Hillary's plan to silence Internet journalists (Poe commentary)

World Net Daily ^ | July 6, 2005 | Richard Poe

[ViLaLuz]

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR
Hillary's plan to silence Internet journalists

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Posted: July 6, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening sneak preview of New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.

If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on.

By Richard Poe
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

On Feb. 11, 1998, Hillary Clinton told reporters that the Internet needed an "editing" or "gatekeeping" function. The World Wide Web was out of control, she said. It needed to be reined in. Five years later, Hillary's dream is on the verge of being realized.

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 empowers federal judges and Federal Election Commissioners to determine who is allowed to say what about political candidates in all electronic media. On Sept. 18, 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to extend its enforcement of McCain-Feingold to the Internet.

In the face of a massive outcry from bloggers, the FEC backed down from fully implementing Judge Kollar-Kotelly's order. However, the order stands. Sooner or later, it will be enforced.

Proposals are already on the table to require bloggers to register with the government and to report to the FEC any election-related blogging they undertake as "political contributions" subject to campaign finance law.

How did we get to this point?

The simple answer is that we failed to treat the Clinton threat as seriously as we once treated the Nixon threat. Nixon's abuses were aggressively investigated and punished. The Clintons' abuses were swept under the carpet.

Nixon's political machine evaporated following his resignation. The Clinton machine has only grown stronger with each passing year. Today, the Clintons effectively control the Democratic Party. The McCain-Feingold Act is largely their handiwork.

You won't hear about any of this from major media.

The Watergate myth

The recent emergence from anonymity of "Deep Throat" (aka former FBI Assistant Director W. Mark Felt) has brought forth an outpouring of nostalgia from major media. Their nostalgia is understandable. History has not been kind to the generation of journalists that brought us Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. A series of media scandals from Easongate to Rathergate has deflated its pretensions to objectivity and noble purpose. Of its former glory, only the Watergate Myth remains – the claim that major news media once saved our nation from dictatorship. Sadly for the Woodward and Bernstein generation, even the Watergate Myth has begun melting away under history's corrosive gaze.

The truth about Watergate is more nuanced than we were led to believe. We now know that Nixon's abuses, while real, were hardly unprecedented. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations abused the police powers of government on a grander scale than Nixon, most infamously in their surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King. Even worse, the same news organizations which thump their chests over Nixon's ouster now collude unashamedly in the promotion and whitewashing of Hillary Rodham Clinton – a would-be president whose abuses of power arguably exceed Richard Nixon's.

"[M]ost people are afraid of invoking the wrath of Hillary Clinton, and so they will talk about her only on condition of anonymity ..." author Edward Klein recently told the National Review. "Like Nixon, Hillary is paranoid and has an enemies list. Like Nixon, Hillary has used FBI files against her enemies. Like Nixon, Hillary believes the ends justify the means. Like Nixon, Hillary has a penchant for doing illegal things."

Klein's heresy has aroused savage denouncements from Big Media, not least because they view Klein as a turncoat. He is one of their own. Having served more than ten years as editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, from 1977 to 1987, Klein is a pillar of the Old Media establishment. But he has broken ranks with his colleagues. His book provides a refreshing break from the Hillarymania (Klein's word) which afflicts so many in the media world.

Yet even Klein's book reveals only a narrow sliver of the truth.

The whole truth about Hillary

The rise and fall of the Clinton co-presidency presents a parable of good vs. evil more dramatic, in some ways, than Nixon's ouster. Its heroes were real-life Davids facing a real-life Goliath – unlike Woodward and Bernstein, who represented a mighty media empire in the full flush of its power.

The heroes of the Clinton drama did not succeed in forcing their adversaries from office. But they saved America – at least temporarily – from a 16-year Clinton co-presidency. Hillary Clinton was registered with the FEC as a presidential candidate for the 2000 race. The outpouring of Clinton scandal coverage from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet forced her to back down from this plan.

Today, as Mrs. Clinton prepares to retake the White House in 2008, it is more vital than ever to clarify who she is and how she behaved the last time she occupied the West Wing.

It is also past time to give credit where it is due – to honor the New Media heroes who did what Woodward and Bernstein only pretended to do; who rose from the grass roots, with limited resources, and without Woodward and Bernstein's high-level connections; who defied an outlaw White House, endured government repression, and rescued our Republic from a fatal corruption.

These are the men and women of what I call the Web Underground – pioneers of Web news who began their work years before anyone heard of the blogosphere, dissident voices who got their message out through online subscription services such as Prodigy; newsgroups such as alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater; and later through websites such as WorldNetDaily.com, NewsMax.com, Townhall.com and FrontPageMagazine.com, as well as activist message boards such as FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne.com.

My book, "Hillary's Secret War," tells their story. No one else has told it before.

An "All the President's Men" for the Internet generation

After Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story, Big Media lionized them. Simon & Schuster signed them to tell their story in the critically-acclaimed 1974 best-seller "All the President's Men." Warner Studios released a star-studded film version of the book in 1976, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein, respectively.

The book and film inspired a generation of young idealists to enroll in journalism school, hoping that they too could become crusaders for justice, as they imagined Woodward and Bernstein to have been.

I like to think of "Hillary's Secret War" as an "All the President's Men" for the Internet generation. It is my personal answer to Woodward and Bernstein.

 

A seemingly unbridgeable gap divides those who place their trust in New Media from those who rely on Old Media for their news. They may walk the same streets and inhabit the same neighborhoods, yet their beliefs about current events differ so sharply, they might as well live in parallel universes.

Those who rely on Old Media believe that Nixon posed a threat to our freedom, while the Clintons were guilty of nothing more than a bad marriage. The Web Underground and its audience know better. We know that the Clintons were caught red-handed in a raft of abuses as grave as those for which Nixon was driven from office. Yet, unlike Nixon, the Clintons were never held to account.

For instance, Nixon's articles of impeachment accused him of attempting (but failing) to persuade the Internal Revenue Service to audit hostile journalists and political foes. By contrast, the Clinton IRS freely audited scores of White House critics, including prominent journalists. When the political nature of the audits became impossible to deny, IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson – a friend of Hillary who had worked on the Clinton campaign – resigned, but never faced charges.

