The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Domestic water supplies deliberately contaminated with industrial waste marketed as health giver: ALERT LEVEL 7

  Further Reading

  http://www.fluoridealert.org – Fluoride:Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy

  VINCENT FOSTER

  It was meant to be another Arthurian age, with political knights in shining armour sallying forth from Camelot in Washington DC to slay the ugly dragons of America – poverty, inequality, and every ism that could be poked from under a stone. From the outset, instead, the reign of William Jefferson Clinton in the White House was sunk in waves of scandal.

  One of the first controversies to lap at the door of the Oval Office was the death of Vincent Walker Foster Jr, a deputy White House legal counsel. A childhood friend of Bill Clinton and a partner in the Rose Law Firm of Arkansas with Hillary Clinton, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, on 20 July 1993, with a gunshot wound to the head. The alleged weapon was still in his hand, the latter stained by gunpowder residue.

  Foster was known to have been depressed, and only the day previously had contacted his physician and been prescribed a mild sedative/anti-depressant, Trazodone. In his briefcase was found a suicide note: “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

  Vincent Foster had run foul of the city’s media for his role in “Travelgate”, in which White House travel office workers had been sacked on corruption charges and replaced with operatives from Clinton’s power base in Arkansas. The incident looked and smelled bad, and a Washington Post editorial specifically charged that Foster’s internal investigation into Travelgate was a whitewash.

  His death seemed an open and shut case of suicide, and investigations by the United States Park Police, the United States Congress and Independent Counsels Robert B. Fiske and Kenneth Starr all ruled that Foster took his own life.

  “Fostergate”, though, refused to die, largely because conservative opponents of Clinton saw in it a chance to bring him down. Leading the anti-Clinton charge was the right-wing multi-millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who bankrolled an investigation into “Fostergate” by journalist Christopher W. Ruddy which would be published as The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. Close behind Scaife were Citizens for Honest Government, whose video The Clinton Chronicles not only fingered Foster’s death as dubious but stated that some fifty other people associated with Bill and Hill had died in suspicious circumstances.

  According to The Clinton Chronicles, Foster was plain murdered and the gun placed in his hand (the wrong hand) to make it look like a self-inflicted death. Why was he murdered? Probably because he knew too much about “Whitewatergate”, yet another scandal pounding at the Clintons’ doors – this time concerning land and banking deals from the time of Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial stint in Arkansas. Or, maybe, because Foster was having an affair with Hillary Clinton, which needed to be terminated in the most effective way possible to save the president the humiliation of a public cuckolding.

  Not all conspiracists believed that Foster was murdered. An alternative scenario had Foster committing suicide but doing so in a place likely to cause the Clintons a maximum bad news day; to obviate this, the Clintons had the body removed to far-off Fort Marcy. Since the body was transferred from the place of demise, this explained the surprising lack of blood said to be on and around Foster’s corpse at Fort Marcy. Meanwhile, on the furthest shores of the Foster-suicide theory, journalists J. Orlin Grabbe and James R. Norman “discovered” that Foster committed suicide because he was about to be unmasked as a Mossad agent.

  The conspiracists of “Fostergate” wished to get Clinton in the crosshairs but unerringly drew a bead on their own feet. One key “witness” in The Clinton Chronicles turned out to be the video’s producer; two more – Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patteson – proved to have been paid for their “evidence”.

  Aside from the conspiracists there was, in the eyes of the public at least, one more party out to crucify Clinton. This was special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

  Son of a Texan minister and sometime member of Ronald Reagan’s legal staff, Starr spent four years producing the Starr Report, which appeared in September 1998. This recommended the impeachment of the President. All the dirt that Starr could dredge up, after using $40 million of American taxpayers’ money, was that the President had enjoyed fellatio from an intern and then lied about it. Blameworthy behaviour certainly, but hardly Nixon-ite immorality. Naturally, Starr in his zealousness examined the death of Vince Foster – and found it to be a suicide. Surely, if Kenneth Starr is content that Foster died by his own hand, the remainder of the American right could be?

