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Voice Over: Now, from CBN: the selling of blood from Arkansas inmates. It was a program shut down, but it infected the innocent. So why did the blood keep flowing from Cummins Prison?
Steven Harvey:(sp?) [Lead Counsel for Canadian hemophiliacs] We want to know, from Bill Clinton on down, who was involved in these decisions.
Pat Robertson: Hello, and welcome to this edition of the 700 Club. I’m Pat Robertson.
Terry Neison (sp?): And I’m Terry Neison.
Pat: It starts in Arkansas and leads all the way to Canada. But the answer may be hidden in the Oval Office. A twisted trail of greed, political corruption and cover up, arson, and unbelievable negligence has led to the deaths of hundreds of people in Canada. CBN News brings us Part II of the explosive report on tainted blood, taken from disease-ridden inmates and sold in the Canadian Market.
snip
Lee Webb: As Congress returns from recess, a grass-roots group representing the hemophilia community, who suffer from AIDS or hepatitis C, is in Washington to hold their legislators feet to the fire.
Man with megaphone: What do we want?
Marchers: More money!
Man: When do we want it?
Marchers: Now!
Lee Ward: Members of the Committee for Ten Thousand converged on Capital Hill Wednesday to urge Congress to fully fund the Ricky Ray (sp?) Act that was signed into law last November. The law provides one-time payments of $100,000 to compensate hemophiliacs and their families, who have contracted hepatitis C or HIV through tainted blood products. The Committee says the government failed to take appropriate measures to screen the nation’s blood supply, or to warn recipients of the potential danger.
Unknown marcher: The federal government did not do their job in policing the pharmaceutical companies. And this could have been prevented. It’s time for the government to really face up to the fact that they didn’t do their job.
Lee Ward: The Committee estimates 10,000 hemophiliacs and their family members have been infected by tainted blood since 1988, and 5,000 have died. Stay with us. In our upcoming focus report we will reveal more on a tainted blood scandal in Canada with deadly connections to the state of Arkansas.
snip
Pat: We brought you a shocking story yesterday. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t some sort of spooky meanderings of a conspiratorial mind. This is based on a lawsuit. This is based on actual fact. This is based on the lives and the deaths of hundreds of Canadians, because diseased blood and dying Canadians (sic), and a link goes straight back to the prisons of Arkansas.. (sic) Here’s Lee Webb with today’s CBN News focus report. Lee.
Lee Webb: Part II of our CBN News special report, The Blood Trail. Yesterday we took you to Arkansas’ Cummins prison, and told you about a tainted blood scandal which dates back to the time when Bill Clinton was the Governor of that state. We also showed you the Canadian hemophiliacs who are now dying from plasma collected in Arkansas prisons. Today, indications the White House was tracking the scandal in the early ‘90’s. And the trail of crime committed by someone who intended to cover this story up. Here’s CBN senior reporter, Dale Hurd.
Dale Hurd: In 1970’s and ‘80’s, the Arkansas prison system under Bill Clinton’s watch was selling inmates’ blood plasma for big money. Official dollar figures are low – less than a million dollars per year. But some believe that based on the market price of plasma, the number of inmates, and how often they were allowed to give blood, it is likely the program generated several million dollars per year.
The program was run by an outside medical contractor, Health Management Associates, which was headed up by one of the Governor’s close friends. Health Management Associates had problems – a lot of them. An outside audit found that HMA was employing unlicensed medical staff. At least one doctor had been a drug addict. One inmate was allowed to give blood fifteen minutes before he died from kidney failure. Some inmates were paid for their plasma with drugs. Inmates say they were allowed to run the program with minimal and sometimes no supervision.
John Shock Most of the time you had just inmates running the place. You had three people that were sitting in the office with stuff in there that they had (sic). But most of the time you mostly had inmates, period, running it.
Dale Hurd: John Shock believes he contracted hepatitis C by donating prison plasma. It destroyed his first liver.
Unknown interviewer: How often could you bleed; how often could you give blood?
Shock: Legally, once a week. Now you could pay, or make arrangements for another inmate, because inmates did most of the paperwork, running stuff around there, you know, like that. [You could] get your name back on the list [and] go in there Saturday and Sunday.
Hurd: HMA was investigated in 1981, ’82, ’83, and ’86. In 1982 the Food and Drug Administration cited HMA for overbleeding inmates, bad record-keeping, and allowing medically unqualified inmates to bleed. It shut down the bleeding center at Cummins prison after plasma infected with hepatitis B was shipped to Canada and given to hemophiliacs. It was shut down again in 1986. But that wasn’t the end of the bleeding program, thanks to the intervention of the Arkansas Governor. And more tainted prison plasma from Arkansas was distributed in Canada, the U.S., and other nations.
