The Long Con of William Jefferson Clinton: Part VI

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I do not believe in accidents. I used to. I believed in accidents as a child. In the years before my exposure to realities of our world, I believed in the power of chance and the power of unanticipated outcomes as the defining narratives of our time. I wouldn’t say that was the same thing as believing in Santa Claus or a State Department proclamation about spreading democracy, but it was a naivete unfit for my transition to adulthood. I shed my beliefs about accidents some time around 1980 as the rise of Ronald Reagan coincided with the release of American agents in Iran. Then again, it may have been before that when my grandfather took me to see lectures by men like John Henrik Clarke and others. In any event, a skeptic was born long before I cultivated any capacity to consolidate facts or win arguments.

As I begin Part VI of these installments, I believe it is important to recap some of critical findings and positions I will use as the basis for my claim that former President William Jefferson Clinton is engaged in a “long con” with many confederates. The aim of this long con is to mask a system for military control, resource exploitation, population management and profiteering behind international humanitarianism. This is a heavy charge – and it is one which typically requires a Smoking Gun – a leaked memo from the British government; confessions from aging and embarrassed financiers; criminal investigations posing the danger of incarceration – something. I would need that if I alleging a deep, secretive conspiracy. I am not. I am asserting that this initiative is being conducted and HIDDEN in PLAIN SIGHT. I remain careful not to make charges which cannot be substantiated or reasonably deduced based on available evidence.

To that end, I have sought to demonstrate a continuity of objectives over time. In other words, I am not suggesting that William Jefferson Clinton is the principal architect. I am suggesting, however, that he is the face. Bill Clinton, America’s first Black President, is the face of humanitarian intervention on the continent of Africa. Africa is now the number one source of petroleum to the United States of America. Africa is now the target of the United States of America’s first military command (Africom). Africa is the center of an international conversation on emerging and infectious diseases. Persons, institutions and governments with interests antithetical to Africa and Africans have studied emerging and infectious diseases for more than 10 decades and made little impact on the health, wealth and stability of the continent. Measures proposed by Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and others will not address the fundamental challenges of infrastructure development on the continent. The questions of sanitation and water, transportation and communication are at the center of challenges facing Africans. Vaccinations, while an effective tool in many instances, have served as a critical impediment to progress. Scientists continue to violate ethical principles for the sake of research…and in the process, they stand atop the carcasses of innocent children, their peers, and our greatest revolutionaries.

Read on and trust nothing…verify for the life you save may be your own.

On the Ground from California to the Congo – Charleton, Mark, Albert, and Patrice

Dr. Stanley Plotkin is one of the world’s most accomplished virologists. He has had a long instructional and administrative association with Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute. Dr. Plotkin was also the most widely respected voice to raise opposition to the charge that the Wistar Institute had accidentally caused the global proliferation of AIDS through the dissemination of an oral polio vaccine in the Congo. Those charges were placed at the feet of the Wistar Institute by Edward Hooper, author of a 1999 book (and subsequent documentary), The River. Plotkin’s prestige was a product of his work in creating the vaccine for rubella and contributing work on polio and countless other viruses over a period of 40 years. And still, in my “beginner’s review” of the esteemed doctor, I couldn’t help thinking he had a serious credibility problem.

In a 2001 report published by the Royal Society (the knock down, drag out journal in which representatives from both sides engaged in a pitched battle over the origins of HIV and AIDS), Dr. Plotkin casually provided background information from 1956 on the decision of scientists to name the vaccine. According to the doctor, the virus was named after an infant Charleton who had received injections of the virus while housed in a home for retarded children in Sonoma, California. Hoover contended the acronym for the virus, CHAT, actually signified chimpanzee attenuated. “Chimpanzee attenuated” meant that the virus had been effectively stripped of its most lethal effects by being passed, in this case, through the tissue of chimpanzees. The process of attenuation was fundamental to the development of polio vaccines and was provides a critical point of departure for understanding the killed vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and the live vaccine developed by Albert Sabin. Plotkin stated that the true meaning of the virus was known to all the persons working in the lab at the time. For me, this bit of reflection (five decades into the rear view mirror) had all the hallmarks of a logical fallacy. This was a blatant appeal to authority – an appeal to the history of the scientist and his recollections of a distant relationship which might or might have any bearing on the considerations at hand. I decided to take a closer look at the “institution for retarded children in Sonoma, California.”

