The SPOTLIGHT September 7, 1998

GINGRICH: LAW BE DAMNED; BILL STAYS

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) May be the president's closest ally in Washington. Gingrich told The Washington Post Clinton should stay in office unless Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr provides "a pattern of felonies."

Why would a Republican leader protect a Democratic president, you ask? Politics pure and simple. The GOP, and possibly the House speaker himself, would rather run against a weakened image of Bill Clinton in 2000, than face Al Gore guiding a strong economy.

Fortunately, politics played less of a role in the writing of the Constitution than it does tody. Art. II, Sec. R is straightforward. It states:
"The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Notice the Founding Fathers did not leave it up to the House speaker as to who he would bring impeachment proceedings against not for what specific purposes. This speaker may not consider perjury, obstruction of justice or a first degree sexual abuse to impeachable offense, but the Constitution does. It's not a judgment call.

If the facts show the president engaged in any of these activities in regards to the Lewinsky affair, the House is obliged to recommend impeachment proceedings to the Senate.

The way it works is the independent counsel investigates and provides a report to the House which refers it to the Judiciary Committee. Committee members will probably secretly review the information and make a recommendation to the House. If the House votes to impeach, i.e. bring charges, the information is given to the Senate for a trial. Andrew Johnson is the only president to be impeached. The Senate did not find enough evidence to remove him from office.

Starr was appointed to investigate the Whitewater land deal in 1994. Since then 14 individuals associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton have either pleaded guilty of been convicted. The list includes Clinton's predecessor as governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker, and Webster Hubbell, who was Clinton's No. 3 man at the Justice Department.

Several webs have been woven out of the initial investigation. One of these was sexual harassment charges brought by a former employee of Arkansas, Paula Jones, against Clinton. Mrs. Jones's depositions brought the president's sexual affair with a 21-year-old intern into public view.

Starr is expected to provide a report in September -- before the House breaks for its election-year recess. The Washington scuttle-but is Starr will issue a report, but it will focus on the Lewinsky affair, not the entire Whitewater scandal.

"I don't think the Congress could move forward only on Lewinsky, unless Starr had such a clear case, such an overpowering case," Gingrich told the Post. "But I think we would be better served to know the whole story."

The "we" the speaker is referring to seems to be the Republican leadership. Gingrich and the White House seem to be relying on public opinion polls that claim America doesn't want Clinton impeached. The Constitution doesn't want Clinton impeached. The Constitution doesn't recognized polls -- and it shouldn't. If the president did the crime, Congress should see that he does the time.

Clinton should save Americans energy, money and time by taking the advice an unsuccessful congressional candidate in Arkansas offered Richard Nixon on August 6, 1974.

"There's nothing left to say," the candidate told The Arkansas Democrat. "There's not any point now in his putting the country through an impeachment since he isn't making any pretense of innocence now."

The candidate was Bill Clinton. Nixon took his advise. Three members of Congress have already stepped forward to urge this president to do likewise. House Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) And Rep. McHale (D- Penn.) Have all urged Clinton step down.

The SPOTLIGHT September 7, 1998

PRODUCER OF CONSPIRACY VIDEO TALKS ABOUT DRUGS, SPIES AND MENA MURDERS

In 1981, colorful American drug smuggler Barry Seal was facing a 13 count indictment that could send him to prison for life. At that point Seal made a deal with the CIA and went to work for the spook shop, smuggling drugs into the now-infamous Mena, Arkansas airport. The life and times of Seal and his covert connections to the Arkansas political machine of President Bill Clinton and to the Iran-contra intrigue of the Reagan-Bush era involving Lt. Col. Oliver North were among the subjects discussed on the May 31 broadcast of The SPOTLIGHT's weekly call-in talk forum, Radio Free America, with host Tom Valentine.

The guest was Daniel Hopsicker, a journalist who has produced a two-hour video production, Conspiracy: The Secret Heartbeat of America, that delves into the covert world of CIA intrigue. An abbreviated transcription of the interview follows. Valentine's questions start with a "Q". Hopsicker's responses start with an "R".