Some believe Bill Clinton organized a payoff scheme to keep a plasma operation in business that will cause the deaths of an estimated 1000 Canadians. It’s part of a larger public health catastrophe in which 42,000 Canadians are believed to be infected with hepatitis C, and thousands more with HIV, thanks to poorly-screened plasma in Canada.
The White House dismisses allegations that then-Governor Clinton knew about the tainted blood. Yet there’s one indication that someone in the White House did. In January Linda Tripp was giving her sworn deposition about FBI files in the White House, when she was asked about encrypted files on the computer of Deborah Gorham, secretary of the late-Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster. In her answer she mentioned something that she obviously thought was strange.
Linda Tripp: The word ‘encrypted’ if I used it at all, did not have to do with FBI files. It had to do with another issue, on Deb Gorham’s machine, when it was located in the West Wing, prior to its being moved. And, what I had told Ruthann Goldberg at the time was, that it had been alarming to me that when I tried to enter data from a caller that I was working with, a tainted blood issue, that every time I entered a word that had to do with this particular issue, it would flash up either the word ‘encrypted’ or password required, or something to indicate the file was locked. [note: see p. 662 of Tripp’s deposition to Judicial Watch, January 13, 1999. Available at Judicial Watch web site.
Hurd: It could mean White House officials were tracking the tainted blood scandal, because they knew it could seriously damage Bill Clinton. It is what some call the Blood Trail.
The blood trail leads from Arkansas all the way to Canada, where a story most Americans have never heard of has dominated the front pages. Because here it involves billions of dollars in lawsuits and political fortunes as well. The scandal threatens to ruin the political career of the man dubbed as the next Prime Minister of Canada – liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin.
Paul Martin served on the board of directors for a company that helped to distribute the prison plasma. His problems only worsened when it was alleged the Canadian government shredded documents and erased tapes to hide his role.
Canada’s Krever Commission has documented the Arkansas blood connection, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have launched a massive investigation in Canada and the U.S., into what caused a national health catastrophe. But in Washington it’s a different story. The Justice department, which did not return our calls, is not believed to have shown any interest in the Arkansas prison plasma scandal.
The man who blew the whistle on the blood program is Michael Galster. Galster worked at Cummins prison, and discovered that sick inmates were giving blood without being tested.
Interviewer: At your February press conference you called on the Justice Department to look into this, did you not?
Galster: Certainly.
Interviewer: Have you heard from them?
Galster: Absolutely not. We’ve been totally ignored.
Hurd: But there’s a trail of crime to show that parties in Canada or the U.S., or both, want to make sure this story goes away. In 1993, just months after an official inquiry into the blood scandal was launched in Canada, tainted blood files in the offices of the Red Cross in Quebec City burned in an arson fire.
This year, three months after Galster’s press conference at the National Press Club, came two more criminal acts. On the same night, May 19, just hours apart, professional criminals struck in Montreal and in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In Montreal, a thief entered the offices of the Quebec Hemophilia Society, stealing files on the blood scandal from this box, and taking a computer and phone. Pierre Demaret(sp?) is the society’s Executive Director.
Pierre Demaret:(sp?) Nothing now will surprise me. I don’t even want to be paranoid about this whole issue. But we never know. I cannot say for a fact that it was related to the blood scandal. But if it is, somebody was really afraid of something.
Hurd: And just a few hours later, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an arsonist burned down most of Michael Galster’s prosthetics clinic.
Galster: This that is the parking lot now, was about 4000 sq. ft. of our laboratory space, our offices and exams rooms, and computers. It was all completely engulfed in flames when I got here on the evening of the 19th, or the early morning of the 20th. The fire trucks were pumping water into it, and by early the next morning we only had a brick shell of what had originally been our business for 22 years.
Hurd: Then, in July a laptop computer was stolen. It belonged to the lawyer who was investigating Bill Clinton’s role in the tainted blood scandal.
Linda Tripp said there were encrypted blood files on the computer of Vince Foster’s secretary. In July of 1993, Foster’s body was found in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, just outside of Washington, in what was officially ruled a suicide. During the time that Foster died (sic), a commons committee in the Canadian Parliament had called for a major public inquiry into how Canada’s blood supply became so contaminated. And Foster was reported to be very upset about the issue.