  For the record, here is the conclusion of Starr’s report on the death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr:

  To sum up, the OIC [Office of the Independent Counsel] has investigated the cause and manner of Mr Foster’s death. To ensure that all relevant issues were fully considered, carefully analyzed, and properly assessed, the OIC retained a number of experienced experts and criminal investigators. The experts included Dr Brian D. Blackbourne, Dr Henry C. Lee, and Dr Alan Berman. The investigators included an FBI agent detailed from the FBI-MPD Cold Case Homicide Squad in Washington, D.C.; an investigator who also had extensive homicide experience as a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington D.C., for over 20 years; and two other OIC investigators who had experience as FBI agents investigating the murders of federal official and other homicides. The OIC legal staff in Washington, DC, and Little Rock, Arkansas, participated in assessing the evidence, examining the analyses and conclusions of the OIC experts and investigators, and preparing this report.

  The autopsy report and the reports of the pathologists retained by the OIC and Mr Fiske’s office demonstrate that the cause of death was a gunshot wound through the back of Mr Foster’s mouth and out the back of his head. The autopsy photographs depict the wound in the back of the head, and the photographs show the trajectory rod through the wound. The evidence, including the photographic evidence, reveals no other trauma or wounds on Mr Foster’s body.

  The available evidence points clearly to suicide as the manner of death. That conclusion is based on the evidence gathered and the analyses performed during previous investigations, and the additional evidence gathered and analyses performed during the OIC investigation, including the evaluations of Dr Lee, Dr Blackbourne, Dr Berman, and the various OIC investigators.

  When police and rescue personnel arrived at the scene, they found Mr Foster dead with a gun in his right hand. That gun, the evidence tends to show, belonged to Mr Foster. Gunshot residue-like material was observed on Mr Foster’s right hand in a manner consistent with test firings of the gun and with the gun’s cylinder gap. Gunshot residue was found in his mouth. DNA consistent with that of Mr Foster was found on the gun. Blood was detected on the paper initially used to package the gun. Blood spatters were detected on the lifts from the gun. In addition, lead residue was found on the clothes worn by Mr Foster when found at the scene. This evidence, taken together, leads to the conclusion that Mr Foster fired this gun into his mouth. This evidence also leads to the conclusion that this shot was fired while he was wearing the clothes in which he was found. Mr Foster’s thumb was trapped in the trigger guard, and the trigger caused a noticeable indentation on the thumb, demonstrating that the gun remained in his hand after firing. The police detected no signs of a struggle at the scene, and examination of Mr Foster’s clothes by Dr Lee revealed no evidence of a struggle or of dragging. Nor does the evidence reveal that Mr Foster was intoxicated or drugged.

  Dr Lee found gunshot residue in a sample of the soil from the place where Mr Foster was found. He also found a bone chip containing DNA consistent with that of Mr Foster in debris from the clothing. Dr Lee observed blood-like spatter on vegetation in the photographs of the scene. Investigators found a quantity of blood under Mr Foster’s back and head when th
e body was turned, and Dr Beyer, who performed the autopsy, found a large amount of blood in the body bag. In addition, the blood spatters on Mr Foster’s face had not been altered or smudged, contrary to what would likely have occurred had the body been moved and the head wrapped or cleaned. Fort Marcy Park is publicly accessible and travelled; Mr Foster was discovered in that park in broad daylight; no one saw Mr Foster being carried into the park. All of this evidence, taken together, leads to the conclusion that the shot was fired by Mr Foster where he was found in Fort Marcy Park.

  The evidence with respect to state of mind points as well to suicide. Mr Foster told his sister four days before his death that he was depressed; he cried at dinner with his wife four days before his death; he told his mother a day or two before his death that he was unhappy because work was a “grind”; he was consulting attorneys for legal advice the week before his death; he told several people he was considering resignation; he wrote a note that he “was not meant for the job of the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.” The day before his death, he contacted a physician and indicated that he was under stress. He was prescribed antidepressant medication and took one tablet that evening.