“They took my brother’s brain without consent, and the doctor, in his obituary it said that he had one of the largest brain collections,” says Karen. “And if there’s any way for me to find that, I would like to put him back together.”

The story of Sonoma, California is one of a heartbreaking remembrance. The world has not always been kind to children and especially not to children with special needs. Today there are public schools in New York City that receive $80,000 per student to educate autistic children. In 1956, there was nothing of the sort. Five decades ago, in a world where scientists like Stanley Plotkin were operating much like the Nazi-era Germans imported under Operation Paperclip, families faced decisions where all of the options were bad. For one family, the family of Mark Dal Molin, the story was as follows:

“Karen Alves was just 10 when she lost her baby brother, Mark Dal Molin, in 1961.

As the oldest of four, she says her fondest childhood memories are of doting on her little brother. “One of the things we looked forward to, when we came home from school, was to play with Mark,” she says.

But life would be a struggle for the Dal Molins because Mark was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that cripples the body, but not necessarily the mind.

“In the ’50s, cerebral palsied children were considered to be developmentally disabled, mentally retarded,” says Alves to correspondent Vicki Mabrey.

“I never believed he was mentally retarded. When you looked into his eyes, he communicated through his eyes. … He’d laugh and giggle and kick, and just screech when he saw us.”

But by 3, Mark could neither walk nor talk, which meant his mother, Rosemarie, had to care for him.

“We know he recognized everybody,” says Rosemarie. “He would laugh or he would cry if he was unhappy.”

The children’s father, Bill Dal Molin, felt that Rosemarie was neglecting their three daughters, because of Mark. “His mother was very, very much attentive to him, and the girls, I felt, were like troops to her,” says Bill. “She was very hard on them, the girls.”

Doctors advised the Dal Molins to commit their son, so Bill told Rosemarie they had to send Mark to an institution. It was November 1958.”

Stanley Plotkin and the scientists at the Wistar Institute had an intimate relationship with this institution for retarded children in Sonoma, California. He worked closely with another man, Dr. Hilary Koprowski, whom many schools believe actually invented the live vaccine credited to Albert Sabin. Koprowski is also one of the scholars accused by Hoover of accidentally invented over one million Africans with the HIV virus through the use of a contaminated oral polio vaccine dispensed by the World Health Organization over four decades ago. In 1951, the Warsaw-born scientist conducted an experiment on 61 children institutionalized at Sonoma. The test was to measure the efficacy of an attenuated vaccine for polio. This was seven years before Mark Dal Molin was committed. His story continues:

Rosemarie had committed 3-year-old Mark to Sonoma State Hospital, the largest institution for children in California. At the time, the hospital housed 3,500 children with diverse needs, from babies born with minor defects, like a cleft palate or a club foot, to children with epilepsy and Down syndrome.

While the severely disabled languished in overcrowded rooms, the able-bodied were put to work in the institution’s dairies and orchards.

Rosemarie did something more that other parents who had committed their children to Sonoma State did not; she visited her son every Wednesday.

“It was just a small thing that I can still do is to go see him,” says Rosemarie. “Because most of these children, they never see parents again.”

But those visits came to an abrupt end on Memorial Day, 1961, when Mark was 6.

“I picked up the phone and I heard a voice say, ‘Is Mrs. Dal Molin in?’ and I just knew,” says Karen. “They didn’t even say where they were calling from. But I just, this dread came into my heart, and I got my mom and I left. I ran. I hid. Nobody told me. I knew he was dead.”

From that day on, Karen and her sisters, Chris and Gail, say they never spoke Mark’s name again. They buried their grief, grew up and had families of their own. But after 40 years, they still struggle with the decision to institutionalize their brother.

“It pretty much blew the family apart,” says Gail. “I believe that Dad did what he felt was best for the family. In my heart, I know that is true. But the impact of it on each one of us and the family was devastating.”

In 1994, haunted by thoughts of her baby brother, Karen decided to devote all her spare time to answering the question that had burdened her for decades: how exactly did Mark die?