Galster says that when Foster worked in Arkansas, he approached Galster in the legal role of defending Health Management Associates, the company that ran the prison blood program. Foster asked Galster to help bail HMA out of a malpractice suit. Galster thinks Foster was still cleaning up HMA’s messes after he went to the White House. When the scandal exploded in Canada, Galster believes the blood trail caught up with Foster.
Tainted blood scandals have rocked several nations. Some have forced official to apologize. Others have sent officials to jail. Now it could be America’s turn. The surviving Canadian hemophiliacs are preparing a $5 billion lawsuit against those responsible in the United States. That would most certainly include the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, which had a similar blood program. The FDA may also be sued. And the lead counsel for the hemophiliacs, Steven Harvey, will seek a deposition from Bill Clinton on his role in the program.
Steven Harvey: We want to know from Bill Clinton on down, who was involved in these decisions, how decisions were made, what information they had, and why it is that Cummins was allowed to continue as a blood source, even after all the dangers became obvious.
Hurd: Arkansas prison plasma was not only shipped to Canada, it was shipped around the world, and to the U.S. It is not known how much of it was tainted, but the Arkansas prison plasma program continued through the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, until 1994. Some fear thousands died because of it.
Galster: If Mr. Clinton, as Governor during those years, had not allowed this contract to be renewed, and had stopped it, as he was warned to do, thousands of lives would have been saved.
Hurd: The Canadian tainted blood victims and family members we talked to all hold Bill Clinton at least partially responsible. Some want retribution. Others would simply like an apology.
Interviewer: Does Bill Clinton need to say that he’s sorry?
Denise Orieux: Oh, absolutely. Bill Clinton could say to me tomorrow "I didn’t really know what was going on, and I’m sorry this happened," and I’d accept that. I’m sure Mr. Clinton wasn’t going out of his way to kill people. But he is capable of saying, "I made a mistake, and I’m sorry."
James Krepner: This is not a proud moment in Arkansas history and it's certainly not a proud moment in Bill Clinton's history. The reality is he allowed a program to function, to export blood,
which killed many of my friends here in Canada.
Michael McCarthy: I'd like Bill Clinton to spend one day in my shoes, or one of my friends shoes
who are dying from HIV or Hep C, and realize the ramifications of his inability to act in a safe and responsible manner as Governor of Arkansas when he could have shut down this program. People will go to their graves
knowing that you paid a part in their death. So how do you sleep at night now, Bill?
Lee Webb: Dale Hurd joins us now with more on this incredible story. Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas during this time, but Dale, do we have any idea how much he knew about this scandal?
Dale Hurd: We don’t know specifically, because no one is able to find the documents from his time as Governor. There are reported to be 400 cases of documents, his papers from his time as Governor in Little Rock, and no one seems to know where they are. We do know this: from the press clippings at the time, and the reports that were addressed to the Governor, he knew that the medical program at Cummins was dangerous, it was out of control. So if he cared at all about his job, he had to know that the plasma program was at least risky, if not reckless. But it’s clear from what we saw that safety was not a first priority with this plasma program, it was about money.
Webb: Dale, why aren’t journalists covering this story?
Hurd: Well, as a matter of fact, CNN did do this story in an investigative piece – CNN and Time – on that program. And they managed to do it without a single mention of Bill Clinton, which I found interesting. Michael Galster tells me that Dateline NBC sent a week with him, filming, preparing a big piece on this. Galster says NBC told him they killed the story after they were paid a visit by a committee from the FDA. We decided to do this story in May, after the break-in and the arson fire, because at that point it was clear that there was something to this story – someone was trying to hide something. If there’s nothing to this story, why did Michael Galster get death threats for weeks and months before his business was finally burned down?
Webb: Important questions. Thank you, Dale, for this incredible story. As Dale mentioned, this is not a big story in terms of journalism here, Pat, but it is a huge story in Canada.
Pat: I want to say to our audience that everything that comes out on our sitting President or his administration in Arkansas, and some of the corruption, the word is "This is nothing but part of a right-wing conspiracy, these right-wing crazies are at it again." The people who are investigating this tainted blood are from the very power centers of the Government of Canada. And the people who are suing are folks who actually got injured by this program. And if it leads to the White House, so be it.
But I think that as Senator Lott said yesterday, we need a new Attorney General. She has failed miserably. She has not failed her employer, Bill Clinton, her boss. She’s done an admirable job of covering up just about everything they've done.
