Copyright © 1994 The Telegraph plc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.
The Electronic Telegraph   Sunday 29 May 1994   World News
[World News]

Lawsuit timebomb ticks under Clinton
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

FOREIGN policy is taking its toll on Bill Clinton, as it was bound to do in the end.

Nothing has gone disastrously wrong, but the polls suggest that Americans are becoming contemptuous of a diplomacy built on hollow rhetoric and the rotating appeasement of domestic pressure groups.

The last thing Mr Clinton needs at this point is a D-Day celebration which puts him in the bogus position of having to applaud regimental virtues. There is always a risk that old soldiers will turn their backs on him - literally - in a gesture of ritual mockery. At best, he can expect to be reminded of his manoeuvres to avoid service in Vietnam and the letter he once wrote expressing "loathing for the military".

But that the celebrations should be taking place in Britain is doubly irksome. The White House does not want an untimely reminder that the President has managed to cock up relations with one of America's closest friends.

In the eyes of the American foreign policy establishment, the Clinton-Major spat is viewed as another example of carelessness by an Administration that does not understand how the world works.

However, fussing about the end of the Special Relationship is quite unnecessary. Britain and America continue to be twin states of a single nation, bound together inextricably by financial cross-holdings and a shared entertainment, media and academic culture.

The fact that the White House is accusing the British press of fanning the Whitewater scandal and keeping it alive is evidence enough of British purchase upon the United States. It is impossible to imagine the Japanese, French or Russian press causing headaches in Washington with coverage of internal American affairs.

Nobody would even notice what they were publishing. The British, however, are exercising subtle influence by an invisible process of percolation - and they are drawing blood.

TALKING of Whitewater, a group of Republican senators said last week that they were tired of "foot-dragging" by Democrats on Capitol Hill and threatened to filibuster legislation until hearings are scheduled in the Senate Banking Committee.

They want to go beyond the peccadilloes of Whitewater and sink their teeth into the real scandal, which is said to involve money-laundering through the Arkansas bond system.

The pitbull from New York, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, is leading the attack, but it remains to be seen whether the Republican Party as a whole intends to follow for the kill.

THE Arkansas scandal is beginning to ruffle feathers in Republican circles, for at the end of the day it gets into matters that the former President Bush and his friends in the intelligence community would rather not talk about. In fact, a lot of people on both sides of the political divide have something to hide in this affair, and it no longer makes much sense to talk of Whitewater as if it were a Right-wing assault on a liberal President.

It would be an exaggeration to talk of an organised cover-up. But there has been an instinctive closing of ranks by the American establishment. Most striking, the press is ignoring a book that makes allegations about the Contra resupply operation based in Arkansas in the mid-1980s, and about the penetration of the American financial system by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

The book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, is written by a former CIA operative named Terry Reed who trained Contra pilots and developed a network of underground arms factories in Arkansas between 1984 and 1986.

The book is hard to believe at times. Some of the narrative is based on hearsay that is unreliable, a point that Reed himself does not dispute. But there is a wealth of independent evidence corroborating the central thesis of Compromised - that the CIA ran a "black operation" in Arkansas while Bill Clinton was governor of the state. There is clearly a huge appetite for the book. Spread by word of mouth and a samizdat network of radio talk-shows, it has sold more than 50,000 copies since March and has been on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list for the last month. The publishers are scrambling to put together a fourth printing to meet demand.

Yet the only major newspaper to have covered the book is the conservative Wall Street Journal, which dismissed it as "not credible". Very few newspapers have made a serious attempt to look into the allegations. For the opinion elite, it seems, the subject is too hot to handle.

But though the Washington Beltway may wish to ignore Terry Reed and his troubling book, it cannot dismiss him so easily. For the last three years he has been quietly pursuing a lawsuit in the US federal courts that could prove devastating for President Clinton.

"Nobody is paying any attention to my civil litigation. The press doesn't even know about it," he said. "I'm flying in below radar, and I'm going to drop a bomb on the White House."

The suit accuses Buddy Young, the former chief of security at the Arkansas governor's mansion, of "having manufactured, tampered and planted evidence" against Reed and of abusing police powers. The judge has already given the go-ahead for the case and has set a court date for September.

D-Day for Bill Clinton is June 7 or thereabouts. That is when Reed's lawyer acquires power of discovery, allowing him to subpoena most of the state troopers who worked in Governor Clinton's security detail during the 1980s. Their testimony under oath should be compelling.

From there, the lawyer will move on to the whole cast of characters allegedly involved in a dirty tricks department of the Clinton political machine in Arkansas.

The judicial process is now moving ahead relentlessly, and there is practically nothing that the White House can do to stop it. Soon, the world is going to wake up to discover that this lawsuit poses a more immediate threat to the Clinton presidency than Paula Jones, or Senator D'Amato, or Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske, or all of them combined.


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