Nixon aide Charles Colson went to jail for leaking secret FBI background data to a reporter, in an effort to discredit Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. By contrast, Clinton operatives commandeered over 1,000 FBI background files and got off scot-free. According to sworn witness testimony, Clinton aides entered the data from these files into a computer database. This information presumably remains in Clinton hands to this day. No one knows – nor seems to care – how they have used that data through the years.

Thanks to a veritable mass-media blackout, most Americans have no idea that such allegations were ever raised against the Clintons.

In a May 22, 2004, broadcast, Rush Limbaugh offered these thoughts on the war between Old and New Media – a war between rival storytellers whose outcome will largely determine what future generations know and believe about our time. Limbaugh said:

We're not going to win this in my lifetime ... [T]he history of this is going to be written long after all of us are buried and in heaven, because the people alive now who are writing about it are the people who are losing. They are not getting it right ... But at some point, folks ... we on the right, in the New Media, Internet, talk radio, Fox News ... we're going to become the majority, and the seismic shift, whenever that happens, let's just say 50 years from now or 75 ... it is those people who are not even born yet, who are going to look back and they're going to research this, without any bias of having been involved in it, and they're going to write the history of what's going on now. And it will be the accurate history.

In "Hillary's Secret War," I tried to begin the long, slow process of restoring to our national memory what really happened during the Clinton years. Perhaps I began the process too soon. Mighty forces guard the vaults where those memories lie hidden. They will not yield without a fight.

Spiked by Big Media

The Brahmins of Big Media, needless to say, extended a cooler reception to "Hillary's Secret War" than they had to Woodward and Bernstein – and not, I suspect, solely because I happen to be a much smaller fish. Granted, I barely rise to the level of plankton in the media food chain, but the people whose stories appear in "Hillary's Secret War" are killer whales. Their tale should have been told years ago – if not by me, then by others more worthy. Yet no one bothered. The difficulties I encountered in publishing "Hillary's Secret War" may help explain why.

After compelling me to perform several rewrites – during which process I was told, among other things, that my book contained too much "Hillary-bashing" – my publisher suddenly announced that it would not publish my book at all. The publisher was Crown Forum, a division of Random House.

What a strange time that was. The events that followed bore an eerie similarity to many of the stories recounted in "Hillary's Secret War." Like the dissident journalists profiled in my book, I suddenly found myself shut out of Big Media. Like the characters I had been writing about, I was now forced to seek help from the Web Underground.

Thank God for them. Had it not been for the direct intervention of some of the founding fathers of Web media, I daresay "Hillary's Secret War" would have faded into the very oblivion that Big Media had intended for it.

Joseph Farah published my book through his WND Books division (it is now published by Nelson Current). David Horowitz gave me a full-length author interview in FrontPageMagazine.com. NewsMax founder Christopher Ruddy published a ringing endorsement of "Hillary's Secret War" in NewsMax Magazine and in the online and print editions of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

FreeRepublic founder Jim Robinson honored me by writing the Foreword to "Hillary's Secret War." He also took the unprecedented step of posting an official call to his membership to, "Freep this Book," asking all Freepers who were able to purchase a copy of "Hillary's Secret War" or request that their local libraries purchase it.

Hillary's secret police

As mentioned earlier, Hillary Clinton told reporters on Feb. 11, 1998, that the Internet needed an "editing" or "gatekeeping" function. She neglected to mention at the press conference that she was already working on the problem. Indeed, she had been waging a secret war to silence Internet dissidents for the last four years. She continues waging it today.

In the Clinton White House, Hillary played the role of enforcer. She commanded what came to be known as the Clinton "secret police," a covert operation comparable to Nixon's Plumbers, dedicated to suppressing evidence of Clinton crimes. "Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer," wrote the late Barbara Olson in her 1999 book "Hell to Pay."

Mrs. Olson was in a position to know. A former federal prosecutor, she served as chief investigative counsel for Congressman William F. Clinger Jr.'s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which probed Hillary's role in the Travelgate and Filegate scandals in 1995 and 1996.

During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals walked a dangerous path. At the very least, they would be pulled from the Clinton beat, their stories discredited and their careers tarnished. In some cases, they were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits.

Some of the White House "secret police" were private detectives, such as Terry Lenzner, Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano. Others were Clinton loyalists embedded in federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the National Transportation Safety Board and so on. Many of these people are still in place, and still doing the Clintons' dirty work. I call them the Shadow Team.

In their effort to suppress negative press coverage, the Clintons encountered little resistance from Big Media. Major news organizations were easily brought to heel, their parent companies being acutely vulnerable to federal regulatory action. Even Fox News and talk radio had to tread lightly on some issues, lest their FCC licenses receive unwelcome scrutiny.

The Internet, however, lay beyond Hillary's control.

Hillary's Shadow Team issued a secret report in 1995 titled "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce." It characterized the Internet as a dangerously "unregulated" medium, potentially devastating in its ability to bypass the controlled, corporate newspapers and networks. In Hillary's view, the Internet presented a grave threat to Clinton power. For that reason, her secret police persecuted Internet dissidents with special ferocity.

And so the Web Underground arose, taking up the mantle of crusading journalism which Big Media had forfeited, exposing wrongdoing that mainstream journalists dared not acknowledge.

Hillary's shadow government

The struggle continues today. The Clintons may be out of the White House, but Hillary's covert network remains powerfully alive.

In October 2004, David Horowitz and I published a three-part expose at FrontPageMagazine.com called, "The Shadow Party." It revealed how Hillary Clinton and George Soros had joined forces to create a network of radical billionaires, non-profit foundations, 527 committees, public employee unions and leftwing nongovernmental organization's.

This "Shadow Party" has evolved into a veritable government-in-exile, with enormous influence in every sector of corporate, cultural, political, academic, financial and public life. Its most successful project to date has been the suppression of free speech through the McCain-Feingold Act.