Q. You did not start out to make a "conspiracy" film, did you?

R. No, absolutely not. I was doing a business news television show on NBC internationally and just had the old American ambition to expand my work. We went out to shoot a pilot for a show that we wanted to be a new version of In Search Of for the paranoid '90s. Like the original In Search Of, our show was going to have three stories per half hour show, two fluffy pieces and a serious piece. The first serious story we planned for a 12-minute segment was the story of the deaths of the two boys who were found dead on the railroad tracks in Arkansas.

Q. You're referring to the now famous story of the two boys who appear to have been murdered, but whose murder has been covered up by the Arkansas authorities. It's believed that these boys had discovered drug smuggling out of the Mena, Arkansas airport which it is now known was a site for CIA- connected drugs-and-arms smuggling linked to the Iran-contra affair.

R. When I got down to Arkansas and met the people there, I couldn't walk away from it. I met Linda Ives, the mother of one of the dead boys. She has been on a 10-year crusade to bring the known killers of her son to justice. By the time I got to Arkansas, all of this had been widely covered. But it's not an unsolved mystery so much as it is a mystery that the government officials down there refuse to allow to be solved.

I though that all of the talk about the murders, etc and the deaths linked to Bill Clinton -- if I thought about it at all - was a lot of Republican and right-wing propaganda. That was until I got down to Arkansas and saw what I was and I said, "Maybe it was Republican and right-wing propaganda, but it was also, unfortunately, too true."

Q. What was the first clue to you that something was really amiss?

R. It was the first clue that opened my eyes. We stopped in Houston, Texas on the way to Little rock and interviewed Jean Duffy. She was the prosecuting attorney for a federally-funded drug task force in Arkansas whose investigators began to come to her three years after these boys were murdered and tell her they knew who killed them and that they could solve the mystery. She said: "Go for it," and as her team moved closer and closer to the killers of those two boys, a terror campaign began against Jean Duffy, both in the news-papers there and through threats on her life, and she was eventually forced to flee Arkansas in fear for her life. Today she's a geometry teacher in Houston.

You know what lawyers are like. They speak in very precise words and that's the kind of person Jean Duffy was. She was a no-nonsense prosecuting attorney. I interviewed her for three hours. Then we went on to Arkansas, where we went to the Little Rock Democrat-Gazette newspaper, which is the major newspaper in Arkansas.

There in the city room I sat across from a newspaperman who looks just like I do. He was a guy dedicated to telling the truth, I thought, but he lied through his teeth to me, saying "Jean Duffy's crazy. She belongs in an insane asylum." He added that Dan Harmon (another person who figures into this story) was crazy, too.

He said, "The thing I'm proudest of in my 10 years of newspapering in Little Rock is driving that woman out of state." He did not know when he told me that I had just met Jean Duffy the day before. He thought I was just another reporter flying in for a quick look around.\

As he was saying this to me, I realized that there was something really wrong, because whatever you want to say about Jean Duffy, "crazy" is not something you would call her if you want to be believed. You could say she's mistaken or perhaps that she has the wrong take on events,, but "crazy" is just not a word that you would ever use to describe this person I just met. And here was a newspaperman who had written seven years of stories about her and about the train deaths and he was lying to me.

Q. Who was this newspaperman?

R. His name is Doug Thompson. But let me tell you why I feel a little bit of sadness for him. At the end of our interview he looked at me and he said, "I don't work that beat anymore. I do business news now. It's much easier. I enjoy it a lot more. I've got a family to support." It was months later that I recollected that statement of his and I realized that what he was doing at that point was as close to an apology -- an admission - as he could ever come to that he felt bad about what he had been forced to do. So we pursued the story of the train deaths. It was a drug drop gone wrong.

It led right to Mena, Arkansas, which many people are familiar with. When we went to Mena, we met Russell Welch. The good thing about what I've been through this past year is that I've met some American heroes. Welch is one of them.

He was an Arkansas state trooper who was assigned to investigate narcotics trafficking out of that airport. But Welch is not an Arkansas native. He was a Californian and he did not fit into that "good ole boy" culture down there. He went after a lot of narcotics trafficking and he was investigating Barry Seal who was operating out of Mena.

