THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1994
September
Fall 1994
Hale's story "corroborated" by another Arkansas trooper; the resurgence of the Mena cocaine smuggling story
- Fall: Former Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown tells the American Spectator staff that he can corroborate convicted embezzler David Hale's story that Clinton pressured him to loan $300,000 to Jim and Susan McDougal.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
The claim rocks the Spectator staff: Hale's story of a pressured loan is key to the entire structure of his story of Clinton financial misconduct and cronyism. Interestingly, Brown has given numerous interviewers to reporter Daniel Wattenberg before now, and never mentioned Hale, though the Hale trial and Hale allegations were all over the news, but now, suddenly, Brown says that he personally witnessed a meeting between Clinton and Hale in either 1985 or 1986 where Clinton tells Hale, "You're going to have to help us out. We're going to need to raise some money." Brown's justification for not coming forward until now is, he says, fear of losing his job with the state police association. - Brown's timing is suspect at best. For a year, independent counsel Kenneth Starr has been fruitlessly pursuing evidence of criminal misconduct in relation to the Whitewater land deal. Either Spectator staffers or Arkansas Project members inform Starr's office of Brown's claim; Starr's investigators interview Brown, and Starr's office promptly leaks the story to the conservative Washington Times. The Washington Post prints the story the next day, October 20. Brown's story is as vague and uncorroborated as Hale's, and his recollection of the timing of the purported discussion conflicts with Hale's own recollection. Starr, to his credit, places no more confidence in Brown's veracity than Hale's, but though he can't use the story as part of his legal investigation, has no qualms about planting the story in the media to further damage Clinton's credibility.
- Caryn Mann, the live-in girlfriend of Arkansas Project member Parker Dozhier, later says that Dozhier told her that he and David Henderson stage-managed Brown's testimony, with Hale (accompanied by Henderson) and Brown in adjacent hotel rooms and Dozhier ferrying questions and information between the two. "Parker said that it was important that L.D. and Hale never speak directly because it might appear like they were colluding with one another to put a story together," she recalls. "But Parker said that Brown probably knew that Hale was in the room next door, because Brown made jokes about it. L.D. said, 'If I didn't know better, I'd say you guys know David Hale.'" Naturally, such collusion and witness tampering is quite illegal.
- As Brown's involvement with the Arkansas Project grows deeper, he regales Spectator editor Robert Tyrrell with ever-more fantastic tales of international intrigue, including lurid tales of Clinton's involvement in the mythical cocaine-smuggling ring centered around Mena, Arkansas.
- The story of the Mena cocaine ring is fascinating. It originated in 1987 as rumors of a CIA-backed coke-smuggling operation created to provide funds to the Nicaraguan Contras. Apparently at least some of these rumors are true, including the involvement of pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal, a DEA informant who, in 1984, helped the CIA videotape Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar unloading cocaine from a plane in Managua, Nicaragua. Seal was murdered in 1986 by three gunmen from the Medellin cocaine cartel. On October 5, 1986, the same plane from the 1984 videotape, a C-123 cargo plane known as the "Fat Lady," crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle and led to the revelation of the CIA connection with cocaine smuggling and Contra funding. A great deal of evidence later pointed to a CIA smuggling operation that used the remote Mena airport as one of its transshipment connections, but largely due to intensive efforts by Reagan and Bush officials to keep the story under wraps, federal investigators could show little proof of any criminal wrongdoing by the CIA. The story would fade until its resurrection in 1992, revised to downplay any mention of the CIA or the Contras and instead becoming an attempt to smear Clinton during the presidential campaign. The real culpability of a number of CIA agents, along with right-wing icons such as Oliver North, Richard Secord, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan, is set aside, and the story revamped to tell a tale of Clinton using the cocaine ring to fund his sexual and financial exploits. Apparently, the author of the revised Mena allegations is veteran Clinton-hater and con artist Larry Nichols, who even tied it in to his own personal bete noire, the Arkansas Development Financial Authority, which had fired Nichols years before. Nichols, who claimed that the entire Mena enterprise was used in collusion with the AFDA to launder drug money for Clinton, even says that he personally witnessed cargo planes loaded with cocaine at the airfield (he never explains why he didn't bother to inform law enforcement officials of any of this). Nichols's Mena allegations form a sensational segment of the now-notorious, and thoroughly discredited, Clinton Chronicles, a videotape still selling briskly among America's conservatives and religious fundamentalists (featuring a voiceover saying, "Barry Seal had to find a state that had a sleazy governor hooked on cocaine, and everybody knew it. Bill Clinton was hooked on cocaine"). The Spectator now decides to investigate Nichols's claims more thoroughly.
