The Clintons' sins of malice: Paul Sperry on monster lurking behind the 'Bubba mask'

WASHINGTON – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she forgives her husband's adulterous affairs because they were "sins of weakness," not "sins of malice."

But if Bill Clinton is merely a harmless, if hopeless, lady pleaser, why did eight of the ladies who allegedly made him weak fear him so?

The club of women who charge that the former president personally assaulted them or, through his "agents" or "people," threatened to do them or their families physical harm is a large one. Some are vague about the threats. Others are quite specific.

But a pattern is clear, not to mention disturbing: One after another, women have accused the New York senator's husband of being, at a minimum, a bully; at worst, a rapist. And all of them said they were afraid for their safety while he was in power.

Some also fear Hillary herself. She hired a private detective in Arkansas to investigate some of Bill's "bimbos," and some suspect she may have been behind much of the intimidation.

A former Miss America, she claims to have had a 1983 fling with then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton. She says she kept quiet about it during the 1992 campaign after getting threatening phone calls. The calls started again, she says, after she was subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case. "I was physically scared," she told the New York Post.

Gracen told the Toronto Sun in 1998 that Clinton is "a very dangerous man." She also said: "I've had to be very careful. There was a lot of pressure on family and friends; people were being staked out." She says the IRS audited her after she spoke out.

In his book "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," Michael Isikoff recounts how Gracen ran into Clinton in Hot Springs, Ark., when she was 21 and serving as Miss America. While doing a public service announcement there, then-Gov. Clinton pulled up in his state limo and offered her a ride.

According to Isikoff, Clinton invited Gracen to the apartment of one of his pals at the Quapaw Towers back in Little Rock.

"They had sex that night. It was rough sex," Isikoff said. "Clinton got so carried away that he bit her lip, Gracen told her friends."

Now turn to Jaunita Broaddrick's account of how Clinton, as Arkansas attorney general, raped her during an afternoon meeting in Little Rock in 1978.

"The second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. [She cries.] Just a minute," she told NBC News in 1999. "He starts to, um, bite on my lip and I tried to pull away from him. [More crying.] ... And then he forces me down on the bed."

Norma Rogers, a nurse and friend of Broaddrick, says she met her at the room shortly after the alleged rape. She noticed that Broaddrick's top lip was turned out and badly swollen. In fact, it was double its normal size.

The lip-biting detail – brought up by two women who don't know each other, don't live in the same place and haven't heard each other's stories – is compelling. It establishes an M.O.

Why didn't Broaddrick come forward earlier? "I was afraid that I would be destroyed like so many of the other women," she told NBC.

Three weeks before Clinton announced he would run for president, the then-governor called a shocked Broaddrick out of a meeting at a nursing home where she worked. He asked for her forgiveness, but she says he was really trying to take her temperature about the incident 13 years earlier, to see if she still cared and might decide to make it an issue for him.

Shortly before House impeachment investigators interviewed her in 1998, she said she noticed a man following her and that she found her home had been broken into, with only her answering machine tape stolen.

In 1992, she revealed her affair with Clinton – and had audio tapes to prove it.

"My home had been ransacked. I had received threats. My mother received threats. People were getting beaten. I was afraid for my life," she told CNN's Larry King in 1998.

She said her home had been broken into three times and ransacked the third. She told then-candidate Clinton about the burglaries.

"When I told Bill about it, he said, 'Do you think they were looking for something on us?'" Flowers said. "When he said it to me, there was just a tone in his voice. And I thought, you probably had this done to me."

Asked about the Flowers affair under oath in 1998, Clinton finally copped to it.

An ex-White House volunteer, Willey claims that on Nov. 29, 1993, she was groped by the president in the same Oval Office room where he later had consensual sex with intern Monica Lewinsky.

She kept quiet about it until Jones' lawyers subpoenaed her, too. About two months before her Jan. 11, 1997, deposition, Willey found "masses" of nails in three of her car tires. They were stuck in the same six-inch area in the center tread of both front tires.

"It didn't look like an accident," said the owner of the Richmond, Va.-area shop that replaced the damaged tires.