Barry Seal was apparently America's most important covert operative of the '70s and '80s. His fingerprints were on a lot of things, a lot more than anybody knows about today. I've discovered that even though Seal's name has been bandied about in a lot of circles for about 10 years now, there's an enormous amount about his that is not known or is absolutely wrong. Every single explanation for the assassination of Barry Seal and who killed him and why he was killed is absolutely wrong.

I've learned that in just the last three months. I don't feel in danger, personally, but right now I'm too angry to care.

A good guy federal official -- and there are a few of them out there -- told me that I should not look into a particular individual, that he was a stone- cold sociopath and if I valued mot just my life but the lives of my family I should just forget that I heard this guy's name. So I had pretty much decided I would just let that part of the story just lie, but after what's happened to people who have been attempting to help rescue my production from being censored from the airwaves, I don't have any compunction about doing it.

Q. There are forces at work out there trying to prevent your film from being seen.

R. That's right. When I finished my work, I took it to my Hollywood godfather. He's a major power in Hollywood. I knew I had a good product and we were hoping that HBO would be able to show the film. Here we had evidence that Barry Seal, America's biggest drug smuggler, was a CIA agent who had brought in $5 billion worth of cocaine.

What were talking about here is that the cocaine and crack epidemics did ot happen by themselves. They were no an accident. They were caused. It was marketed and the money went to benefit certain interests in this country. That's what I discovered in Mena, Arkansas, looking into Barry Seal. I can cite you chapter and verse on Barry Seal's CIA connections.

Q. Please give us some background on Barry Seal.

R. Barry Seal was born and raised in Baton Rouge, an extremely engaging personality who could make yo like him. He was gregarious and outgoing, not violent, and he was not a shady drug dealer. He was an executive, management type. He grew up in the shadow of Louisiana Mafia chief Carlos Marcello, who many researchers generally believe was linked in some way to the JFK assassination.

Barry Seal was a co-pilot at the Bay of Pigs invasion and, of course, in our recent history there is no place more important that Miami a few years before the Bay of Pigs and a few years after. The CIA-Mafia-Anti-Castro Cuban connection forged down there in Miami, I believe, is crucial to understanding the events over the next 40 years. Barry Seal was down there with these people.

Now here's some speculation. I had a conversation at lunch with one of America's foremost authors, a man who is a Guggenheim fellow, the former head of United Press International, and who, at one time, served on the National security Council. He is not a "conspiracy theorist," per se. His name is Roger Morris. He wrote one of the first major books to deal in part with Mena, Arkansas entitled Partners in Power. Over the course of lunch, he asked me, "What have you heard about Barry Seal having flown the getaway plane in Dallas?" I said, "I didn't even know there was a getaway plane in Dallas."

Subsequent to that I've learned other things. One woman, who was with a newspaper in Baton Rouge, told me that her ex-husband, who was "connected" to the crime syndicate, had told her that Barry Seal had flown the getaway plane in Dallas. Doing some research on the JFK assassination, I read that there was a small, private airport in Dallas and that on the day of the JFK assassination there was a plane sitting on the runway with its engines running.

I son't know any more than this. I do know that Barry Seal worked for Carlos Marcello. I know that he was a pilot in Louisiana. So here it was: I had gone down to Arkansas to do a pilot for a proposed television show and I walked into the big megillah. It's something that amazes me today.

In 1972 Barry Seal was arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana with a DC-4 airplane filled with seven tons of plastic explosives that were being shipped to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. The customs official who arrested him was Ernst "Jake" Jacobson who, 12 years later, was named as Barry Seal's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) handler by George Bush's National Drug Task Force when Barry Seal had supposedly "rolled over" and became an informant for the DEA.

The arrest of Seal in 1972 was dismissed by the government in the interests of "national security." The explosives that Seal was flying were owned by Carlos Marcello. I guess it must be high on the CIA's daily checklist to keep deals with Mafia chieftains secret and that's why the charges against Seal were dismissed.

Q. A lot of people believe what you say is a myth: that Barry Seal was gunned down on the orders of Latin American drug lords.

R. That's the myth. Every newspaper article in America talked about the assassination of Barry Seal in this way. If Barry Seal had talked -- which he was about to -- I don't think either George Bush or Bill Clinton would have ever become president of the United States. The newspapers referred to him as the most important DEA informant in history and said that he was killed by three assassins sent by the Medelin cartel in retaliation for Seal bringing back pictures of drug lord Pablo Escobar loading drugs onto planes. Every single thing there is wrong.