“I just needed to know and, no matter what it was, I needed to know. So I went to the recorder’s office,” says Karen.

It is clear from this account and the historical records of elite scientists and the institutions who funded them that children in these institutions were used to serve a larger purpose. There can be no question that the gross violations of human rights within the United States was so appalling that the notion a similar violation could NOT have happened in the Congo is ridiculous on its face. The story of Mark Dal Molin at Sonoma should have ended here, but it does not.

“There was no death certificate. One of the clerks came over to the front desk, leaned over and said ‘When did he die?’ And I said, ‘1961.’ ‘Well, when did he go into Sonoma State?’ And I said, ‘1958,’ and she said, ‘You better look into it, because strange things happened there.'”

Things got stranger still when Karen noticed an article in the local paper saying 16,000 people, including children, had been used in radiation experiments. “Out of curiosity, I started to read it, and they mentioned patients that were in state-run hospitals being used,” says Karen. “And I just go, ‘Oh my God.’ This could be it.”

Then, President Clinton had just ordered thousands of secret documents on government-sponsored human radiation experiments declassified and made available on the Internet.

Karen found a study funded by the federal government involving 1,100 Sonoma State cerebral palsy patients from 1955-1960. One document she also found showed that her brother had been part of the study, assigned Specimen #8732.

Karen wasn’t able to find out what tests, if any, Mark was subjected to. But some of the patients in the Sonoma State study were put through painful procedures like the pneumoencelphalogram, in which air is injected into the brain before a series of X-rays.

“Imagine puncturing someone’s spinal cord, drawing fluid out and putting a foreign substance in there. Gas,” says Karen. “When they trap air in your body, you’re in pain, excruciating pain, for days.”

“They were the raw material of medical research,” says Susan Lederer, who teaches medical history at Yale University. She was a member of the presidential committee that investigated the radiation experiments, and she says she wasn’t shocked by the findings because researchers have been using disabled children in experiments for over a century.

“Children in orphanages, children in homes of the mentally retarded, these are all good populations from the sense of medical research, because you have an easily accessible group of people living in controlled circumstances, and you can monitor them,” says Lederer.

Lederer read the study that was conducted at Sonoma State Hospital, and says the children underwent painful experimentation “for which they received no direct benefit.”

“It seems clear that these were intended to enlarge knowledge about cerebral palsy,” adds Lederer.

It did not produce a breakthrough, although Lederer says studies using mentally retarded children were critical in creating vaccines for polio and hepatitis.

Lederer says using captive populations meant big money for medical researchers: “It would even be an advantage in applying for grant money, because you don’t have to go to the problem of recruiting subjects.”

In the case of Sonoma State, records show that when the study began, cerebral palsy admissions there jumped by 300 percent.

“One of the ways that medical directors of such institutions sort of connected themselves to the world of medical research was simply to provide their patients as commodities,” says Lederer. “I mean, we can provide this many guinea pigs for you.”

Sonoma State is now known as Sonoma Developmental Center. During her 12-year search, Karen repeatedly wrote to the current administrator, looking for information about Mark.

She was told that there were “no records on radiation studies at Sonoma,” and that there was “no record that your brother was involved in radiation research.”

“And I’d say, ‘Just go to the human radiation Web site and put in Sonoma State Hospital in your search and documents come up,” says Karen. “You’ve gotta have something there. No. They deny it. Deny it. If I called her right now, she’d deny it.”

Administrator Theresa Murphy has worked at Sonoma State for 30 years. She said she didn’t have any information about the medical experimentation that was taking place at the institution.

When asked if patients at state hospitals were used in medical research, Murphy says, “I’ve read that there has been things like using rattlesnake venom of epilepsy. But you know, there’s just nothing in our archives about the research you are talking about.”

“If these studies were being done, if there are patients from here being sent for radiation studies, is that a stain on the hospital record,” asks Mabrey.

“I think in the history of people with developmental disabilities, and there have been some dark times. I truly believe that,” says Murphy. “And it wouldn’t surprise me that there were things we would find – consider questionable today.”