Shortly after, Willey's cat disappeared. And two days before her deposition, Willey told ABC News that a jogger stopped her and asked her about her tires, her cat and her children – by name. "Don't you get the message?" he allegedly asked.

Phone tapes record Lewinsky – at the time the White House was pressuring her to sign what turned out to be a false affidavit – intimating to friend Linda Tripp: "I would not cross those people for fear of my life." She also said: "My mother's big fear is that he's [Clinton's] going to send someone out to kill me."

As an employee of Clinton, like Jones was in Arkansas, Lewinsky was a key material witness in the Jones sexual-harassment case, since she would help Jones' lawyers establish a pattern of Clinton hitting on subordinates.

"Through this whole thing I've felt very scared," she told King in 1999. "I don't drive crazy, so I won't run off the road; and I'm not suicidal. So if something happened to me, there's a reason."

She claims Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey threatened to destroy her if she broke her silence about her affair with Clinton.

A former Miss Arkansas, she claims a Clinton operative tried to hush her up during the 1992 campaign about an affair with Clinton.

The man warned her, "They knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs," she told the London Sunday-Telegraph.

Tellingly, two other alleged Clinton paramours, Marsha Scott and Catherine Cornelius, stayed loyal to Clinton and escaped intimidation. They found cushy jobs in the White House.

Stories of Clinton's dark side, even violent nature, are hard to believe, coming off as he does in public as a big teddy bear, dispensing hugs and delivering southern-fried homilies with ease. He certainly knows how to turn on the aw-shucks charm.

But there is another side to the man, and I've seen it myself. Clinton came unglued inches from my face at a 1999 press picnic at the White House. I saw his volcanic temper explode first-hand, and from that point on I understood Broaddrick when she said of her encounter: "He was just a different person at that moment. He was just a vicious, awful person." There is indeed a monster lurking behind the Bubba mask.

Hillary also has a violent temper, which also does not comport with her super-composed public persona and pretty pastel pantsuits.

Hillary may have contributed to the pattern of threats and intimidation against Bill's mistresses, suggests Joyce Milton, author of "The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton."

She says she hired private detective Ivan Duda of Arkansas to track down background on Clinton's numerous affairs. Duda identified more than half a dozen women who were involved with Clinton, including one who worked on the support staff of the Rose Law Firm where Hillary was a partner.

"Hillary showed some emotion when he mentioned the Rose employee, Duda recalls, but she never expressed any anger toward her husband or indicated that she was thinking of leaving him," Milton wrote. "He assumed she wanted to be prepared for any charges that might come up in the course of the campaign."

So Hillary hired a private eye not to gather information about his predatory behavior for a divorce suit, but to cover it up and save both their political careers. It was damage control.

Broaddrick tells how Hillary squeezed her hand at a Democratic fund-raiser in what she says was a subtle-but-chilling warning to keep her mouth shut.

She wasn't about to let any "bimbo eruptions" derail her presidential ambitions. Bill was her ticket, still is (his gift for fund-raising is unparalleled, and his economic and fiscal legacy is her battle cry). Two for the price of one – in 2008 (if not 2004) as in 1996 and 1992. Partners in crime, er, politics for life.

Don't get me wrong. I believe Hillary when she says she "wanted to wring Bill's neck" in 1998. She was genuinely mad, but not because he cheated on her (yet again). It was because he got caught. DNA doesn't lie, and this time they couldn't either.

But Lewinsky was an isolated "sin of weakness," Hillary now spins – boys will be boys!

And the Clintons will be Clintons ... hopefully, for all of our sake, as far away from the White House as possible.

And what of the former intern turned Starbucks girl near the White House who was assassinated by a gang of killers at work while the vault holding $10,000 remained untouched?

Anyone recall her name?

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Starbucks 'Killer' Recants, New Questions Emerge in Intern's Death

Sunday January 23, 2000
When Carl Derek Cooper confessed last March to the July 1997 slayings of onetime Clinton intern Mary Caity Mahoney and two other workers at a Washington, DC Starbucks, suspicions of a White House connection quickly evaporated.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Cooper's trial. He recanted his confession, the primary piece of evidence police had linking him to the crime.

