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.