It took two years and a court order for Karen to get Sonoma State to turn over Mark’s medical records. Though not complete, records did show that Mark Dal Molin suffered unusually high fevers the last six months of his life before dying of a seizure.

“He ran extremely high fevers that none of us here right now would live through,” says Karen. “Swollen eyes, seizures, those things can fit in with radiation poisoning.”

Mark’s records contained another shock. Karen found not one, but two autopsy reports, one for his body and another for his brain. Karen says that Mark’s brain was removed after he died.

“They took my brother’s brain without consent, and the doctor, in his obituary it said that he had one of the largest brain collections,” says Karen. “And if there’s any way for me to find that, I would like to put him back together.”

We don’t know exactly what happened to Charlton. We know more than we could have imagined about Mark. What these stories tell us is that the scientific community, to whom we have accorded so much respect, has violated our most basic trust in an unconscionable way. These scientists may have been Eastern Europeans born under the same cultural/religious milieu. They may have been “men of their times.” They may have been brilliant men who achieved unprecedented results – but they were also not whom they professed to be. They were not disinterested, ethical participants in a burning pursuit for solutions. They were conscious men with agendas and in many instances, they bore malice in their heart. Sometimes, they were just crazy.

The strange journey of Einstein’s brain began on the evening of April 17, 1955, when the seventy-six-year-old physicist was admitted to Princeton Hospital complaining of chest pains. He died early the next morning of a burst aortic aneurysm. As in the cases of Carl Gauss and Walt Whitman, the issue of permission to perform an autopsy is clouded by subsequent testimony. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call that evening, would later say, “I just knew we had permission to do an autopsy, and I assumed that we were going to study the brain.” As reporters soon discovered, Harvey did not have permission. Nor did he have a legal right to remove and keep the brain for himself. When the fact came to light a few days later, Harvey managed to solicit a reluctant and retroactive blessing from Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, with the now-familiar stipulation that any investigation would be conducted solely in the interest of science, and that any results would be published in reputable scientific journals. But Einstein’s dignity had already been compromised. He had left behind specific instructions regarding his remains: cremate them, and scatter the ashes secretly in order to discourage idolaters. Yet not only did Harvey take the brain, he also removed the physicist’s eyeballs and gave them to Henry Abrams, Einstein’s eye doctor. They remain to this day in a safe deposit box in New York City, and are frequently rumored to be poised for the auction block.

More on the beginning of what would become the 43-year odyssey of Albert Einstein’s brain from The Guardian:

Of those at his bedside, it was Otto Nathan, Einstein’s loyal friend and adviser, whom he presumed would carry out his wishes. Nathan, a former financial counsellor to Germany’s Weimar Republic, had taught economics at Princeton after fleeing the Nazis and was by this time an economics professor at New York University. He had arrived in America shortly before Einstein and helped the physicist to adjust to his new life in the US. Einstein remained fiercely grateful. The vaunted professor had been homesick for the like-minded scientists and social democrats he’d left behind, and Nathan helped to fill the void. When Einstein eventually died, at 1.15am on Monday April 18, his son Hans Albert gave permission for an autopsy.

Careful planning goes into designing an autopsy suite. At Princeton hospital, smooth linoleum floors, simple to clean, sloped toward a central drain to catch the runoff of body fluids. Vents in the ceiling blew any spray toward the floor. The cool shade of mint-green tile chosen to cover the walls contrasted with the natural pigments of a fresh cadaver, making it easier to spot tissue discolourations.

To the left of the doorway, two sinks protruded from the wall: the shallow one stood at waist height; the second, deep enough to contain the splatter of a small intestine, reached to mid-thigh. A hose was attached to the long-necked tap over the second sink. It ran up the side of a utility shelf through a metal casing to which another hose could be fastened and water directed where needed. Other tubes connected to barrels of embalming fluids that sat high on the shelf, relying on gravity to release their potions. All of it stood, hung and dangled in close proximity to that cold slab of a table, riddled with holes like a colander for life’s liquids to strain through.