On Nov. 30, 1994 , three weeks after Republicans swept Congress in the mid-term elections, George Soros announced in a speech that he wished to "do something about ... the distortion of our electoral process by the excessive use of TV advertising."

Eight months later, Democrat Sen. Russ Feingold obligingly rose on the Senate floor to denounce soft-money abuses, thus setting in motion the juggernaut that would ultimately give us the McCain-Feingold Act of March 27, 2002.

Also in 1994, Republican Sen. John McCain set up the Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues, which is heavily funded by Soros' Open Society Institute. This non-profit think-tank would become a nerve center for the campaign finance reform lobby.

Perhaps most significantly, 1994 marked the beginning of a $140-million scheme which would eventually become known as the "Pewgate" scandal. That year, a group of non-profit foundations associated with the Soros network began bankrolling "experts" and front groups whose purpose was to bamboozle Congress into thinking that millions of Americans were clamoring for "campaign finance reform" – even though they were not.

Ten years later, in March 2004, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts named Sean P. Treglia spilled the beans on the conspiracy to an appreciative audience of leftwing reporters and academics at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager obtained a videotape of the speech and broke the Pewgate story on March 17, 2005.

Campaign finance reform "didn't have a constituency," Treglia admitted on the tape. So the Pewgate conspirators set out to create one. Says Treglia,

The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot – that everywhere they [politicians] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.

To this end, a network of foundations – which included, among others, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers' Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and George Soros' Open Society Institute – dispensed $140 million between 1994 and 2004. Millions went to self-styled "good government" groups such as the Center for Public Integrity, Democracy 21 and John McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues.

Pewgate's tentacles reached even to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many of the legal arguments upon which the court based its Dec. 10, 2003, decision to uphold McCain-Feingold derived from data now deemed to have been fraudulent – data cooked up by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a Soros-funded operation which received millions in Pewgate lucre.

"[A]lmost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding [McCain-Feingold] are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Treglia crows in the videotape. Treglia currently sits on the board of the Pew-funded Institute for Policy, Democracy & the Internet, which seeks to tighten regulation of political speech on the Web.

Why Hillary matters

With the passage of McCain-Feingold, Soros' Shadow Party scored its first great victory. Now that same network busies itself grooming Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

For a first-term junior senator, Hillary has acquired extraordinary power on Capitol Hill. She can make or break virtually any of her fellow Democrats. As chairwoman of the Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee, she can block or approve her colleagues' committee assignments. More important, her political machine exercises de facto control over the party's purse strings. The Shadow Party raised some $300 million for Democrats during the 2004 election.

Regarding the Democratic Party, MoveOn PAC director and Soros operative Eli Pariser boasted after the last election, "Now it's our party. We bought it, we own it."

"Hillary Rodham Clinton has ... utterly [taken] over the Senate Democrats and the party itself – inside and out – and she has done it in a mere two years," marvels R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. in his 2004 book "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to Power."

Hillary's secret police will no doubt play a role in smoothing the way for her planned return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Likewise, the Internet will figure prominently in the effort to stop her.

[fooman]

All freepers should get this book. I bought several for family members.

[Peach]

An excellent book and you're right...it should be read by all freepers.

Prairie and Mo1, thought you might be interested in this article. Jim Robinson wrote the foreward for the book.

[bitt]

ping

[ViLaLuz]

"The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 empowers federal judges and Federal Election Commissioners to determine who is allowed to say what about political candidates in all electronic media. On Sept. 18, 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to extend its enforcement of McCain-Feingold to the Internet.

In the face of a massive outcry from bloggers, the FEC backed down from fully implementing Judge Kollar-Kotelly's order. However, the order stands. Sooner or later, it will be enforced."

[prairiebreeze]

Thanks for the ping. This sort of suppression of our freedoms is right up that Marxist b*tches' alley.

[Northern Yankee]

This will catch up to her.

What an evil corrupt creature.

[listenhillary]

Finished the book a couple of weeks ago.

Lots of mis-direction in this article though, it comes down to GWB (stupidly) signing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Everyone thought that the supreme court would throw the law out on it's bum. Suprise!!!

[TomGuy]

from SFGate.com, Sunday, February 22, 1998:

===

First lady just doesn't get it

REBECCA EISENBERG

Sunday, February 22, 1998

Hillary Clinton's call for Internet "gatekeeping' reveals a lack of understanding

The Net needs "gatekeeping," said Hillary Rodham Clinton to a select group of important people and special reporters last week, demonstrating yet again the government's tendency to be wrong.
.
.
.

"We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this," she answered, "because there are always competing values. There's no free decision that I'm aware of anywhere in life, and certainly with technology that's the case."

Although technology's new developments are "exciting," Hillary continued, "There are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function. What does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?"

===

Actually, she does "get it." She saw the potential danger of the Internet to her own political ambitions. Six years later, she saw what it did to John Kerry's candidacy. She "gets it" alright and she wants/needs it stymied before her run in '08.

[kjo]

What part of the First Amendment does she not get? It says...Congress shall make no law...What is becoming clear is that the Dems need to put CBS and their like back in the saddle again. Their first step is to close down, as best they can, the free speech on the internet. McCain/Finegold was their first step. The passed on it 5-4. One more Empty Souter on the Court will allow them to do almost anything.

[caver]

I don't like Hillary any more than the next person around here but this article makes her sound like Superman or something. It almsost sounds like she's in control of the world. If she is so powerful, then why isn't she in the White house right now. I do believe she is evil, but they are sure making her out to be a lot smarter and powerful than she really is.

[ex-Texan]

Hillry is a Demon. Ergo she drives the DemonRats to do things they ought not consider.

[sport]

If you dig deep enough you will find Hillary's fingerprints on the plan to get Rush Limbaugh.

The '08 election is going to make the '04 election seem like a walk in the park.

The entire Clinton dity trick m.o. with a few tricks added will be in play.

[Eagles Talon IV]

There will be one major difference between the coming /08 election and that of 2004. In 2004 the Republicans were caught flatfooted by the Dems use of the 527's and fell far behind in that area. I believe the Dems actually out raised the Republicans in that election. The same mistake will not be made again. Contrary to what some may believe, the right does have the ability to learn, adapt and move their program down the road.