And if that wasn't enough to set off a fresh round of frenzied speculation, now a new investigation suggests Mahoney could have been an extremely inconvenient witness in the Monica Lewinsky case.

"I swear on my father's grave and my son's life that I didn't do Starbucks," Cooper told the FBI shortly after he admitted his guilt to local police, according to courtroom testimony reported by the Washington Post last week.

Now it emerges that Cooper told police several different stories about the Starbucks murders; once blaming an acquaintance for the killings, another time claiming he was merely a lookout.

But after 54 hours of questioning, Cooper's lawyer says he buckled.

"No matter how many times Mr. Cooper denied his involvement, they kept pressuring him. They kept pressuring him until they got what they wanted," attorney Steven Kirsch told US District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green, according to Thursday's Washington Times. Kirsch wants Green to rule the confession inadmissible at trial on the grounds it was coerced.

The motive in the Starbuck's massacre was supposedly robbery, though none of the $10,000 cash on hand was taken even after Mahoney and her two co-workers were felled by a fusillade of bullets. Casting further doubt on the robbery theory: five of the ten shots fired hit the former Clinton intern, including an execution bullet fired into the back of her head.

The same week Cooper recanted, new information emerged about Mahoney's background and her possible ties to the Monica Lewinsky case.

Author David M. Hoffman, who spent a year investigating Mahoney's murder, tells Globe Magazine's Tom Kuncl that the Starbucks massacre came just three days after Monica told Clinton she was going to tell her parents about their relationship.

According to Monica Clinton reacted angrily, telling her, "It's a crime to threaten the President."

Hoffman's claim is corroborated by the Starr Report.

"Monica took the threat seriously," Hoffman told Globe, "telling Linda Tripp that she feared for both their lives if her affair with Clinton ever became public."

"I don't want to wind up like Caity Mahoney," Monica is rumored to have told friends.

The Tripp tapes amply document Monica's fears for her own physical safety, featuring no fewer than four exchanges where the Clinton girlfriend voices sentiments such as: "I would not cross these people for fear of my life."

Hoffman claims to have uncovered new details about Mary Mahoney's time at the White House, which, if true, suggest the White House alum could have played a key role in the Clinton sex scandal despite her own homosexuality:

"For many months, Mary, an outspoken lesbian and good hearted den mother for other young White House interns, had been listening to tearful stories from them about alleged sexual passes made at them by Bill Clinton. She'd begun to tell others she planned to do something to help them."

Also, reports Hoffman, "a blockbuster piece of gossip swirling through Washington (at the time of Mahoney's death) was based on a columnist's blind item that a former White House intern whose name began with the letter M was about to reveal news of a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton."

Was it Mahoney, Clinton damage controllers no doubt wondered?

Meanwhile, the fuse had been lit on another White House sex bombshell just two days before the Starbucks killings. That's when cyberscribe Matt Drudge first reported that Clinton had put the moves on a then-unnamed White House volunteer.

It would be three more weeks till the world knew her name: Kathleen Willey. But by early July 1997 White House damage controllers knew they had a serious intern problem on their hands.

Carl Derek Cooper is scheduled to go on trial for Mary Caity Mahoney's murder on April 10.

D.C. Police Silent on Murder of Former White House Intern

On July 6, 1997, a brutal triple murder took place at a Starbucks restaurant in an upscale Georgetown neighborhood. The victims were Aaron Goodrich, 18; Emory Evans, 25; and Mary Caitrin Mahoney, 25. According to a July 13 Washington Post story, ballistics test indicated that 10 shots were fired from two different guns, sometime after 9:15 p.m. The Post story characterized the crime as an "execution-style" murder.
The murders were strange for several reasons. First, the restaurant's doors were locked when the victims were found. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, although nearly $4,000 was in the store at the time. Police initially discounted robbery as a motive. Second, the restaurant was in a neighborhood that has a very strong neighborhood watch program. None of Washington D.C.'s 397 murders in the previous year had occurred in or near Georgetown, which is rated safer than many other American cities such as Palm Springs and Oceanside, California and Boulder, Colorado. Third, neighbors heard no gunfire, indicating that the assailants might have used silencers. Finally, multiple murders are rare even in violent areas of Washington D.C.

