Posted on 12/28/2005 2:51:43 AM PST by Mia T
F A C T O R 8: THE ARKANSAS PRISON BLOOD SCANDAL
(... or how can Hollywood support a clinton, Mr. Gere?)

thanx for heads up :)
You're welcome Mia T.
Been following this issue for years.
So, how is the release of this film being handled? Is there any advertising budget? How can I get a copy?
The 'sanitized' version of the blood scandal...where the VRWC is to blame.
Those who are unfamiliar ( or whose memory has been dimmed by the passage of time ) with this grim tale of corruption, crime, and cronyism really need to read every article, and follow every link, in the database. You will have trouble believing what you are reading.
Note well the recurrence of names I regard as "FReepers of Legend," Budge, T'wit, Clive, askel5, adanC, Wallaby, to name a few, who did their best to track and publicize this little horror.
"I'd like to see it before I declare the film to be well-balanced, though, given all the crap that usually comes out of Hollywood."
A good policy, but is this film out of Hollyweird?
I applaud these efforts, but another one I'd like to see is to get recognition for vets who got Hep C in connection with their military service.
(Full disclosure: eye R wun.)
Richard Gere stunned fellow liberals Monday by suggesting that President Bush is doing a better job of fighting AIDS than President Bill Clinton did. Introduced by Sharon Stone at a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the "Chicago" star hailed Bush for his State of the Union proposal to contribute $15 billion toward the AIDS battle in Africa and the Caribbean. Gere then addressed the track record of Bush's predecessor in the White House. "I'm sorry, Sen. [Hillary] Clinton, but your husband did nothing about AIDS for eight years," Gere said. GERE TAKES ON BILL, NY Daily News | 2/5/03 They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted". Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered. Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected...
bill clinton, State of Union Speech, January 27, 2000 Among the comments clinton made in presence of Secret Service agents: After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, however, clinton toned down his rhetoric and behavior in front of his Secret Service agents, but those who guarded the president say enough of them saw and heard things which could be damaging to clinton. Turnover In clinton's Secret Service Detail 'Highest That Anyone Can Remember' Why does the press continue to ignore the Juanita Broaddrick story?
To wit: A proven felon and utter reprobate can remain president; clinton can be a failed human being but a good president. (Interesting, prescient audio on this.) The error in these statements arises, says Steele, from the belief that virtuousness is separate from personal responsibility so that one's virtuousness as an individual is determined by one's political positions on issues rather than on whether or not in one's personal life there is a consistency and a responsibility. If mere identification with good policies is what makes one virtuous then those policies become, what Steele calls, iconographic, that is to say they just represent virtuousness. They don't necessarily do virtuous things. If clinton's semantic parsing strips meaning from our words, clinton's iconographic policies strip meaning from our society, systematically deconstructing our society as a democracy. . . I would take Shelby Steele's thesis one step further. I maintain that iconographic policy functions like a placebo, producing a real, physiological and social effects. The placebo effect is, after all, the brain's triumph over reality. Expectation alone can produce powerful physiological results. The placebo effect was, at one time, an evolutionary advantage: act now, think later clinton will dispense sugar pills (or bombs) at the drop of a high-heeled shoe... or at the hint of high treason... clinton's charlatanry mimics that of primitive medicine. Through the 1940s, doctors had little effective medicine to offer so they deliberately attempted to induce the placebo response. The efficaciousness of today's medicines does not diminish the power of the placebo. A recent review of placebo-controlled studies found that placebos and genuine treatments are often equally effective. If you expect to get better, you will. Which brings me back to the original question: Can clinton be a failed human being but a good president? Clearly he cannot. These two propositions are mutually exclusive. clinton's fundamental failure is a complete lack of integrity. He has violated his covenant with the American people. Because clinton has destroyed his moral authority as a leader, he can no longer function even as a quack; the placebo effect is gone. And so the Placebo President must now go, too. September 11 changed a lot of things for me, Bill [O'Reilly]. I will say this, before September 11, I was definitely mildly myopic in terms of my political agenda. If you were Democrat you were probably right, and if you were a Republican you were probably wrong. Everything changed for me that day... My entire worldview changed. If you would have told me September 9 that I would have been at the world series game filming George Bush throwing out the first pitch with my 6-year-old son crying, I never would have believed you, but I was. Because my whole worldview changed. COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

he placebo effect immediately came to mind as I listened to Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, debunk the following pernicious spin intended to save clinton.