[AFreeBird]

What part of the First Amendment does she not get?

And what part of the 5th's takings clause didn't the Supreme's get? If you're counting on the Constitution and Bill of Rights to fight you're battles for you; those days are over, or at the very least, are on life support.

[AFreeBird]

If she is so powerful, then why isn't she in the White house right now.

It's called biding your time. The new media was new and counters to its power and growing influence did not yet exist. It seems that that counterweight (in the form of oppressive laws) is growing.

Read Sun Tzu for an understanding.

[swampfox98]

Thank you Richard Poe. I have book marked this article, and intend to buy the book. I remember very well when Hillary went after the Internet. (conservatives on the Internet not the liberals)

If Hillary is elected every Marxist idea she has ever learned will be put into practice against the conservatives. Her husband has already stated the he hates conservative Christians - they don't mess around calling him an adulterer and a liar. Other Christians make excuses for him. (Remember Graham saying Bill is so handsome women just fall at his feet?)

We are going to be in a raging war, and it is doubtful the Right will win this one, as we are few in number. By that time, the Mexicans will be voting, and Hillary will make a big hit with them. Conservatives have lost their voting power and Hillary knows it. She is out for blood, and she'll get it.

[caver]

"Read Sun Tzu for an understanding."

Being a bit of a military buff, I love Sun Tzu.

[Max in Utah]

We are going to be in a raging war, and it is doubtful the Right will win this one, as we are few in number.

If Hillary wins the Presidency I fear it will lead to a real civil war, of conservatives against liberals. It would only take a spark, one unacceptable Executive Order, to ignite.

[hineybona]

Get your guns because she will win ..I see it coming. The world is filled with morons who follow this b*tch like she's God..Get ready

[swampfox98]

You are right. As a conservative, I am about fed up with our government being a tool for special interests. I would love to see them overthrown, and go back to the days when our Constitution was revered, and judges were judges not lawmakers.

However, saying that - I don't see it happening because our own Republican Party would be against us, and we would be murdered pronto. I see the country today as Patriots and Torries. The Torries want our form of government destroyed. The Patriots want it restored. Our dear President has thrown a monkey wrench into the mess, importing millions of illegals who are here to occupy and eventually take us over. So our enemies are in the millions.

[sport]

I have that feeling also.

In the United States of America there millions of idiots that are more than will to die for either Clinton.

It is only on this forum that Hillary is despised and is seen for the cold calculating, evil bitch she actually is.

We [Conservatives] can win but it is going to be a knock down and drag out barroom brawl and the Republican Party is going to have to put out a maximumin effort to defeat her. At this time, I don't see that happening. Right noe the Republican power structure is leaning toward either John Mc Cain, or Rudy. Neither of these will enegerize the base that elects Republican Presidents [i.e.] legitmate gun owners,anti- abortionists, peope for lower taxes, and Christians. Additionally, if the past performerance is any jidge of future performance, most Republicans do not have the heart to go toe-to-toe and nose-to-nose with the Democrats and slug it out with them. Te few Republicans who have doen this have been throughly plummeled by not Democrats but fellow Republicans.

One indicator to watch will be the Supreme Court nominee.

The Democrats and Republicans have running fights.

The Democrats fighting and the Republicans running.

[GOPJ]

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 and Federal Election Commissioners to determine who is allowed to say what about political candidates in all electronic media. On Sept. 18, 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to extend its enforcement of McCain-Feingold to the Internet.

Liberal judges protect free speech of pornographers - they don't give a flip about protected political speech -- one more reason for conservative judges on the SC.

[hineybona]

I agree, we act as if WE lost the election and the Dems are in power..What is THAT about ?..No balls in the Republican Party AT ALL!!!Thats why I fear a Clinton win.

[WKUHilltopper]

I'd be careful for what you post. She'll get your name and then she could crush your skulls with her big, fat, hairy thighs...

[hineybona]

Good one bro..........

[ViLaLuz]

Yes, I read it, too. Lots of good, timely information.

[ViLaLuz]

"Actually, she does "get it." She saw the potential danger of the Internet to her own political ambitions. Six years later, she saw what it did to John Kerry's candidacy. She "gets it" alright and she wants/needs it stymied before her run in '08."

I totally agree.

[ViLaLuz]

"If she is so powerful, then why isn't she in the White house right now."

She is relying on timing. She knew she couldn't go up against a sitting war time president and win.

[Eva]

Hillary may be trying to silence the internet journalists, but a judge in Seattle has already made a ruling that radio talk show hosts must report in kind contributions for any political support they give a candidate or partisan issue.

[ViLaLuz]

"If you dig deep enough you will find Hillary's fingerprints on the plan to get Rush Limbaugh."

I would love to see that. I don't doubt it. Got any links?

[ViLaLuz]

"I'd be careful for what you post. She'll get your name and then she could crush your skulls with her big, fat, hairy thighs..."

Hmmm, I never thought them "hairy." They always looked like overstuffed branschweiger sausages to me. But the thought of what you suggest makes me shudder.

[jwh_Denver]

"I fear it will lead to a real civil war, of conservatives against liberals"

Let's make those liberals for what they really are, communists. I think the country is too far gone to try to put the Constitution back into play until there is a civil war. We will need a damn good leader.

[WKUHilltopper]

"Hmmm, I never thought them "hairy." They always looked like overstuffed branschweiger sausages to me. But the thought of what you suggest makes me shudder."

I wouldn't have the nerve to lift up her skirt to check out her thighs! Besides, I'm the wrong sex anyway and she'd get ticked!

[ViLaLuz]

"I wouldn't have the nerve to lift up her skirt to check out her thighs!

Another nightmarish image.

[AD from SpringBay]

This is frightening - especially considering what is happening without the second Clinton presidency. The last thing she needs is to get her hands on 1,000 more FBI files.

[ladyinred]

I read this book, and it is great, as are many that expose the evil that is Hillary Rodham Clinton. The problem is, the media still spins her way, and Joe Public isn't interested in reading this stuff. Had even half of the population of this country read any one of a number of books exposing these two despicable people, we would not have to worry about Hillary ever again.