On the far wall opposite the entrance, behind one of the square steel doors, Einstein’s body had chilled. But someone that morning before pathologist Thomas Harvey arrived must have retrieved it from the refrigerator. Someone turned on the tap and, using the hose, sprayed water across the table, making it slippery enough to drag Einstein’s supine corpse by the left arm and leg on to it from the gurney. It lay waiting when Harvey arrived. He was not surprised to see it there, but standing in front of the naked shell of the century’s intellectual hero, a frisson of awe skittered through his veins.

“I felt lucky,” Harvey would say. “I had the great fortune of being the one, at the right place at the right time. It was the biggest moment in my life.”

Thomas Harvey died on April 5, 2007.

The 1950’s were heady days for scientists. It seems like they were all a little like Thomas Harvey…they were all looking for the biggest moment of their lives. Here is what Dr. Stanley Plotkin’s current employer, Sanofi Pasteur, has to say about one of the “great heroes” in the race to find a cure for polio, Dr. Albert Sabin:

Albert Sabin, who was also working on live attenuated strains, paid a visit to Koprowski’s lab at Lederle. In the words of Koprowski, the purpose of Sabin’s visit was “to bury the hatchet and exchange samples of viruses. So I sent him some of my samples. But I never received any of his samples from him.”

Maurice Hilleman, a major figure in vaccine research in America and director of the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research, explains tersely that Sabin, “a self-pronounced genius, went in and took over Cox’s and Koprowski’s ideas.”(3) According to John Paul, Koprowski would later complain that the polio vaccine he had discovered became known as the Sabin vaccine.

Sabin wasted no time. In 1954 he wrote his first article about research on attenuated viruses. In 1956 he administered his vaccine to roughly 9,000 monkeys, 150 chimpanzees and 133 young adults in an Ohio prison. He enjoyed the support of Merck, Sharp and Dohme, which gave him some 25 million doses of each selected strain, something for which, according to Vaughan, the company never received credit.

During a meeting in Stockholm to discuss polio vaccines in November 1955, Sabin presented results obtained on a group of 80 volunteers, while Koprowski read a paper detailing the findings of a trial enrolling 150 people. Koprowski explained that in a group of children who had been immunized previously, “antibodies remained for three years following administration of a single dose.”(4) He was farther along than Cox or Sabin.”

There is a great deal at stake in these international competitions for prestige and research dollars. Scientists at elite institutions are not living a meager existence where they scratch and claw to make ends meet. Scientists live comfortably in an environment which is conducive to the higher functioning of the mind. And even when everything is as it should be materially, folks still lose their minds. That’s what happened with Albert Einstein. In the case of the Congo, lunacy simply doesn’t explain all that transpired over the past few centuries.

I will not take this opportunity to tell again the history of this region of Africa. I will, however, take a moment to highlight some of the most significant points of reference for understanding this region of the world. In much the same way the US supported French colonial prerogatives in Vietnam, and white-minority land seizures, wealth appropriation and apartheid in South Africa, the United States government, under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower called for the murder of Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba. By most accounts, the murder of Patrice Lumumba was executed by Belgians and Congolese conspirators operating as surrogates for a Western master. The United States furthered its own interests and that of Belgium by installing a vicious dictator who ran the nation with immunity for decades. Mobuto Sese Seko enjoyed all the privileges and protections that “white” guns and money could provide. In return, he sustained chaos, used terror, committed mass murders, and exported wealth to Europe.

The United States was intent on killing Patrice Lumumba. Unlike Mobuto, Lumumba had no intentions of squandering the wealth of his nation and his people on the trinkets and baubles which seduced the US’ choice. The Central Intelligence Agency placed its doctor of death, Sidney Gottlieb, on the ground in Congo right around the time that Hilary Koprowski was in country. Gottlieb, born Joseph Schneider in the Bronx in 1918, headed off to Africa with a bag of toxins and responsibility for implementing a plan for the agency’s other man on the ground – Larry Devlin. Devlin had operational bosses in Washington within “the Agency” and he had a political boss in country – it was Frank Carlucci.