But she has failed the American people and basically she works for the American people, not the Clinton Administration. It’s high time that we get a clean Attorney General in there who will get to the bottom of some of these things. This is a terrible, terrible, scandal.
The Bible says your sins will find you out. Sooner or later the things that have been going on have to come to the surface. But you ask yourself, who is it that is engaged in killing people? Who is engaged in committing acts of arson in two countries? This is a pretty sophisticated group of people.
What happened to Vince Foster? They say "Well, he levitated his body about 200 feet (sic) and then fell in a recumbent position on the ground after he shot himself." This is nonsense.
Terry: the whole thing is mind-boggling.
Pat: But who is doing this? It is an incredible, shadowy network that wants to destroy evidence at all costs. We had a reporter threatened out there. And later, in Washington, his family was threatened.
This is not playtime. These people do kill people. And they do set fire to things. I remember the Parks killing. We went out to the place where he was gunned down by five or six men, coming off an exit to an interstate. His car was blocked and he [had] six bullets in him, as I recall. [Garbled comment]
Terry: We have a fact sheet. This has been an incredible story. If you are interested in having some of the facts, this fact sheet is called "Tainted Blood: Who’s Behind its Rapid Flow?" And, of course, it overviews all you have heard in these two reports, and there are some additional resources for you at the bottom of the page. If you’d like this it’s free for you – 1-800-759-0700. Just say I’d like today’s fact sheet. We’ll get it out to you right away.
end of tainted blood story
I can only post and reply to my account from my laptop, which is very small and hard to use. So I'm signing off.
Good luck bloodhounds.
Thanks so much from all of us that wouldn't have had access to this if it hadn't been for your efforts.
Bump for the hounds! OWWWWOOOH (simulated bloodhound howl)
Pat: But who is doing this? It is an incredible, shadowy network that wants to destroy evidence at all costs. We had a
reporter threatened out there. And later, in Washington, his family was threatened.
Threatened twice, no less. They meant for the threat to stick and be taken seriously.
Today's program can be viewed via internet
Part II of CBN's print version, which others have posted on FR also, is available
Nice to see your name again, Wes. Thanks for posting it- I rarely turn on the one-eye [The one with incessant commercials and mental drool posing as 'entertainment'.].
Thanks for doing the transcription. Big help! One gets the visual impact by watching, then we get to go back over the words in print here, in case we missed anything.
Per your wish for corrections, the attorney is David, not Steven, Harvey. We should check that story about the inmate dying 15 minutes after giving blood. I have a recollection that he just got stuck for a blood test, not a plasma draw.
Part II was much better. Part I was a waste of videotape, but Part II was much better.
Bttt.
> We should check that story about the inmate dying 15
minutes after giving blood.
" We drew blood from him 15 minutes before he died and that, of course, did show some problems,
but we had no reason to suspect renal problems before then."
Apparently, it was a kidney test and probably not
a plasma draw as you surmised. I should have included
the preceding paragraph:
Oops. I guess I did include both paragraphs in the first place.
The phrasing is decidedly ambiguous, but the headline suggests that it was a plasma donation, and the phrase "we drew blood" does not require us to believe otherwise. Prior testing could have been any time.
I'll go with a plasma draw after all. In that case, we wonder mightily what killed the patient? CJ, any help on this?
Um, I put that headline in brackets because I wrote it. The original
headline wasn't available in the database.
Thank you Phelanw! And a well deserved BLOODY BUMP!
As greedy for money as these people are, I wouldn't put it past them to draw blood from deceased prisoners and sell it all. Larger quantities when you can get every drop!
Another thing I hadn't heard before, they expanded into the prison hospital......... couldn't stand to see a $ fly by, could they.
Hey Wallaby, have another cup of coffee. :-}
> Um, I put that headline in brackets because I wrote it.
Well, that settles it. We agree.
"We had a reporter threatened out
there. And later, in Washington, his family was threatened."
So the Clinton Crime Cabal is still in the "wet" business, eh? More power to Pat and CBN!
A big bump and a drip!
Just bumping around on the blood threads ... regards!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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Posted for educational purposes and discussion only. All errors are mine.
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here
here
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To: T'wit"Dr. Henderson said the medical staff had treated Benton for a variety of medical problems but that
tests of his kidneys did not show any problems.
("[Inmate Plasma Donor Dies; Clinton Orders Investigation
of Health Management Associates],
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
January 19, 1986)
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To: T'wit
Dr. Henderson said the medical staff had treated Benton for a variety of medical problems but that
tests of his kidneys did not show any problems.
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