  Dr Berman concluded that Mr Foster’s “last 96 hours show clear signs of crisis and uncharacteristic vulnerability.” Dr Berman stated, furthermore, that “[t]here is little doubt that Foster was clinically depressed . . . in early 1993, and, perhaps, sub-clinically even before this.” Dr Berman concluded that “[i]n my opinion and to a 100 per cent degree of medical certainty, the death of Vincent Foster was a suicide. No plausible evidence has been presented to support any other conclusion.”

  In sum, based on all of the available evidence, which is considerable, the OIC agrees with the conclusion reached by every official entity that has examined the issue: Mr Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993.

  Bill Clinton aide killed to prevent him blabbing about president’s illegal land deal: ALERT LEVEL 3

  Further Reading

  Christopher W. Ruddy, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, 1997

  Kenneth Starr, Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jnr, by the Office of the Independent Counsel, 1998

  FREEMASONS

  The whipping boys of conspiracy, the Freemasons have been blamed for every “evil” from the French Revolution to the Jack the Ripper murders, from Bolshevism to the death of Princess Diana. Their least, but most extensive, alleged crime is furtherance of their own interests against those of the “cowans” (non-Masons). Persecuted by Hitler and condemned by the Papacy in no fewer than seven bulls and encyclicals, the world’s five million Freemasons not only deny any malevolent wrongdoings but claim to be charitable workers whose only desire is, as the Scottish Rite puts it, “the guarantee of equal rights to all people everywhere”. Far from being a secret society, the Freemasons are, they say, merely a society with secrets.

  Eccentric bunch of patriarchal do-gooders or sinister agents of satanic forces? If the history of Freemasonry is examined, there is no doubt that the Freemasons are closer to the truth than their detractors.

  According to Freemasonry’s own mythology, its origins lie in Biblical times, with the building of the Temple of Solomon by the master architect Hiram Abiff. After Abiff’s murder, Solomon ordered that his coffin be opened so that the secrets of the building genius might be known. The first thing that was found was Hiram’s hand. Thereafter a handshake became the secret sign by which Freemasons recognized themselves.

  The Masonic authors Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas pursued the history of Freemasonry even further back in time, to Pharaonic Egypt, where Hebrew slaves learned the secrets of pyramid construction and Egyptian symbolism, later using this wisdom to build the wondrous Temple of Solomon. In Knight and Lomas’s bestselling The Hiram Key, Jesus himself was apprised of the Masonic secrets of Hiram, which were passed to the modern age by the Knights Templar when they stumbled upon the Temple during the Crusades.

  Knight and Lomas are far from alone in identifying the Templars as the “missing link” between the masons of antiquity and modern Freemasonry. Chevalier Andrew Ramsay had done so in an oration to the Grand Lodge of Paris in 1737, further suggesting that the prevalence of Freemasonry in Scotland was attributable to Templar refugees who washed up there.

  Freemasons and conspiracists alike have a vested interest in claiming a long pedigree for the Brotherhood. For Freemasons a foundation in ancient times suggests esotericism, for conspiracists the longevity of the Brotherhood is proof of its malignant power. Disappointingly for the Brotherhood and the anti-Masons alike, there is no proof that Freemasonry was founded in Ancient Egypt, even in Biblical times. In fact, there is not even evidence of a link between the medieval guilds of “free masons” (that is, stone masons who worked with “free” stone, the sort used in windows and façades of cathedrals and other grand buildings) and “speculative” Freemasonry. The first records of Freemasonry appear in the 17th century; on 20 March 1641 Sir Robert Moray was initiated into an Edinburgh Masonic lodge; five years later the antiquarian Elias Ashmole, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the soldier Colonel Henry Mainwaring were initiated as Freemasons in the Warrington Lodge.

  Moray, Ashmole and Mainwaring were entirely typical recruits to Freemasonry: they were gentlemen. Freemasonry became a fad amongst the 17th- and 18th-century squirearchy, who found the craft an enticing mix of conviviality, in-crowd elitism, daring occultism – and Enlightenment philosophy: Masons were asked to believe in a “Grand Architect of the Universe”, a concept which suggested Rationalism.