Making the story particularly interesting is the fact that Mary Mahoney was shot as many as five times, according to some press reports. As the Washington Post reported: She was almost unrecognizable. Caity, the coffee shop assistant manager, was first shot in the chest, police said. She had raised her hands to her face, possibly to protect herself. A bullet pierced her hands and hit her face. Then she was shot in the back of the head.

Ms. Mahoney had been heavily involved in presidential politics, working on Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992. She served as a White House intern for a while in the first Clinton Administration, arranging White House tours. After finishing a degree in Women's Studies at Towson State University in Baltimore in 1995, she moved to Washington permanently, taking a job as an assistant manager at the Starbucks restaurant. There Ms. Mahoney's path seems to have crossed that of another White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. George Stephanopoulos said last week that Lewinsky used to hang out at the Starbucks where he lived.

These connections to Lewinsky and the White House have raised eyebrows in many quarters. The January 23, 1998 Strategic Weekly Briefings contained the following account attributed to anonymous sources:

When Monica Lewinsky first met with Vernon Jordan in November 1997 she told him she didn't want to end up like Caity Mahoney. Jordan professed not to know whom Lewinsky was referring to until she identified Mahoney as the former White House intern who was murdered last summer in a Starbucks. . . .

Police are apparently no nearer to solving the crime than they were in July of 1997. In a December 6 story the Washington Post reported that a police informant in the case had been beaten to death outside a row house in Southwest Washington. Police sent the informant into a crack house to purchase cocaine, hoping to find grounds to search the house and question the occupants about the Starbucks case. Three men were arrested in the beating death, but police found no connection to the Starbucks murders.

Efforts by the Washington Weekly to gain information from the D.C. police have been unsuccessful. The following exchange occurred on Thursday of last week with D.C. police detective Tony Patterson, who is in charge of the case:

QUESTION: May I ask you some questions?
PATTERSON: It depends. Which case?
QUESTION: About the Starbucks murder. May I ask you some questions?
PATTERSON: No, no. I can't discuss that case.
QUESTION: You can't discuss that case?
PATTERSON: Not right now.
QUESTION: Can you discuss it off the record?
PATTERSON: No.
QUESTION: You can't discuss your informant who was beaten to death?
PATTERSON: No, that's what I said. Too much has been released to the press already.
QUESTION: Can you discuss aspects of the case that would not affect your investigation?
PATTERSON: No sir.
QUESTION: You can't discuss anything? You can't describe the murder scene?
PATTERSON: That's already known.
QUESTION: It's known from press accounts, but what is not known so well is what you have to say.
PATTERSON: I have nothing else to say about it.

Efforts to contact Starbucks management were somewhat more fruitful. The Washington Weekly talked to Kenny Fried, a Starbucks spokesman on Friday.

QUESTION: I would like to get a statement from you about where the Washington D.C. murder case is at this point.
FRIED: We're working on getting the store reopened at this point.
QUESTION: What is the status of the case with the police?
FRIED: They're definitely working on it. They've not closed it. It's a high profile thing here. But, unfortunately, the people--we've never sent any statements out or anything like that. We're trying to open our store at this point, that's our concern. The store will reopen February 20th. In Washington this was the biggest story for two weeks. It was on the front page of every paper and on the newscasts morning till evening, so it was very heavily on the minds of the media here.
QUESTION: Do you know at this point if the police have a suspect or suspects in the case?
FRIED: We don't know anything about that.
QUESTION: I take it this was very unusual for the store. It was located in a very nice neighborhood in Georgetown, is that correct?
FRIED: Yes, it's a nice area with a national retailer and Starbucks never had anything like this happen in their history. And so it's just unusual and three young people were killed and so these factors together created a lot of attention.
QUESTION: The Washington Post characterized this as an execution-style murder. Do you have any comment on that?
FRIED: I'm dealing mostly with the reopening of the store, so I won't comment on that. We have not talked to media because we just want to get the store reopened. I can tell you that our CEO has announced that all future net profits for the life span of the store will go to a designated anti-violence organization. The particular organization will be announced when the store opens.
QUESTION: There is a lot of speculation going around on the internet about who could have had a motive for this killing. And this is being connected to the fact that this young lady was a former White House intern, and that rumors were circulating in Washington at this time that an intern was going to come forward with information about the President's activities in the White House. Have you heard stories like that?
FRIED: No, I haven't.
QUESTION: Do you have any comment on that?
FRIED: I'm not the right person to comment on that. I can see if there is anyone at headquarters who could comment on that.
QUESTION: Do you know of any apparent motive in this slaying?
FRIED: No, we don't, nothing. There was speculation that it was robbery.
QUESTION: Was there any indication from the crime scene that it was an attempted robbery?
FRIED: That's all a police matter.