- The Spectator's Tyrrell begins by consulting the 1994 biography of Terry Reed, titled Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, yet another farrago of speculation and fabrication that alleges Reed, a pilot who says he worked alongside Seal in the Iran-Contra operation, was present at a 1986 meeting between Clinton, AFDA director Bobby Nash, Oliver North, Reed himself, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, and future Bush attorney general William Barr. Reed says the participants argued over the profits from their drug smuggling. Reed says that Barr told Clinton he was CIA director William Casey's "fair-haired boy," and that his help as a Democrat involved in a primarily Republican operation has been critical. "Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you f*ck up and do something stupid, you're No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job you've always wanted [obviously the presidency]. That's pretty heady stuff, Bill. So why don't you help us keep a lid on this, and we'll all be promoted together." A few pages later, Reed says he sat in a van outside a Mexican restaurant with Clinton and told the governor of Seal's murder while Clinton thoughtfully smoked a joint. (Interestingly, Reed's description makes a point of emphasizing that Clinton "took a long, deep drag...then exhaled slowly and deliberately," a reference to Clinton's famous 1992 denial that while he had tried marijuana in his youth, he had "not inhaled.") Project leaders Boynton and Henderson hold numerous contacts with Reed, and bring him to the Washington offices of the Spectator, where everyone except Tyrrell finds his story too hard to swallow. Finding little support among his own staff, Tyrrell turns to private investigator Rex Armistead, on the recommendation of their mutual friend Jim Johnson.
- Armistead, a former police officer, is a self-aggrandizing figure who claims extensive contacts in the "Dixie Mafia" and likes to brag about the nine men he has supposedly killed in the line of duty. He does possess strong contacts in the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, a federal agency in New Orleans, and in the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force. Now Armistead is a private detective whose primary clients are in the oil and trucking businesses. Armistead, an unrepentant white supremacist, has experience helping Johnson in earlier attempts to besmirch Clinton. His claim to fame among Arkansas's racist right began when he helped Mississippi politician Paul Johnson win the governorship in 1963; Johnson is most remembered for labeling the NAACP "N*ggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums." Armistead built his credentials as a Mississippi police official who helped the attempted cover-up of the 1970 police riot at Jackson State University, where he and others collected hundreds of shell casings to prevent ballistics identification of their weapons. Armistead is one of the ones who lied under oath by claiming that sniper fire provoked the police's barrage of gunfire into an unarmed crowd of protesters. In 1983 he orchestrated a smear campaign against Mississippi's then-governor, Democrat Bill Allain, alleging that Allain was gay and trying to peddle his story to ABC. ABC producers and correspondants quickly found Armistead at the center of a Republican scheme to unseat Allain, not only with the homosexual allegation, but by paying three black prostitutes to falsely implicate Allain in sexual peccadilloes. Allain won re-election. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, Al Franken)
"Western civilization with all its might and glory would never have achieved its greatness without the directing hand of God and the creative genius of the white race. Any effort to destroy the race by a mixture of black blood is an effort to destroy Western civilization itself." -- Council of Conservative Citizens, Fall
September 1994
Taliban takes power in Afghanistan
- September: Starting as Afghani exiles in Pakistani religious schools, the Taliban moves to take control of Afghanistan.
Islamist terrorism
Experts believe that many Taliban members were trained by Pakistan's ISI, and thus were more successful militarily than one might believe. Some of these experts believe that the CIA worked with the ISI to train them. Said one regional expert with extensive ties to the CIA, "I warned them they were creating a monster." Many believe that the Taliban has always been on ISI's payroll; this allegation is made in the Wall Street Journal in November 2001, and on CNN in February 2002. (CCR) - September: A revised version of the original Clinton Chronicles, titled aptly enough The New Clinton Chronicles, is released.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
It excises all mention of Stephens Inc., the Republican-supporting business firm which had been so slanderously besmirched in the first video, and instead tells a dark and spooky story about a huge drug ring running out of the Mena, Arkansas airport and managed by Bill Clinton. Film producer Pat Matrisciana funds the new film as he did the first: by soliciting donations from his powerful colleagues in the Council for National Policy. CNP members receive free copies of the video and are asked to circulate them as widely as possible. CNP members, many of whom are senior members of Congress and the judiciary, are asked to use their influence to expand the Whitewater hearings to investigate the Arkansas Development Finance Administration. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons) - September 1: Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein publish The Bell Curve, a deeply flawed study purporting to prove that inherited levels of intelligence predetermine the fate of the individual in society.
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
The book argues that government assistance to the disadvantaged (particularly blacks and other minorities) is a waste of time. The book's statistical studies attempt to prove that racial difference in measured IQs "prove" that blacks and Latinos are genetically less intelligent than white, and that as such, minority Americans should be content with menial jobs and a lower place in American society. According to the book, true equality had been achieved in American public schools just before the advent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the mandated desegregation and equality of resources provided by that legislation was actually discrimination in reverse, promulgated against whites who are genetically superior to blacks and Latinos, and are not treated farily by laws mandating equality. The book, which is fatally crippled by its embrace of psuedoscience and horrendous statistical manipulation, sets off a firestorm of criticism, but is roundly embraced by conservatives and segregationists, whose own agenda is bolstered by the book's arguments. Later the book's statistical content is proven to be based largely on data provided by a discredited eugenics foundation. (Joe Conason)