First of all, the official Louisiana police report on Barry Seal after his death states that after becoming a government informant Barry Seal brought 330,000 pounds of cocaine into this country. So it's not as though Seal stopped smuggling dope after he became an informant. Instead, Seal's history of smuggling through Mena, Arkansas came after he became an informant. Seal knew in late 1980 that he was going to be indicted in "Operation Screamer" in Miami and he began to take actions at that time to "work of that beef." He contacted Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic lawyer who was best known as a counsel to the Watergate committee, but who is also a mob lawyer in Miami.

It was in 1981 that Seal began to fly dope for the U.S. government into Mena, Arkansas. His career as a DEA informant didn't begin in 1984. He knew in 1980 he was going to be indicted and he rolled over then. What did the government want him to do to "work off his beef"? They wanted him to fly dope and that's just what he did.

Seal is said to have been assassinated by the Medellin cartel. I always thought that was strange. Does the cartel assassinate CIA agents? I don't think so. The CIA is pretty powerful and they wouldn't mess with one of the CIA's people. So it turns out that my suspicions there were correct.

Every newspaper report on Seal's death said that there was a three-man hit team sent to get Seal. It was an eight-man team. Only four of them were ever charged. One of them was allowed to plead guilty to minor charges in Miami and was deported. Six men were arrested attempting to leave the scene, including the three who were eventually convicted: Miguel Velez, Bernardo Vasquez and Luis Quintero.

A seventh, Rafa Cardona, who had dispatched the team from Colombia, was safe in Colombia and he was charged in absentia for the crime. But he himself was mowed down a few months later. This was, I believe, part of the Clean-up operation for Iran-contra which was exposed by the downing of Barry Seal's plane, on which Eugene Hasenfus was a crewman, over Nicaragua, some six months later. And although they said that Hasenfus didn't work for the CIA, Congress just passed a bill providing him a pension.

The man who supplied the weapons was a CIA asset in Miami. He ran a fashion store that sold ladies dresses out front and he sold weapons out of the rear. He was supplying the contras with weapons as part of Oliver North's Iran- contra operations.

Now these assassins weren't supposed to get caught. I interviewed Sam Dalton, a lawyer for one of the three, who talked to me because he no longer felt bound by attorney-client privilege. He told me that the Colombians who came to this country to assassinate Barry Seal were under the direction of an American military officer who spoke to them on the phone anonymously and they figured out real quick that he was Oliver North.

So they were directed once they got into this country not by somebody from the Medellin cartel, but by Lt. Col. Oliver North of the U.S. National Security Council.

Now this may sound strange, but I have a certain amount of sympathy for North. He was the guy who was left out to hang. I have been told that North was one of the few people who didn't profit in any major way for all of this. I was told by a Louisiana state official who testified in front of a secret congressional committee in 1998 that the congressional committee heard enough evidence to put Oliver North in jail for life for drug smuggling.

The SPOTLIGHT September 7, 1998

RAGE OF MUSLIM WORLD EXPLOSIVE

Bill Clinton's cowardly attack on innocent civilians overseas fuels the fires of worldwide Islamic hatred.

By A.B. Kopanski

I know the place in Afghanistan which the U.S. Navy bombed. It is Khost, formerly an air base for Soviet SU-27 jets, Antonov transport planes, MiG-29 and MI-24 helicopters before the fall of Soviet power.

According to our sources, the U.S. cruise missiles killed 28 shepherd, militia men from Dueri and Marwati clans and Kasmire volunteers. These fiercely traditional Pashtun clans live in eastern Afghanistan and the northwestern frontier province of Pakistan.

According to the Pashtun code of honor (Pashtunwali), the blood of the slain Pashtu men and women must be paid either by "blood money" (Islamic diyah) or washed with the blood of the murderers (i.e., Clinton's Zionist advisors). It appears as though the Clintonians {American taxpayers -- Ed.\ will pay several million dollars rather than risk a long, vicious war with these fierce Aryan warriors of Islam.