The Washington Weekly continues to investigate this case. Anyone with information on the case is encouraged to contact the Washington Weekly by email at: editor@dolphin.gulf.net . Confidentiality is assured.

Published in the Feb. 9, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly. Copyright © 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)

Friday, February 11, 2000

Amnesty International USA Appeals to President Clinton and Attorney General Reno to Rescind Decision to Seek Death Penalty in "Starbucks" Case

WASHINGTON, DC -- Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today urged President Clinton to instruct Attorney General Janet Reno to reverse her decision mandating that prosecutors seek the death penalty against Carl Derek Cooper, the alleged gunman in the 1997 triple murder at a Georgetown Starbucks. The human rights watchdog made the request in a letter to the President and copied to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.

AIUSA charged that the decision demonstrated an offensive disregard for the will of the citizens of the District of Columbia, who as recently as 1992 resoundingly rejected restoring capital punishment in the city. In his letter, AIUSA Executive Director William F. Schulz urged President Clinton and Attorney General Reno to "pursue prosecutorial strategies that do not offend the ethical and moral standards chosen by the people of the District of Columbia."

Deputy Attorney General Holder's announcement Thursday that the Justice Department was reviewing whether there are racial disparities in the federal death penalty system directly affects the proceedings in the Starbucks case. "We would urge you to suspend all federal executions and capital indictments pending the completion of these inquiries," Dr. Schulz wrote the President.

Schulz said in the letter that comparing the Starbucks case with the 1995 McDonald's shooting in which three employees were killed illustrates the "arbitrariness and race-based factors driving capital litigation. The contrast between the two cases confirms the findings of Amnesty International's recent report, Killing With Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA, which documents the general suspension of equitable treatment by prosecutors and the courts when race issues are factors. We concluded that the odds for the application of the death penalty increase significantly when the victim is white and the accused is black or brown."

According to the Amnesty report, of the 500 prisoners executed between 1977 and 1998, more than 81 percent were convicted of the murder of a white, even though blacks and whites are the victims of homicide in almost equal numbers nationwide. The report also noted the odds of a death sentence in cases in which blacks killed whites has been shown to be as much as 11 times higher than in the murder of a black victim by a white person.

"To preserve respect for the law, citizens must have confidence that the scales of justice won't tip against any individual for any arbitrary reason ( especially the color of one's skin," Schulz said on the release of the letter. "Capital punishment erases the distinction between the criminal and a society purportedly guided by moral principles. A just society would abolish it."

Too Many Dots
Medium Rare
By Jim Rarey
4-12-3

Looking at today's news, this writer was struck by the reappearance of names of people who have been involved in cover-ups in the recent past. Like Yogi Berra's aphorism, its "deja vu all over again."

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with some snippets from this writer's articles over the past two years.

One of the most intriguing is the background of FBI agent Bradley Garrett. He was involved in a murder case the authorities considered a "run of the mill" robbery/murder. The people involved in that case would lead one to think it was a high national security case.

From this author's article, "CHANDRA, JOYCE AND MARY - R.I.P." of September 16, 2001:

"The murder of Mary Caitrin Mahoney and trial of her alleged killer, while probably not tied to the OKC bombing nevertheless involves an almost unbelievable cast of characters at a time large amounts of illegal campaign finance money were being raised and serious breaches of national security occurred.