  In 1717 four London lodges outed themselves as the Premier Grand Lodge of England, which caused a split in the ranks of English Freemasonry, some Masons electing to follow the older York lodge. Despite the schism (which was healed in 1813 when the London and York lodges were brought together as the United Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of England), all the lodges of Britain adopted three main degrees of Freemasonry – Apprentice, Fellow-Craft and Master Mason. On reaching the latter level the Mason received all the privileges and rights of the Lodge.

  By 1720 Freemasonry had been exported to France, in 1730 it reached the US, and a decade later it arrived in Russia and Germany. Thereafter there were few corners of the world without a Masonic lodge, although the powerbase of the Brotherhood has continued to be Britain and its American ex-colony, where no fewer than 12 presidents have been Freemasons; the first incumbent, George Washington, laid the foundation stone of the Capitol wearing his Masonic apron. (US conspiracy websites allege that Masonic themes and symbols also pervade Washington’s namesake city, including a pentagram in the street plan and, of course, the Pentagon itself.) To counter the spreading allure of Freemasonry, the Roman Catholic Church not only damned it repeatedly but set up a direct, religiously sound rival, the Knights of St Columbus. Despite Pope Clement XII’s outright ban on Catholic participation in Freemasonry in 1738, some Catholics joined the Brotherhood nonetheless, most notoriously as members of P2.

  Religious condemnation of Freemasonry has not been restricted to the Catholic Church. Among the most vociferous contemporary critics of the craft are US conservative evangelical groups, which declare Freemasonry to be at the very least atheistic, at worst a Satanic conspiracy to rule the world. These groups, which are conspiracy theorists par excellence, cite, as proof of Freemasonry’s alliance with the Devil, Albert Pike’s infamous Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), which hailed “Lucifer the Light Bearer!” (Pike, a former Confederate brigadier general, made the Scottish Rite the main form of Freemasonry in the South.) More ammunition for anti-Masons lies in Memoirs of an Ex-Palladist by Miss Diana Vaughan (1895), which describes Satanic rituals undertaken by Pike’s Palladium network. Alas, the thrilling Memoirs were a fiction created by the 19th-century French anti-Masonic campaigner Leo Taxil. Then there is the dollar bill, which since 1935 has carried
the Masonic motto Novus Ordo Seclorum, widely rendered as “New World Order” – although a more accurate translation is “New Order of the Ages” and, far from being a nod to a Satanic would-be hegemony, the quote is a learned nod to Ovid.

  In Britain, opposition to Freemasonry has centred on allegations of political interference rather than religious deviation. At the top of the pyramid, the Royal Family is heavily tied into Freemasonry through Prince Philip, a senior figure of the Brotherhood. Philip is alleged by Mohammed Al-Fayed and some anti-Masons to have ordered the murder of Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed. For these conspiracists there is significance in the place of Diana’s death – the Pont de l’Alma Tunnel, Paris, which used to be a meeting place of the Knights Templar – and that she was wearing jewellery in the design of a pentagram.

  The Duke of Edinburgh is not the only royal Freemason to be implicated in murder. In Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), Stephen Knight charged that Freemason Prime Minister Lord Salisbury ordered the Whitechapel killings to cover up the marriage of Victoria’s grandson, Prince Eddy, to a commoner. The actual slaughtering was done by the royal surgeon and Freemason Sir William Gull, who carved Masonic symbols on the prostitute victims.

  Knight continued his investigations into Freemasonry with The Brotherhood (1984), which less sensationally accused Freemasons of corruption and favouritism, especially in the police and judiciary. Shortly afterwards Knight died of a brain haemorrhage (predictably there were claims that he had been murdered by Masons) but Masonic scandal-digging continued with Martin Short’s Inside the Brotherhood: Further Secrets of the Freemasons (1989). This told tale after tale of anonymous High Court judges giving preferential treatment to fellow Masons.