[Captain Peter Blood]

This would be almost unenforceable. This is a direct threat to the First Amendment. Also if they are going to try and regulate Internet pundits why not regulate Print and Media pundits also. If they are going to be given a free pass in what they say how is their speech any different than what a blogger is saying. Is is because they are being paid and have an editor and a blogger isn't and doesn't?
The Hypocrisy here is unreal. So the FEC is going to try and put a muzzle on free speech on the web because certain politicians don't like what is being written about them.
This goes against almost everything this country stands for and is a threat to the First Amendment and a Free Press. Guess Drudge will be the first to walk to plank.

[ViLaLuz]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45157

How Clintons took control of federal law enforcement
Posted: July 7, 2005

By Richard Poe
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Hillary recognized early that the Internet posed a threat to her power. Her efforts to regulate Internet speech began as early as 1994. By 1995, her operatives were engaged in an all-out war to silence Clinton critics on the Web.

When the Clintons took office in 1993, Big Media still monopolized the news. Its editors and news directors largely determined what Americans knew about the events of the day. By the time the Clintons left office in 2001, Big Media had lost its hold on the American mind. New Media such as talk radio, cable news and the Internet fanned the flames of a growing dissident movement – disgusted with Washington corruption and charged with a militant spirit.

Through a curious stroke of fate, the technology which made the Web Underground possible emerged in the same year that William Jefferson Clinton took office as president of the United States.

Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993. The following month, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the Mosaic browser. Later renamed the Netscape browser, this was the first genuinely user-friendly browser to reach the mass market, enabling ordinary people to navigate the World Wide Web using easy point-and-click technology.

Before 1993, only computer nerds knew the word "Internet." After 1993, cyberspace was open to the masses.

The earliest online dissidents posted their messages on what is now a fairly obscure corner of the Internet – the so-called Usenet, or Unix User Network – through newsgroups such as the venerable alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater. Other online subversives set up message boards on subscription-only commercial services such as Prodigy – a closed online community much like AOL.

In the early '90s, Prodigy's Whitewater News bulletin board became a hot spot of dissident activity. Like Alice's looking-glass, it offered a portal into another world. The complacent America conjured up each evening on our TV screens by Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings gave way on the Prodigy board to a harsher, more daunting terrain, where Americans faced hard choices, as momentous, in their way, as the choices our forefathers confronted in 1776.

Banana Republic, USA

The Whitewater News board covered a range of Clinton scandals far beyond the crooked Ozarks real estate deal from which it took its name. The board exposed the deep-rooted network of corruption in Arkansas which had given rise to the Clintons.

A poor, sparsely-populated state, Clinton's Arkansas had evolved into a kind of Third-World country within the United States. Local government – including police – were notoriously cozy with the "Dixie Mafia" kingpins who ran Arkansas' criminal rackets.

The Clintons blended comfortably with Arkansas' traditional backwoods corruption. But they also helped raise that corruption to new levels. During Bill Clinton's tenure as attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, the state became a veritable Dixie Casablanca, a hotbed of global intrigue, in which shady operators ranging from Columbian drug lords and BCCI money launderers to Chinese intelligence agents took part.

Arkansas had become a kind of banana republic, not unlike Noriega's Panama, in which the local dictator, Bill Clinton, and his circle of friends lived above the law and gained access to rivers of dirty money, in exchange for little more than keeping their mouths shut and staying out of the way.

Under Gov. Clinton, the state of Arkansas had been turned into a massive base for CIA black operations supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. From roughly 1982 to 1986, transport planes flew weapons from the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Ark., down to the Contras in Central America – allegedly often returning with cocaine shipments supplied by Columbia's Medellin drug cartel.

What role the alleged drug shipments played in the Iran-Contra operation has never been fully resolved. Some investigators charge that the CIA funded the Contras with drug money. Others blame rogue elements in the Contra supply operation who sold drugs on the side, while their CIA handlers pretended not to notice. Either way, it was not a nice picture.

Mainstream Republicans have proved just as reluctant as mainstream Democrats to look deeply into the secrets of Mena airport. However, the Prodigy message board proved a ready conduit for press reports on Mena. Some of the earliest reports posted at Prodigy were drawn from leftwing journals; others had appeared in local newspapers such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Many appeared in response to the 1994 book "Compromised," by ex-CIA pilot Terry Reed, who offered a unique, insider's account of the Mena operation.

Regardless of ideology, every writer who took on this explosive topic found an open-minded audience in the Web Underground.

In later years, Clinton defenders would blame a "vast rightwing conspiracy" for concocting the Mena story. White House spokesman Mark Fabiani, a member of Hillary's Shadow Team, told the Washington Post in 1996, "Mena is the darkest backwater of the rightwing conspiracy industry. The allegations are as bizarre as they are false."

But they were not false. And it was the hard Left that broke this story, not the hard Right. The radical Covert Action Information Bulletin brought it to light in the summer of 1987, in a special edition on "The CIA and Drugs." In 1989, activist Mark Swaney led a group of leftwing University of Arkansas students, called the Arkansas Committee, to investigate the Mena affair. Subsequent reports appeared in the early '90s in leftist journals such as the Nation, the Village Voice, In These Times and on the Pacifica Radio Network.

Leftwing writers such as Alexander Cockburn, Roger Morris and Sally Denton had their own reasons for pursuing the Mena story. To them, Mena exposed Bill and Hillary as hypocrites, capitalist sell-outs masquerading as "progressives." Whatever the investigators' motives, however, the facts were available for anyone with an interest. To this day, few have taken the trouble to look at them squarely.

The Clinton coup

On Oct. 18, 1994, a ripple of excitement stirred the Web Underground when the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, "The Mena Cover-up," by Micah Morrison. Incredibly, Morrison recounted the whole sordid tale of the Mena arms-for-drugs operation, for the first time in a major national newspaper.

"My Lord, so the end is really at hand," one poster exclaimed on the Prodigy message board.

The end was not at hand, however. None of the intrepid citizen journalists at Prodigy suspected in 1994 how bulletproof the Clintons had become to any and all allegations of criminal activity raised against them.