Mahoney had landed an internship working in the office of the Secretary of Commerce, Norman Mineta (the Current Transportation Secretary) for Doris Matsui. Matsui is the wife of California Democrat Representative Robert Matsui. However, she had political connections of her own having served as a trustee of the California Economic Advisory Council with Public Official Executive Board members, Gray Davis, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

Matsui worked closely with John Huang, with the title of deputy assistant to President Clinton. Together they raised over $3 million in campaign funds from Asia and Asian-Americans. $1.2 million had to be returned because it came from corporations and non-citizens.

It was in this time frame that John Huang worked first in the Commerce Department and then transferred to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) but kept his high security clearance. Huang had been attending CIA briefings and then immediately went across the street to the Washington office of Jackson Stephens, the Arkansas broker who was a financial angel of Bill Clinton and placed phone calls to his Chinese handler in the Lippo Group in Indonesia.

Stephens was a partner with James Riady of the Lippo Group in the Worthen bank in Little Rock. The bank was alleged to have been involved in laundering CIA drug money. The bank (and Stephens) were involved (along with the Rose Law firm and partners Hillary Clinton, Web Hubbell and Vince Foster) in the takeover of First American in Washington D.C. by BCCI. Robert Bartlett, the then Editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal said he first starting keeping his eye on the Rose Law firm when he heard of its involvement with BCCI.

And there sat intern Mary Mahoney in the midst of all that activity. The Clinton's had another reason to keep an eye on her. Mary was an open lesbian and aggressive supporter of gay rights. She had become something of a "den mother" for younger interns who claimed to have suffered sexual harassment at the hands of the president (not including Monica) She had been threatening to do something about it.

Mary also held a part time job as assistant cashier at the local Starbucks coffee shop. In July of 1997, she and two other employees were gunned down around closing time by what police claimed was a robbery although no money was taken. Mahoney was shot five times. One of the shots was to the back of her head gangland execution style.

In March of the following year, FBI agent Bradley Garrett arrested Carl Derek Cooper for the three murders. After 54 hours of questioning by Garrett and another agent, Cooper signed a confession that he immediately repudiated as soon as he got to court. Garrett is currently in charge of the Chandra Levy "missing persons" case and was the lead agent on the Vince Foster death determined to be a "suicide."

Judge Joyce Hens Green set a trial date for April 10, 1999. This is the point at which the cast of characters becomes bizarre starting with Judge Green who was first appointed as a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

In the last year of President Reagan's second term, Green was appointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to serve a non-renewable seven-year term. That court deals exclusively with national security and with international terrorism, and involves approving applications for electronic surveillance. Judges on that court require the highest security clearance available. In 1990, then President George Herbert Walker Bush appointed Green presiding judge of that court and she handled all emergency matters during the remaining five years of her term.

Judge Green also presided over the BCCI trial that had resulted from indictments obtained by New York Assistant District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau's investigation was stopped when the FBI stepped in under the direction of Robert Meuller (currently the new FBI Director) and no further investigation ensued. Judge Green approved plea bargains that resulted in BCCI forfeiting its assets in the United States. Two defendants had been indicted, Roger Altman and Clark Clifford an influential power broker in the Democrat party. The two men had accepted the two top spots in First American after the BCCI takeover but claimed they had no idea BCCI was involved in the nearly nine years they functioned in those capacities. Altman was acquitted and Clifford never stood trial because of ill health.

Back to the Cooper trial. Before the trial even started, a controversy arose when Janet Reno announced she was going to seek the death penalty for Cooper. D.C. officials were furious claiming Reno was overstepping her bounds. The district had never asked for the death penalty in any murder case.

Reno held a hearing on the matter. At that hearing, defense attorney William Martin (not connected with the Cooper case) urged Reno to ask for the death penalty. Yes, that's the same Billy Martin who represented Monica Lewinski's mother, Marcia Lewis, and currently represents Chandra Levy's parents.

To complete the cast, Judge Green then appointed attorney Francis D. Carter to represent Cooper. Carter is the Frank Carter to whom Vernon Jordan took Monica Lewinski. Carter prepared the false affidavit for Monica's signature, which put her at risk for perjury when she later testified in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Monica escaped prosecution when she was granted immunity by independent counsel Ken Starr.