Steele's contention is that this compartmentalization, rather than being the amazing advantage the clintons would have us believe, in fact, spills toxicity into, corrupts, the culture.
bill clinton is the paradigmatic Placebo President. Placebo is Latin for "I shall please." And please he does doling out sham treatments, iconographs, with abandon. To please, to placate, to numb, to deflect. Ultimately to showcase his imagined virtue. Or to confute his genuine vice.
(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU! FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME!
I found another Freeper friend -- probably long lapsed -- on the film's web site, but think it best not to give any hints.
My kind regards to you, T'wit.
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For more than two decades, the Arkansas prison system profited from selling blood plasma from inmates infected with viral hepatitis and AIDS. Thousands of unwitting victims who received transfusions of a product called Factor 8 made from this blood died as a result. Follow along as filmmaker Kelly Duda uncovers the tragedy that many consider a crime. Through exclusive interviews and key documents as well as never-before-seen footage, he builds a formidable case that cries out to be heard. See in-depth interviews with a wide variety of players including: victims in Canada who contracted the diseases, state prison officials, former employees, high-ranking Arkansas politicians, and inmate donors, all of which paint a horrifying portrait of what happened. Why did the state of Arkansas and its prison system risk selling inmates’ blood for so long and how was it able to continue? Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal is an unsettling look at the complex issues surrounding prison corruption, blood safety and government oversight. This feature length documentary takes the viewer into the underbelly of the good ole boy South, and, like a Grisham novel, delivers disturbing subplots of continued danger, amazing coincidences and a possible conspiracy. At the heart of the documentary is one reporter’s dogged search for the truth. He discovers that his home state knew it was dealing a dangerous product, yet put profits over public safety while federal regulators looked the other way. Charges of cronyism and cover-up reach all the way to the administration of then-Gov. Bill Clinton. And, years before he would assume higher office, the question of “what did he know and when did he know it” comes into play. Add death threats, burglary, and a murder to the story and a suspected campaign of fear and intimidation surfaces lending explanation to how this story was kept quiet for so long. Even now, families are still grieving. People are still dying. Around the world major classaction lawsuits have been filed and criminal investigations are underway. While the rest of the globe looks to America for answers, the story remains largely untold and no one has ever been held accountable. Factor 8 is one citizen’s attempt to set that right.
Profile In late 1998, when Mark Kennedy of the Ottawa Citizen used Kelly Duda’s investigative work to break the Canada-Arkansas angle of the tainted blood story internationally, Duda had no idea how much hard work still lay ahead. It would take more than seven years for the whole story to be told. During this time, Kelly was followed, sued, burglarized, his tires slashed and his rear window smashed. Early coverage in the Canadian press, The Economist, Salon, Investor’s Business Daily and other media outlets all can be traced back to the muckraking efforts of this one man. Kelly has worked with CNN, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) and APTV (Associated Press Television) in their coverage of the use of tainted prison plasma in blood products. He was also part of the team for Fuji-TV that produced The Hepatitis C Epidemic: A 15-Year Government Cover-up. This program won a George Foster Peabody Award in 2003 and was watched by more than 12 million viewers in Japan. Recently, Kelly was a consultant in two major class-action lawsuits in Europe and Japan where plasma from Arkansas’ prison system appeared. He is actively assisting efforts in Canada to compensate all hepatitis C victims of tainted blood, and assisting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in its investigation of the Arkansas prison plasma sales. He has also been in talks with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI about a possible investigation in the United States. Kelly was involved in selecting questions put forth in a Senate inquiry on tainted blood in Australia. Evidence he uncovered linking Arkansas prison plasma to its use in the U.K. was presented to the Queen’s Council in Britain’s High Court and to the Ministry of Health. This information is also in the hands of the European Parliament in Brussels. Previously, Kelly was as a legal researcher for several major law fi rms in the San Francisco Bay area and worked on various independent fi lm projects. Most recently, he was the “go-to” contact in Arkansas for controversial filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s (Uncovered: The War on Iraq) new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Kelly Duda is an Arkansas native. He received his bachelor’s degree in Film Studies & Broadcasting and Political Science from California State University, San José, and attended the university’s MBA program, with an emphasis in marketing. Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal is Kelly Duda’s first feature-length documentary film. It has taken more than five years to make.
