assessment of Clinton’s dismantlement of welfare to a journalist a few years later: “It didn’t pay off in the end.”

 

Do the Right Thing

Many experts now agree that welfare reform increased hardship for the nation’s poorest earners. One economist who once characterized PRWORA as “one of the greatest successes of contemporary social policy” recently told the Washington Post, “I was wrong.” And it was clear, from the beginning, that microlending fell short of boosters’ promises: Arkansas’s Good Faith Fund struggled to stay out of the red until it shifted its focus to the owners of established businesses seeking loans of more than $25,000.

Clinton and the DLC could disregard such worrisome signs, it seems, because material outcomes were only part of the point. Just as much as they wanted to increase former welfare recipients’ incomes, Geismer explains, the New Democrats aimed to transform their psyches.

Contending that “a shortage of confidence . . . is just as debilitating as a shortage of cash,” Clinton believed microlending would make the poor think like opportunity-seeking entrepreneurs. In turn, the newly market-savvy poor would attract the interest of employers and investors eager to discover “untapped markets.” Like the graduates of Public School 67’s industrial training program, the recipients of microloans would demonstrate their worthiness to the arbiters of economic fortune.

Just as much as they wanted to increase former welfare recipients’ incomes, the New Democrats aimed to transform their psyches.

Of course, microlending itself was only one aspect of Clinton’s broad agenda for economic reform. But the second half of Geismer’s book documents how the Clinton administration adapted its logic to other policy areas, including housing, education, and labor. In each instance, Geismer shows that the administration cut back on or eliminated programs that offered direct assistance to the poor, instead “empowering” former aid recipients to seek out opportunities in private markets.

Like microlending, these policies often originated with sincere efforts to address the limitations of the mid-century liberal order. It might surprise some readers to learn, for instance, that one of the early promoters of charter schoolers was Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Shanker, like other liberals in the 1970s, turned to school choice in the wake of the failure of court orders to fully desegregate schools. Shanker saw charters as an alternative to private vouchers that could facilitate integration while providing way for teachers to experiment with educational reform within the public system.

The AFT soon found, though, that charters undermined both desegregation efforts and teachers’ labor rights. The schools offered states a way to bypass collective bargaining agreements and divert funding from public schools at large (all without meaningfully improving outcomes for students). Despite securing some early concessions, the teachers’ union saw its ranks diminished and power weakened as the charter movement grew.

Meanwhile, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights groups warned that charters showed little proof of meaningfully improving outcomes for students of color. In fact, far from advancing integration, charter schools are among the most segregated schools in the nation. But the Clinton administration was paying less attention to the AFT and the NAACP than to Silicon Valley philanthropists, who became the charter movement’s major boosters.

The case of charters is one of many instances in Left Behind when opposition seems easily bowled over by the power of the New Democrats’ elite coalition.

Geismer’s top-down focus tends to emphasize big-picture outcomes over the local implementation of policy, and future historical research may uncover more significant — and perhaps more successful — resistance to New Democrats’ policies on the local level. The New Deal order faced challenges from both the Left and the Right at every turn: there’s no reason to believe that there was any less struggle over the policies that succeeded it.

Still, it’s undeniable that the big picture was bleak. One of Geismer’s most damning accounts of the Clinton administration’s failures comes in a chapter on its response to human rights campaigns to eradicate sweatshop labor conditions in the garment industry. The Clinton administration, she finds, left the regulation of the industry to the industry itself, allowing domestic manufacturers to evade federal lawsuits by conducting their own investigations of subcontractors’ labor conditions. Meanwhile, the administration’s Apparel Industry Partnership established an international code of conduct that was both voluntary and unenforceable. Unsurprisingly, garment manufacturing conditions remain abysmal in the United States and abroad. 

If it seems absurd to charge companies with their own regulation, that’s because it is. But it’s only a logical extension of the belief, central to the thinking of so many New Democrats, that the government can convince employers to act in the interest of the common good. Lacking means to legally enforce desired regulations, the Progressives often relied on what they called “moral suasion” to compel landlords to lower rents and employers to improve working conditions.

A hundred years before corporate social responsibility pledges, the National Consumers League created a label for garment manufacturers that set a minimum wage and established “humane conditions.” Reformers had to hope that exploitation was an aberration, that companies would choose to do what was right. They didn’t.

As historian Eileen Boris recounts in her 1994 book Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Homework in the United States, the Consumers League eventually abandoned the label strategy, in part because the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) convinced its leaders that the voluntary labeling undermined workers’ effort to secure better standards through collective bargaining. Instead, the left-moving organization began pushing for federal minimum-wage legislation.

“Regulation of working conditions through organized persuasion was not enough,” its leaders stated.

 

The New Moralizers

The significance of Left Behind isn’t only its assignation of blame for today’s inequality, though the Clinton administration deserves plenty of it. It’s the account it gives of the New Democrats’ vision, which, if accurately understood, can also be contested.

Instead of viewing the twentieth century as an arc that rises from conservatism to liberalism and falls back to liberalism again, we can trace a continuous tension between liberals’ observations of widespread and structural poverty and their frequent insistence on morally evaluating and individually uplifting the poor. That moralizing tendency never fully disappeared: the New Deal’s two-track welfare system, after all, marked clear distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The New Democrats’ agenda, Geismer shows us, was not only a response to conservative pressure or an abandonment of material concerns, but a new manifestation of that long-standing reformist vision.

Since the Progressive Era, this vision has led certain reformers to believe that if only the poor worked a little harder or spent a little less, corporations would respond in moral kind. Time and again, those reformers were proven wrong. But we can fight to move them, as early labor unions and radicals did, toward the fulfillment of their own ideals of a just world. We’ll need to convince them that persuasion, incentive, and empowerment alone don’t effect large-scale change, and that we all deserve more than this.

 

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