With Carter as his defense counsel, Cooper was convicted despite a weak circumstantial evidence case. There were, of course, no eyewitnesses and Cooper's fingerprints were not found at the murder scene. During his 54 hours of interrogation, Cooper had consistently denied the crime and volunteered several times to take a lie detector test. Most of the testimony against him was by FBI agent Garrett based on Garrett's representation of what Cooper had said during the interrogation. The questioning was not recorded or videotaped although another agent took notes.

One wonders at the array of a high-powered Washington judge with ties to the intelligence community and an attorney who barely escaped being disbarred (in another high profile case) in a case claimed to be a routine robbery murder case by a career criminal."

Garrett's name has surfaced again as one of the two questioners of Lee Malvo, the alleged teenage sniper. When Malvo was transferred from Maryland to Virginia, he underwent seven hours of interrogation by Garrett and Fairfax County detective June Boyle. Boyle had told Malvo he would get to see the attorney he had requested but first they wanted to ask a few questions about his background as "part of the booking process." Then followed the seven-hour interrogation.

Garrett has filed "summaries" of Malvo's answers (which were taped) purporting to confess to some of the shootings. However, it appears Malvo was responding to "hypotheticals " posed as to what the snipers may have done.

Much of Garrett's summary has been leaked to the press. Officials have been quoted as saying no harm has been done since the "confessions" will probably be suppressed by the court and "at least the public will know."

Two more names recently in the news were involved in the investigation of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen.

From Bojinka " The Dog That Didn't Bark" of June 18, 2002:

"Surely FBI terrorism expert John O'Neill would have known the details of Bojinka having investigated the 1993 WTC bombing and the plot to blow up 11 airliners. O'Neill's departure from the FBI was started when he tangled with the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen over the investigation of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. She banned him from Yemen. O'Neill's reputation was further stained when his briefcase containing classified documents went missing for several hours when he was called away to the telephone during a conference in Tampa, Florida. As a result of that unexplained incident, he was told he would not get a position in the National Security Agency (NSA) that he believed he had earned.

O'Neill became the Director of Public Safety at the WTC after he resigned and died mysteriously during the 9/11 attack. He had phoned his girlfriend after the first tower was hit to inform her he was safe."

When O'Neill was bounced from the Cole investigation, the search for the culprits effectively ended. The report of the navy admiral who headed the DOD investigation of the bombing concentrated on recommendations for improvements in security. It did not assess any blame. O'Neill later said he was removed because he was getting too close to foreign dignitaries. He had already had a run in with FBI Director Freeh over the free ride Saudi Arabia was getting in investigation of the bombings of the U.S. embassies.

The U.S. Ambassador to Yemen who squelched the Cole investigation is Barbara Bodine. She was just recently appointed by President Bush as a key player in Iraq's transitional government. She will effectively be the "Mayor of Baghdad" said one former high-ranking Senate official. She is to administer one of the three sectors in which Iraq will be divided. Hers is the central sector that includes Baghdad.

A Pentagon official who asked not to be identified, according to Washington reporter Jerry Sepe, said "Miss Bodine dismissed warnings of terrorist attacks in Yemen against U.S. ships and allowed the Cole to enter port at a reduced security level because she felt the value of showing a U.S. presence in Yemen outweighed the risks."

Sege also reports, "FBI executives and agents familiar with the Cole probe said Miss Bodine, as ambassador in Yemen, prevented the bureau from advancing its investigation into the bombing at a time when agents were beginning to focus on the Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden."

The admiral, that didn't want to know who bombed the Cole, and was at odds with O'Neill in the investigation, is Harold W. Gehman, Jr. He currently heads the investigation into the Columbia shuttle disaster. He is repeating his Cole "mandate" by only looking at improving methods and procedures and not trying to assess any blame.

We have previously reported on the makeup of the Commission appointed to investigate the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the earlier cover-ups in which many of that body have been involved.

It doesn't seem to make any difference whether a Republican or Democrat administration is in office, many of the same "old reliables" are called back into service to "investigate" high profile incidents when the public doesn't "need to know" all of the facts.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Permission is granted to reproduce this article in its entirety.

The author is a freelance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.

If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact the author at jimrarey@comcast.net.

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