Washington in the past paid millions to the Pashtuns behind the back of "world opinion" for less important "collateral casualties" despite the tough rhetoric of the State Department's Ramboids. If Clinton's seraglio will refuse to pay for their cowardly war crimes I assure you that the Pashtun clans will wash it with the blood of Clinton's advisors and their families.

The rage of the Muslim world against Clinton's Zionist regime is very explosive, indeed. Hundreds of Islamic parties and organizations call Muslim masses to the "Long War." Unfortunately, hundreds of innocent Americans abroad and in the U.S. will pay the price for the shocking stupidity of Clinton Korbil/Albright - Berger -- Cohen -- Free -- Greenspan terrorists.

Healthy and charismatic Osama bin Ladin declared recently that "the true battle against the immoral Zionist regime of Washington has not started yet."

Dr. A.B. Kopanski is a college professor teaching in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia.

The SPOTLIGHT September 14, 1998

WHITE HOUSE PUSHED TOWARD A 'HOLY WAR'

Powerful international forces want the world in flames -- with you trapped behind the lines.

By Martin Mann

The Mossad, Israel's secret service and its powerful U.S. lobby, accompanied by a strident chorus of Establishment news organizations, are trying to embroil the Clinton administration in all-out war with the vast Islamic world. That's what concerned diplomatic sources in Washington and New York have told The SPOTLIGHT.

"The Mossad has already lured the White House into launching misguided and lawless air strikes against the wrong targets in Afghanistan and Sudan," said Dr. Clovis Khoury, an assistant, director of Middle Eastern Crisis studies at American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

Now an aggressive coalition of Zionist pressure groups, dual loyalist Washington policy "advisors" and their criers in the mass media are using the recent terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as a casus belli, a cause for war, noted Khoury.

"They are trying to stampede Clinton into ordering even more disastrous assaults against key Muslim leaders and their organizations, who may in reality have little or no connection with terrorism," warned this scholarly observer, who is spending a sabbatical at the State University of New York.
MORE HARM THAN GOOD

There is no longer any question that the two bombing raids carried out by U.S. warplanes in Afghanistan and Sudan last month did more damage to the good name and world-wide leadership role of America than to any "terrorist" targets other regional experts concurred.

"The White House claimed that it blew apart the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum [capital of Sudan] because it was owned by Osama bin Laden, an alleged terrorist chieftain, and engaged in making chemical ingredients for nerve gas," explained Maj. Haakon Biemiller, a Swedish intelligence officer who served two tours in the Middle East before his recent retirement. "Now we I know that both these claims are untrue."
The only proven effect of the U.S. raid has been to deprive thousands of Sudanese from their lifeline medicines" as it turns out the Shifa plant was neither owned by bin Laden nor involved with chemicals of mass destruction. It was a commercial site, the largest supplier of pharmaceuticals in Sudan.

Nor is Osama bin Laden anything like the world-class terrorist archfiend depicted in the U.S. media. "Bin Laden has a violent streak, and found it useful while he worked as a CIA agent in Afghanistan during the '80s," said British foreign correspondent Robert Frisk, who knows the wealthy Saudi expatriate well.

These days, however, bin Laden is a "minor and largely isolated figure, ho is probably surprised and delighted at being held up as a mastermind of terror by the president of the United States," Fisk added.

Why cannot the Clinton administration produce any evidence justifying or at least explaining the motive for its aerial assaults against innocent people?

"Because most of it came from the Mossad, and now it will stand up to impartial scrutiny," said a well-placed congressional aide, who asked for anonymity.

None of these demeaning discoveries has prevented the Zionist lobby from pushing the U.S. toward more violent conflict with Islam. Some examples:

* In what may well have been the most disastrous example of editorial advice ever handed an American president, The Wall Street Journal urged full- scale U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan - a lethal badlands no great power has been able to invade successfully for a century.

* Described as a "resident scholar" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank, Michael Ledeen, a veteran Israeli go-between, urged the White House to end the ban on CIA assassination plots, (imposed in 1974 by presidential directive) and start "terminating" anyone suspected of being involved with terrorism.

* Ledeen's incitement to wholesale murder was enthusiastically echoed by prominent network commentators such as ABC's Sam Donaldson and NBC's Katie Couric, who kept asking Clinton why he was reluctant to issue any "licenses to kill" to U.S. agents.