One of the first projects the Clintons undertook in the White House was to bring federal law enforcement under their personal control. They accomplished this through a massive purge, in three phases. By the time the Mena story broke in the Wall Street Journal, there was no one left with any genuine power to investigate or prosecute Clinton wrongdoing.

The first phase of the Clinton coup came on March 23, 1993. Only 11 days after becoming attorney general, Janet Reno called her first press conference to announce that she was firing all 93 U.S. attorneys and replacing them with Clinton loyalists. This was an unprecedented act. Phase 2 was equally unprecedented. Bill Clinton sacked FBI director William S. Sessions on July 19, 1993, on the pretext of various petty ethics charges.

"I love the FBI, and I hated to be the first president ever to have to fire a director," Clinton remarked at a press conference.

Sessions later claimed that the real reason for his dismissal was that he fought White House efforts to use the FBI for political purposes. And indeed, the Clintons – especially Hillary Clinton – had begun abusing the powers of the FBI almost since the day they took office.

Hillary's 1993 purge of the White House Travel Office provides a case in point. Her goal was to free up jobs for political cronies. Instead of dismissing the old employees quietly, Hillary orchestrated a massive smear campaign against them. The FBI, Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department were assigned to dig up dirt on Travel Office director Billy Dale and his team. Dale was prosecuted for embezzlement, his taxes audited, his FBI background file turned over to dirty-tricks specialists in the White House. Only after two and a half years of harassment was this innocent man finally cleared of criminal charges.

The paper trail leaves little doubt that Hillary was calling the shots in Travelgate. For instance, the notes of White House administrative director David Watkins show that, five days before the firings, Hillary said, "We need those people out – we need our people in. We need the slots." A Watkins memo further states that White House staffers knew "there would be hell to pay if ... we failed to take swift and decisive action with the first lady's wishes" regarding the Travel Office.

Hillary also appears to have masterminded the Filegate caper, in which the White House illegally commandeered from the FBI over a thousand secret background files on potential enemies. Several witnesses have stated that Craig Livingstone, the White House operative who obtained the files, was Hillary's agent, reporting directly to her.

FBI Director William Sessions reportedly protested these sorts of abuses. If true, it would appear that his integrity cost him his job. With Sessions out of the way, the FBI lost whatever trace remained of its fabled independence. The Bureau devolved into something resembling a personal secret police force for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Big Fix

Phase 3 of the Clinton coup finished the job. The Clintons proceeded to defang the federal judiciary. Between 1994 and 1998, they appointed seven new judges to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. – all Clinton cronies. The new appointees nicknamed themselves the "Magnificent Seven" – a name that stuck until the Clintons appointed an eighth member to the team in 1998.

The Magnificent Seven scandalized their colleagues by holding closed meetings every month, from which other federal judges were excluded. "I cannot imagine any legitimate reason for them to meet together once a month, even socially," one courthouse official told the Washington Times. Another court official charged that the meetings "reek with impropriety."

Indeed they did. Throughout the Clinton years, these hand-picked judges issued ruling after ruling shielding the Clintons and their alleged accomplices from federal prosecutors.

It later came to light that the obstructive activities of the Magnificent Seven had been carefully coordinated. The Associated Press reported on July 31, 1999, that Carter-appointed judge Norma Holloway Johnson – chief U.S. district judge for Washington, D.C. – had flouted standard procedure by personally and secretly assigning Clinton-related cases to Clinton-appointed judges. Federal cases are ordinarily assigned at random, by a computer. But the Clinton judges followed their own rules. Whatever crimes the Clintons or their operatives may have committed, they now had little to fear from the law.

The congressional investigation of Travelgate set the tone for the Clintons' remaining years in office. The White House stonewalled five federal probes into this scandal, withholding key documents and witnesses. In the end, investigators simply gave up. "Never has a president and his staff done so much to cover up improper actions and hinder the public's right to learn the truth," noted William F. Clinger's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in its Travelgate report.

Perhaps sensing the mood of the times, Prodigy – which was jointly owned by Sears and IBM – began censoring anti-Clinton discussions more aggressively. More and more frequently, articles critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton were pulled by Prodigy moderators.

One Prodigy poster – a programmer and software entrepreneur named Jim Robinson – later wrote, "I became frustrated with ... Prodigy's frequent threats to censor users of the Whitewater bulletin-board. In addition, I was also beginning to realize that the Internet was a much larger audience than Prodigy, which was a 'subscription' service which was accessed directly by modem, rather than being accessed by the Internet." Robinson launched his own website – FreeRepublic.com – in 1996.

In effect, Robinson chose to "light out for the territories" – the wide-open spaces of the unregulated Internet – rather than submit to corporate censorship. Millions would do likewise in the years ahead.

But those wide-open spaces were not as free as they seemed. By 1996, Hillary's plan to suppress dissident speech on the Net was already in motion.

[ViLaLuz]

These days there are many things going on that threaten and undermine the Constitution. Add the muzzling of conservative bloggers to the list. You know the left will be given a pass.

[ViLaLuz]

Hillary's Shadow Team
Posted: July 12, 2005

 

Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.

If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on.

By Richard Poe, © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

During the last presidential campaign, on Dec. 1, 2003, Diane Rehm of National Public Radio interviewed Howard Dean, who was then still running for president. A caller accused the Bush White House of "stonewalling" the 9-11 investigation. The following exchange ensued:

Caller: Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9-11 and not stonewalling?

Howard Dean: Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9-11.

Diane Rehm: Why do you think he is suppressing that report?

Howard Dean: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

Like so many high-ranking Democrats today, Howard Dean – who now serves as chairman of the Democratic National Committee – does not shrink from publicly speculating on the possible complicity of President Bush in the mass murders of 9-11.

By contrast, most conservatives – whether in or out of public life – long ago abandoned any effort to investigate the "Clinton body count." The topic has become taboo.

With Hillary all but certain to run for president in 2008, that taboo needs to be lifted. No critique of Mrs. Clinton can lay claim to thoroughness without addressing these darkest of allegations against the Clinton White House.