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There may yet BE a real Hollywood make of the story. I do not have any definite news for you about that, alas.
Before they had their falling out, Mike used to call Kelly one gutsy investigator, and he'd still say so. Kelly was certainly that! I went with the two of them on a mission to pick up a key document. A former legislator had found it in his garage; apparently all other copies had been rounded up and destroyed.
It was scary poking around the backwoods of Clintonista Arkansas in those days. Mike is a gun buff and he was packing, big time :-) Kelly -- unarmed -- made the pick-up.
... which Linda Bloodworth-Thomason would aptly write and produce....
see post 13
clinton Legacy Bump!
^
ping
I'm wondering, do you remember, and/or is it true ....... that a few years ago Congress, at the very end of the year, snuck into the budget an amount of (hush) money for the people of Canada who were sickened or killed by the selling of that Arkansas tainted blood?
We "Bloodhounds" posted upwards of 600 articles on the contaminated blood story. Dig around and see what you can find; that's the best way to catch up on all this.
Mike Galster owns the movie rights. One hopes he could do better than the Thomasons :-)
Good find!
Canadians have been warring for years about it. A compensation package for victims was passed but apparently not delivered, or was too small. (One or another of our Canadian friends will know this story better than I.) The Canadian Red Cross had to offer a settlement to keep from going bankrupt in lawsuits (its own blood agency did go bankrupt many years ago).
Hey, BigM, check in here and help with this info, my memory is a bit dusty :-)
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"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," Clinton said during a White House ceremony on Jan. 26. Thomason reportedly feels the president actually flubbed one of the lines. The president wasn't supposed to refer to Lewinsky as "that woman." [It's not the best of timing to reveal one's misogynistic mindset during one's sexual harassment trial, is it Harry?] Sources have told CNN that Thomason can thank a July New Yorker magazine article about the Lewinsky image-managing machine for his grand jury appearance. Apparently it raised a number of questions for prosecutors, including did he have any telling conversations with his old friend, the president, some reportedly in the wee hours of the morning walking the grounds of the White House? Thomason is the producer of such television series as "Designing Women" and "Hearts Afire." In the past Thomason has taken an active role as image consultant for his friends from Arkansas. He and his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, produced the famous "Man From Hope" video that introduced Clinton to a nationwide audience in 1992. He also orchestrated the Clintons' New York walk into the 1992 Democratic convention, and was also influential in choreographing the 1996 Chicago convention. Thomason's name has also come up in connection to the infamous firings of White House travel office personnel. |
bloodworth fyi
ping
Interesting find. I don't think it's politics, though. Kelly is hungry to break into film-making. This contact would be a chance to network a bit and advance his career.
I can visualize a campaign ad series featuring victims and family survivors of victims of the clintons' tainted blood....
Yes ......... that would hit home to the voters who generally only feel (rather than thinking).
bttt
If he did a good job, more power to him. I'll give him the loudest cheer. But I know something about the footage he had on hand and I'll reserve my comments until I see what he did with it.