NEW YORK–Most people would be thrilled to be a real-life character in a movie. Not Frank Carlucci. Lawyers for the former U.S. Secretary of Defense have pressured the film’s distributor to remove his character’s identity from the showings of “Lumumba” on HBO this month.Carlucci doesn’t appreciate the attention. Maybe that’s understandable. In 1960, he was the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, the Congo. That was the time when, according to declassified U.S. State Department cables and testimony to the Senate’s Church committee on assassinations, the United States plotted with the incipient dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and the Belgians to bring down Patrice Lumumba, the popular nationalist leader who’d been chosen prime minister by a Brussels “roundtable” of Congo leaders. Lumumba’s sin was that, when neither the Americans nor the United Nations would help him against Belgian-organized plots to destabilize his government, he turned to the Russians.

The Eisenhower “green light” is in testimony by NSC staff member Robert Johnson to the Church committee hearings of 1975-1976. Johnson said he was astonished to hear that Eisenhower had given an order for the assassination of Lumumba. The Church committee concluded that testimony permitted a “reasonable inference” that the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized by the president.De Witte wrote Peck, “There is another thing: we know that Devlin and other U.S. personnel in the capital were informed about the transfer of Lumumba to the Kasai or Katanga (testimony by Colonel Louis Marlière, active in the entourage of Mobutu). Everybody knew that they were waiting for some subcontractors to do the dirty job, and, given the rank and the involvement of Carlucci in Lumumba-related activities from the U.S. Embassy, we may assume (although it’s not proven) that Carlucci knew of what equaled a death sentence for Lumumba. Once again I turn to the testimony by Colonel Louis Marlière: nobody opposed the transfer.” Carlucci went on to a stellar career, including posts as ambassador to Portugal, deputy director of the CIA, assistant to the President for National Security affairs, and Secretary of Defense, the latter two positions in the Reagan administration. He is now chairman of the Carlyle Group, an investment firm.

Carlucci was never alleged to have participated in the assassination. It is reasonable to assume he had some role in plotting strategy, coordinating logistics or providing other operational support. Given what has been alleged by Edward Hooper, it is a strange coincidence that Frank Carlucci’s college roommate at Princeton, Donald Rumsfeld served as the Chief Executive Officer of Gilead Sciences – a rapidly growing pharmaceutical research firm which produces antiretroviral drugs.

William Jefferson Clinton has had a long relationship with this part of the world. Today, he wears the mask of a benefactor and a healer. When he was at the apex of his power, he wore a different mask. I believe it was at that time he showed his true face.

President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis” before the slaughter reached its peak.It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington’s top policymakers.The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.”It’s powerful proof that they knew,” said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.It discovered that the CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to “stop the genocide, which … is spreading south”.

Three days later the state department’s intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted “genocide and partition” and reported declarations of a “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis”.

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying “acts of genocide”.

The Belgians created the conditions for all that erupted in April of 1994 in Rwanda. They created the mythical distinctions between so-called Hutus and Tutsis. The aim of the United States government in 1960 was to destabilize the region. It was the same in 1994 when William Jefferson Clinton decided policy and practice. It is the same today.

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Dr. Stanley Plotkin has a credibility problem. It is not merely because the Wistar Institute had a questionable relationship with “an institution for retarded children in Sonoma, California.” He has a credibility problem because the entire industry has a credibility problem. During the Cold War era of the 1950’s, American scientists were working to cure more than polio. They were also working on emerging and infectious diseases in close collaboration with the shadow government of the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency was engaged in the practice of running clandestine operations to overthrow democratically elected governments.

The Wistar Institute did not release requested samples of the vaccines in question for 10 years. That’s going to give you a credibility problem every single time.

It is precisely this type of delaying and obfuscation which gave William Jefferson Clinton his credibility problem. In addition to suppressing information on genocide in Rwanda, Clinton (while Governor of Arkansas), there is the wide open question of his oversight and culpability in the Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal.

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Blood has been big business for years. Today, it’s a billion dollar business. Time magazine ran a story of lucrative blood brokering in 1929. The hustle was framed as follows:

Technique of blood transfusion has enabled many an individual to help a sick or injured friend. It has also created a traffic in blood. Blood brokers organize professional donors and supply them to hospitals. The friendless patient pays $50 a pint for blood. Brokers exact 20% of that as commission. Manhattan has about 2,000 donors, half of them professionals, half occasionals (impoverished people, thrill seekers). One Thomas Kane, deckhand, after giving blood 100 times in 15 years, ”retired” last week. He boasts himself the record holder and now considers selling patches of his skin for grafting.