As noted previously, the secret "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" report makes clear that Hillary feared the Internet in 1995 chiefly because it served as a conduit for speculation regarding the Clinton body count – the growing number of Clinton critics, whistleblowers, former lovers, business associates and eyewitnesses to Clinton scandals of one sort or another who had been threatened, beaten, murdered or, in several cases, reportedly committed suicide.

The Clintons were hardly settled in the White House when Internet chatter about the "body count" began spilling over into mainstream media – into foreign media, that is. Most U.S. journalists were no more willing to touch the story in the early '90s than they are now.

"[A] peculiar pattern of suicides and violence surrounds people connected to the Clintons or their associates," noted the staid British journal the Economist on July 9, 1994. "It may be no more than coincidence, but it prompts questions."

Why so many people with knowledge of Clinton scandals met sudden and often violent deaths remains a mystery. Perhaps the Clintons were just lucky. Whatever the reason, the "peculiar pattern of suicides and violence" that surrounded the Clintons was an open secret in Washington from the earliest days of their co-presidency.

When covering Clinton scandals, journalists in the know feared for their safety. The most widely publicized case of journalist-bashing on the Clinton beat involved L.J. Davis, a contributing editor of Harper's magazine. New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan dispatched Davis to Little Rock, Ark., to look into the Whitewater scandal. Davis produced a brilliant report titled, "The Name of the Rose."

Published April 4, 1994, Davis' nine-page cover story artfully untangled the spaghetti-like business relationships that bound the Clintons and the Rose Law Firm to an elusive, global network of money launderers, drug runners, and S&L pillagers, many with links to the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Davis told New York Post columnist Deroy Murdock that a "high government official" in Washington had warned him against lingering too long in Little Rock. "You've gotten into a red zone," said the official. "Work your ass off and get out of there as fast as possible."

Davis did not get out fast enough.

At about 6:30 p.m., on Feb. 14, 1994 – St. Valentine's Day – Davis went to his room in the Legacy Hotel and unlocked the door. The next thing he remembers is waking up four hours later with a lump "the size of a darning needle over my left ear." Davis' doctor told the Wall Street Journal that the wound was not consistent with a fall, but looked more as if Davis had been struck with a blunt object. The hapless journalist suffered a concussion and a blood clot on the brain, for which he was given medication.

Davis' watch and wallet were not stolen, but several pages of his notebook had been torn half through, as if someone had been rifling through them.

Davis bravely stayed on in Little Rock until his work was done. But things got stranger by the day. On March 8, Davis e-mailed a partial draft of his story to the New Republic. The phone rang in his hotel room three hours later.

"What you're doing makes [Iran-Contra Independent Counsel] Lawrence Walsh look like a rank amateur," said a man's voice.

"Who is this?" asked Davis.

"Seems to me you've got your bell rung too many times. But did you hear what I said?" the man continued.

"Yes, I did," Davis replied. The mystery caller hung up.

The man's remarks, especially his crack about Lawrence Walsh, seemed to indicate that he had intercepted and read Davis' draft. "Somebody seems to be reading my computer transmissions," Davis told Murdock. "Whoever called me knew what I'd just sent to the New Republic."

Hillary's War Room

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton strategists famously huddled in a so-called "War Room" under Hillary's direction. It was Hillary who gave the War Room its name. Later, Hillary designated the White House office where she directed Shadow Team operations as a "War Room." In December 2004, Democrats set up a "War Room" in the U.S. Senate, in obvious emulation of Hillary's longstanding practice. Outraged by this affront to the Senate's collegial tradition, Republicans responded by setting up a "Peace Room."

What goes on in these war rooms? Regarding the original 1992 War Room, the Washington Post reported:

The War Room was set up to gather as much intelligence as possible and quickly turn it to Clinton's advantage. Campaign advisers tried to anticipate what stories reporters were working on in hopes of shaping those stories before they were written. James Carville and others combed through daily news media reports like intelligence analysts, trying to ferret out information that would help them figure it out.

By some accounts, the War Room's activities were far less innocuous than those described in the Washington Post. In his lawsuit on behalf of former Clinton lover Gennifer Flowers, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch charged that "Mrs. Clinton ... conceived of, ran, and used the War Room to smear, defame and harm perceived adversaries ..."

Could it be that illegal wiretapping, such as L.J. Davis experienced, was one of the methods the War Room used to "anticipate what stories reporters were working on," as the Washington Post so daintily put it? Could it be that cold-cocking journalists in hotel corridors was one of its techniques for "shaping" stories "before they were written?" We can only speculate.

Such speculation acquires a keener edge, however, when we consider some of the personnel whom Hillary recruited for her black operations.

The Chokehold

In his 1996 book, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," journalist David Brock notes that Hillary exerted her power chiefly through the White House counsel's office. "Hillary was the de facto [White House] counsel," he writes. "Through her control of the counsel's office, which functions as the president's in-house law firm, Hillary had a chokehold on the entire government."

In order to tighten her "chokehold," Hillary set up what Brock calls a "Shadow Counsel's office" – working parallel to the ordinary White House counsel's office, but answering directly to Hillary loyalist Harold McEwan Ickes (pronounced ICK-eez).

Ickes was well-suited to the task of heading this secretive operation. As a New York labor lawyer, Ickes had represented numerous corrupt unions controlled by the Gambino, Colombo, Genovese, Lucchese and other organized crime families. His work on behalf of gangsters and labor racketeers brought him perilously close to prosecution, but Ickes displayed a Houdini-like gift for evading the authorities. "There are more than a couple of prosecutors in this city who believe that the only thing separating Harold Ickes and a jail cell is his ability to go strong and silent in the face of tough questions," noted New York Post columnist Mike McAlary in 1993.

Ickes' personal loyalty to Hillary is impressive. He ran her successful Senate campaign in 2000 and continues serving her today as the Shadow Party's de facto CEO.

A former New Left militant during the '60s, Ickes travelled in 1965 to the Dominican Republic, where a junta of left-wing colonels was trying to restore deposed President Juan Bosch to power. Bosch was a socialist who had spent two years of his exile in Castro's revolutionary Cuba.