BTTT. Thanks.
My sense is that regardless of any political leanings, he is pure on this. Even if this is the case, he still has to protect the product from being infected by clinton operatives.
bump
What do you know about the footage?
thx :)
thx :)
I remember Kelly as apolitical, but yes, he will be pure on this. It was his footage and he will guard it.
Do you have a section on this stuff?
RE: FBI FILES
*When and how did it become apparent that 1,000 (or so) FBI files had gone missing during Clintons first term?
*If so, was there ever an accurate tally of the number of files and whos files they were?
*Was it ever actually determined where they went?
*Were they ever actually returned?
*Does anyone know who saw them while they were missing?
*Does anyone know where were they kept?
*Were copies of any or all of them made?
I know two people who have seen what he had back when, and I know their views about it. I don't believe it would be proper to say any more than that. I've seen a little of it, but nothing worth mention.
Besides, we don't really know what's in this movie. Kelly may have added new footage, or changed things in other ways. We'll just have to see what he's got when we are able to.

Production Notes
It may sound sensational, but I assure you its true. In the process of making Factor 8, I received strange phone calls, I was followed, my house was broken into, my tires slashed, and sensitive information -- including my personal notes -- mysteriously appeared on the Internet. I also had a gun pointed at the back of my head, there was a murder, and a key inmate informant was whisked out of state and put into isolation.
When I went looking for the governors papers of Bill Clinton, to find state documents relevant to my investigation, I was told that 4,000 boxes had been hidden away in private storage and could not be found.
When I went to the Arkansas State Health Department to request records regarding disease rates at the prison and anything about the plasma program, I was stonewalled. I actually had to sue the state agency just to get access to its files that by law are suppose to be a matter of public record.
When I went to the Arkansas State Police Headquarters key documents had disappeared.
When complete strangers showed up out of the blue asking me what I was doing and with whom did I work for, I had to ask myself, whats going on here?
One thing is for certain, if I had a dollar for every time someone (in the past 7 years Ive been investigating this story) told me to be careful! I could have paid my rent several times over.
Then in January 2004, I was sued, and shortly before Factor 8 was to screen in Park City, Utah, a federal Judge blocked my premiere. The case was eventually dismissed, but not without costing me two more years of my life and a lot of heartache. ... Not exactly what I expected to happen to me in my home state.
Now victims around the world are asking me for information. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have talked to me about its investigation into the Arkansas shipments, and so has the U.S. Department of Justice about the possibility of its own investigation. I am working with activists in the U.K. pushing for a criminal investigation there, and with Congressmen in Japan and with the major media in Australia regarding their questions about shipments of tainted Arkansas prison plasma. Yet, despite global interest, few Americans know of this travesty.
bttt
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The CLINTONS' refusing 3 Free Offers from the Sudan during the 1990's to give us our No. 1 terrorist enemy OSAMA bin LADEN on a silver platter before he could hit us real hard here at home =
911 Lifesaving Hero RICK RESCORLA, ..R.I.P.
http://www.strategyzoneonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24361
During the Vietnam War long, long ago...
...the CLINTONS were actively supporting our then No. 1 terrorist enemy, Communist North Vietnam Dictator HO CHI MINH, against Freedom for a then Free South Vietnam.
Nothing has changed, as the song goes,
...EVEN NOW..!!!
Signed:.."ALOHA RONNIE" Guyer
Fellow Battle of IA DRANG-1965 Veteran of one RICK RESCORLA
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_set1.htm
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_collection.htm
(IA DRANG-1965 Photo Collection)
.
thanx :)
"snuck into the budget an amount of (hush) money for the people of Canada who were sickened or killed by the selling of that Arkansas tainted blood"
I don't know, but surely those victims were due some compensation.
I propose seizing all assets and attaching all future earnings of Slick Willy and his husband, and using that to start a fund.
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