Another donor, Robert Francis Gardiner, has sold his blood 73 times in nine years. Shrewd, he has assembled a gang of 300 robust Bowery down-&-outs, dock-wallopers, truck drivers and chauffeurs whose blood he sells to New York hospitals. Outdoor workers serve best.

Such commercial traffic has dangers. It cannot be closely supervised. Many a blood seller is diseased, many a one sells too often. It takes four to five weeks for such to replace their lost blood properly to provide for another transfusion. A doctor sometimes needs a donor in a hurry and has no time to make thorough blood tests and counts. He must rely on a seller’s word, and many a man who will sell blood for a living will tell lies.

Five decades after this report – one decade into the international AIDS crisis – and after the US government ceased allowing prisoners to make domestic contributions to the blood banks, prisons in Arkansas were shipping blood around the world. The dying has not stopped. The records have not all been revealed. The Arkansas Times recently reported:

Last April, at the Abbey Garden on Great College Street in London, a British widow vented her frustration over a now-defunct state program in Arkansas that may have killed her husband.

She addressed Lord Archer of Sandwell, a former solicitor general, who is leading an independent inquiry into how 4,500 hemophilia patients in the UK were exposed to lethal viruses in blood products in the 1970s and ’80s. Two thousand have since died of either Hepatitis C or HIV, in what has been called the worst disaster in the history of the nation’s health service.

The widow, 47-year-old Carol Grayson, spoke calmly of the death of her husband, Peter Longstaff, two years ago. She explained that he was one of the patients who were treated with Factor 8, a blood-clotting product manufactured from human plasma.

Grayson and Longstaff had believed that his medicine was safe; that it had been derived from plasma collected in the U.K. from donors who were not paid.

They learned too late that it had been manufactured, not from plasma collected in their own country, but from persons in other parts of the world and that some of those sellers were, in fact, Arkansas prison inmates.

In the U.K., it is illegal to collect plasma from prisoners. That restriction arose in part from a philosophy that considered plasma from unpaid donors to be safer, and partly because collecting human tissue from prisoners — paid or not — was considered exploitative.

When Grayson was called to testify, she recounted the shock she felt when she and Longstaff learned that plasma collected from groups, such as prisoners, who were considered in the U.K. to be high-risk, had been pooled, fractionated and dispensed as medicine to people like her husband.

The Times continues:

Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had banned prison blood from being sold in the U.S. as early as 1984, Farthing said he wondered, “why blood and blood products not thought fit for U.S. consumption was allowed to be exported rather than destroyed.”

In his film, Duda chronicled his mostly fruitless attempts to obtain documents on the plasma program from Arkansas prison officials and officials of the two companies that contracted with the ADC to run the program during the 1980s. This reporter is shown in one part of the film explaining that records from Clinton’s terms as governor were also unavailable, since Clinton took possession of them when he left office to run for president.

Today, Clinton’s governor’s papers — some 2,000 boxes of them — are stored on the upper two floors of the Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library, a few blocks west of the Clinton Presidential Center. While the presidential papers have been made public, records of Clinton’s years as governor have not; nor does Clinton mention prisons in his autobiography.

The library system’s director, Bobby Roberts, says the governor’s papers eventually will be moved to the Arkansas Studies Institute, now under construction near the main library. But, Roberts added, the papers will only be released to the institute in batches by topic, with Clinton’s approval.

The Clinton Library actually hosted a showing of Kelly Duda’s Factor 8. Bobby Roberts puts the blame for much of what transpired at the feet of local politicians. However, at the height of his power, Clinton did not address these issues and bring about the type of resolution which is required. In addition, he has become the face of an international humanitarian movement to eradicate HIV AIDS from the African continent.

How can it be that the same man who clearly has no concern for the lives of Africans or the lives of persons infected with HIV AIDS suddenly be in a position to lead the world? How can he be believed? Is this not the Art of the Long Con?

Hidden in plain sight. Keep your heart open, your eyes are of no use.

In Part VII, more on The River, Dr. Paul Osterrieth, free trade and intellectual property.