Fearful that the Dominican Republic would go the way of Cuba, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched 22,000 Marines to the island nation on April 29, 1965. After fierce fighting, the leftist colonels were beaten. The socialist Bosch stood for election on June 1, 1966, losing to the pro-American candidate Joaquin Balaguer, who took 56.3 percent of the vote.

Ickes' role in these events is obscure. In an Oct. 15, 1994, profile on Ickes, the Boston Globe stated:

[H]aving traveled to the Dominican Republic to help deposed leftist president Juan Bosch return to office, [Ickes] was present when Lyndon Johnson – citing a communist threat – dispatched the U.S. Marines to occupy the country and keep Bosch and his rebels from power. After touring Latin America, Ickes came home and joined the anti-war movement ..."

The Globe did not explain by what means Ickes sought to "help" Bosch and his leftist colonels "return to office." However, the episode suggests that Ickes' involvement with the far left went beyond the ordinary civil-rights activism and anti-Vietnam protests, which most of his journalistic profiles cite. Whether as a Mob lawyer or a covert participant in Latin American coups, Ickes has spent more than 40 years living and working in the company of killers.

Hillary's Private Eyes

A significant portion of the Shadow Team's operations were carried out by private investigators, among them: Terry Lenzner, founder and chairman of the powerful Washington, D.C., detective firm Investigative Group International; high-ticket San Francisco private eye Jack Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland; and Hollywood sleuth Anthony J. Pellicano.

Former congressional investigator Barbara Olson writes that, "In the political life of the Clintons, it was she [Hillary] who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists."

Hillary's detectives engaged in "a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public," former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998.

Hillary's secret police tend to be a tight-lipped bunch, professionally skilled at keeping a low profile. However, we know more about Anthony "The Pelican" Pellicano than about most Hillary operatives, thanks to his boastfulness and taste for the limelight. Pellicano's violent career as a private investigator reveals much about the sorts of qualifications Hillary sought in her Shadow Team.

In the January 1992 issue of GQ magazine, Pellicano boasted of the dirty work he had performed for his clients, including blackmail and physical assault. He claimed to have beaten one of his client's enemies with a baseball bat. "I'm an expert with a knife," said Pellicano. "I can shred your face with a knife."

FBI agents raided Pellicano's West Hollywood office on Nov. 22, 2002, and arrested him on federal weapons charges. In his office, they found gold, jewelry, and about $200,000 in cash – most of it bundled in $10,000 wrappers – thousands of pages of transcripts of illegal wiretaps; two handguns; and various explosive devices stored in safes, including two live hand grenades and a pile of C4 plastic explosive, complete with blasting cap and detonation cord.

C4 is a military explosive that cannot be sold legally to civilians. Pellicano had a surprisingly large quantity in his safe. "The explosive could easily be used to blow up a car, and was in fact strong enough to bring down an airplane," noted Special Agent Stanley Ornellas in a sworn affidavit.

The FBI raided Pellicano's office after an accomplice ratted him out. Ex-convict Alexander Proctor told the FBI that Pellicano had hired him to threaten and intimidate Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had been poking her nose a little too deeply into a feud between Mafia kingpins and actor Steven Seagal. It seems that Seagal's former friend and production partner, Julius R. Nasso, was tied to the Gambino crime family. When Seagal and Nasso quarreled, the dispute got ugly.

Rough stuff

On the morning of June 20, 2002, reporter Anita Busch approached her car, which was parked near her home. To her horror, she saw a bullet-hole in her windshield. A cardboard sign taped to the glass bore one word: "Stop." A dead fish with a long-stemmed rose in its mouth lay on the hood.

Busch took the hint. She immediately went into hiding, staying in a series of hotels at her paper's expense, while the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Deprtment's organized-crime division investigated.

A break in the case seemed to come when ex-convict Alexander Proctor spilled the beans to an undercover FBI informant. Proctor reportedly told the informant, on tape, that it was not the Mafia who were harassing Anita Busch – it was Steven Seagal! Proctor said that Seagal hired detective Anthony Pellicano to intimidate the woman into silence. Pellicano, in turn, had subcontracted Proctor to do the dirty work.

"He wanted to make it look like the Italians were putting the hit on her, so it wouldn't reflect on Seagal," Proctor told the informant. Proctor accused Pellicano of ordering him to "blow up" or set fire to Busch's car to frighten her. However, Proctor said he got cold feet and merely damaged the car, leaving the dead fish and "Stop" sign as calling cards.

A federal judge sentenced Pellicano to 30 months in prison for possession of the hand grenades and C4. Later, on June 17, 2005, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley charged him with conspiracy and making threats against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. He will likely face prosecution for illegal wiretapping.

Pellicano's 2002 arrest was big news in Hollywood. Article after article touted Pellicano as a "celebrity sleuth" and a "private detective to the stars," whose client list had included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Roseanne Barr, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson (whose chronic problem with child molestation charges provided Pellicano with plenty of damage-control work).

Despite the sensational coverage, few mainstream news organizations uttered the name of Pellicano's most famous client: Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano's Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine," reported NewsMax on Nov. 23, 2002."

A detailed, 1,680-word round-up of the Pellicano case published in the New York Times on Nov. 11, 2003 – a full year after his arrest – made no mention of Hillary's name, nor even hinted at Pellicano's White House connection. Only Internet media such as NewsMax.com focused relentlessly on his Clinton ties.

The omission was deliberate. Pellicano's involvement in Clinton damage-control operations – including his well-known efforts to discredit former Clinton lovers Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky – has been public knowledge for years, the details available to any journalist with a Nexis account.

The taint of violent criminality that infected Hillary's Shadow Team cannot be denied. Pellicano's arrest and conviction – not to mention Harold Ickes' Mob law practice – speak for themselves.

Less clear are some of the specific uses to which Hillary put her Shadow Team. Here, we must enter the realm of deduction and speculation – an endeavor of which Howard Dean and his fellow Democrats would surely approve – and one which leads us inexorably to that most perplexing of Clinton mysteries: the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.