What if there were a story that would explain Vince Foster's suicide and implicate Bill Clinton in a murderous scandal? If you were an American investigative reporter, would you be interested?

Apparently not, because what I am about to tell you has been largely ignored by the establishment American press, although it has appeared in the elite Canadian press.

A day or two after Vince Foster died, a man called the White House Counsel's Office, using a direct line to one of Vince's assistants. The man said he had some information that might be important. Something had upset Vince Foster greatly just days before he died. It was something about "TAINTED BLOOD" THAT BOTH VINCE FOSTER AND PRESIDENT CLINTON KNEW ABOUT...

"I'm only telling you this now because Vince Foster was very distressed about this only days before his death," the mysterious caller said.

No doubt, Vince Foster had "issues," as we say in the 90's. Things like Whitewater, Travelgate, Waco, marital strains, the apparent break-up of his relationship with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and his failure to prepare a blind trust for the Clintons' assets. The trust should have been completed before the inauguration, yet it was unfinished up to July 20, 1993--the date of his death.

Was Foster having difficulty hiding suspicious assets? Vince did have a full plate. But what ABOUT the tainted blood?

The blood in question came from Cummins Correctional Unit, a huge, grim prison farm east of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

In the early 1980s, Friends of Bill devised an easy-money scheme to harvest inmate blood plasma at Cummins. The high risks of prison blood had long been recognized, and were certainly known to Dr. Francis "Bud" Henderson, the founder of Health Management Associates (HMA), which got an exclusive, Clinton-approved contract for the operation.

HMA already had an exclusive contract to provide ordinary health care within the prison, approved by Clinton in his first term as governor. The expansion into plasma harvesting got going when he was reelected in 1982. In the meantime, HMA's medical care had been so sloppy that its medical license was pulled. Yet it was awarded a new license and a broader contract when Bill Clinton got back into office.

In fact, HMA's license was voided three times for medical violations before it went out of business in 1987. Each time, Clinton conspicuously rode to the rescue. A new program under different owners got his approval, and the scheme continued until 1994. Arkansas was the last state to terminate its prison plasma program.

Unlike whole blood, which can be drawn only once every eight weeks, plasma can be drawn twice a week. In a process called plasmapheresis, the donor's blood is pumped into a centrifuge where the solids and red blood cells are separated out. The plasma is retained while the blood solids and enough saline solution to replace it are injected back into the donor.

Amazingly, this sophisticated medical procedure was run by the inmates themselves. Donor screening was minimal, conditions were unsanitary, dirty needles were reused, and records were falsified. In the process, the donor pool was cross-contaminated, and the high risk of prison blood turned into near certainty of contamination with hepatitis, syphilis and other diseases.

Inmates were paid $5 per unit, sometimes $7, in prison scrip. The program generated an incredible 4,000 to 8,000 units per week--at $50 a unit, and sometimes more (up to $100 in peak markets). That works out to $200,000 to $400,000 a week, $10 million to $20 million a year--from one prison.

Why would inmates give so much plasma? Plasmapheresis is not fun. Yet the program was so popular that inmates would stand in line for hours to do it. They did so knowing that they might get sick from it. Did they really do this for a few measly dollars?

Of course not. The inducement was drugs--specifically a painkiller called Percodan (a combination of aspirin and codeine). Codeine is an opium derivative related to heroin. Thus, HMA was trading narcotics for plasma.

From all this revenue, $50,000 a year or so trickled back to the inmates and prison administration. The rest presumably went to HMA, state politicians and Good Ol' Boys, along the usual lines of "doing bidness" in Arkansas. Bud Henderson, on camera, admitted to making $500,000 a year. Other payouts are so far speculative, but the more one knows Arkansas, the more one is certain that Bill Clinton got a cut in cash or favors or both. His agent in these dealings (as in all such business) was Vincent W. Foster.

When a $12 million lawsuit was filed against HMA, Foster approached Michael Galster, a prosthetist working in the prison as an HMA subcontractor, with a scheme to take the heat off HMA. Galster refused.

Galster had nothing to do with the plasma program, but noticed at the time that something was wrong. Though some of his patients were obviously jaundiced from hepatitis or otherwise ill, they would have band-aids on their arm, and told him that it was from plasma donations. Galster assumed that there must be some way to clean up the blood before it went on the market. He learned his error only much later, in 1995, and was aghast to realize the implications.

What he saw was a story tracing contaminated blood to Arkansas--blood that had contributed to a tragic epidemic of AIDS and often deadly hepatitis C in Canada. Few Americans have even heard of this disaster, but it has been front-page news in Canada for years. By initial reports, there were 1,200 cases of AIDS and about 28,000 cases of hepatitis C (which has a fatality rate of about 20%-25%). By better estimates, as many as 80,000 were infected and thousands have died!

News of the blood disaster was breaking in Canada in May and June of 1993. Word must have reached Foster and troubled him greatly. Vince Foster did have a conscience. It's one thing to do "bidness" with bid rigging or cattle futures, but he didn't sign on to sicken and kill thousands with a failed Good Ol' Boy scheme.

The theory is that Foster had it out with Clinton and the other Arkansans, and wanted to go at least partly public with the blood problem to try to make reparations. The others saw him as ready to break, ready to violate the Code of Silence, and tried desperately to talk him out of it.

Longtime Clinton friend and White House employee Marsha Scott clammed up after her mysterious closed-door meeting with Foster the day before he died, but let on this much, as described by journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: She did recall that Foster was a little chilly, failing to get up from his desk to greet her... Reflecting on it afterwards she concluded that he had "painted himself into a box with no windows," but at the same time she "got the sense that he had come to some sort of decision and was, if anything, relaxed as a result."

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are now investigating this case, and we do hope that they get their man.

Finally, think about this: Suspend all disbelief and assume that this whole business was the result of innocent, if unbelievably incompetent action. Clinton is the president who wanted to take over the U.S. health-care system--to nationalize it and, presumably, run it as efficiently and humanely as he and his friends in Arkansas did in the 1980s.

Thank God he never got the chance.