"This is not the way to world leadership so often invoked these days by administration spokesmen," warned Khoury. It is the road to an inferior status like that of Israel -- a despised pariah among civilized nations."

And, as The SPOTLIGHT goes to press, a Swissair flight from New York to Berne has crashed off the coast of Canada. Opined on Capitol Hill pundit, who asked for anonymity: "If you are unable to make the connection between Swiss payments to so-called holocaust survivors and alleged terrorism against the United States and Switzerland, it will be explained to you on the evening news."

The SPOTLIGHT September 14, 1998

BLOOD ON BILL'S HANDS

We told you so: Clinton's "terrorist targets" were innocent civilians.

By Adnan Noon

KARACHI, Pakistan -- You read it in The SPOTLIGHT first. At a time when the establishment press was eulogizing Clinton's bombing of "terrorist targets" in Afghanistan and Sudan, The SPOTLIGHT was on record to inform its readers that the targets were wrong. We told you that innocent people were murdered simply to distract voters' attention from the Lewinsky scandal.

Once more Clinton had fooled the people -- at least for another week -- with a lot of help from the liberal and Zionist lobbies.

It has now been clearly established by the international community - with the exception of Israel and Israel-controlled America - that the much vaunted "retaliation bombings against terrorist targets" were wrong. The pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum was just that, with eight killed. It was the only plant to provide medicine for one of Africa's poorest people.

The so-called Zhawar Kill Al-Badr "terrorist camp" in Afghanistan was in fact an Afghan village where 86 women and children and 14 men were suddenly blown to bits.

While the Clintonites -- Defense Secretary Bill Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine Korbalova-Albright -- were chortling that they had once more protected the American people from "terrorism," they had in fact by their criminal and politically expedient acts of real terrorism, created enemies where none existed before.

They had also made the situation untenable for all their U.S. tax paid flunkies they had put in place to control the local population of the Third World.

COOKED UP EVIDENCE

Al the 'evidence" presented by Clinton as a justification for his bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan was cooked up. First, the building up of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen, as a big bugaboo, one-man terror empire is pure fiction. It comes straight from the propaganda mills of the Israeli Mossad (the state-sponsored real terrorist organization). It is on par with such historical hoaxes as the Belgian schoolgirls getting their hands chopped off by the ferocious Germans in World War I.

Bin Laden is a vocal critic of Israeli atrocities in Lebanon and against the Palestinian people. He is a critic of the Clinton administration.

It is now known that the media build-up of bin Laden was made at random: there many bin Ladens in the Muslim world who are a lot more critical than Osama. But when the Mossad asked some of their Saudi contacts to finger a likely candidate to be projected as a "star terrorist" which could serve them both well, Osama was nominated.

As the news spread, the puppet regimes set up by the Mossad and paid for by U.S. tax dollars throughout the Middle East were more and more embarrassed. Thus bin Laden was chosen and made into a Hollywood star of "terror."
HOAX OF WAR

Like the Zimmerman telegram British hoax, which precipitated a reluctant America into WWI (it alleged that Germany was backing a Mexican armed invasion of the United States; but it was a British invention to railroad America to war against Germany), the famous "soil sample" allegedly scooped up near the Khartoum medical plant was supposed to contain the VX nerve gas.

There was no sample taken in Khartoum: the site was thoroughly examined by neutral and non-Sudanese agencies who were familiar with the plant and all its production and there never was any production of such gas. The sample came instead from Israel, which in fact produces the gas as well as other biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Likewise, the Afghan "terror camp" contained mostly women and children and there was no "convention of inter-national terrorists" going on. Again it was a random place picked simply to give the impression to the American people that "terrorists" could hot hide anywhere and would be killed anywhere in the world.

The unfortunate Afghan village was picked because Afghanistan was unlikely to reach the American people for redress. This new practice of murdering people on the whims of political expediency bodes ill for the American people. Already the Clinton administration has lumped American dissent with its policies with "Muslim terrorists": there could therefore be many more Wacos to come.

Adnan Noon is the nom de plume of an American businessman currently living in Africa.

The SPOTLIGHT September 14, 1998

RELIGION CAN BE COSTLY

By The SPOTLIGHT Staff

Residents of Dekalb County, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, found themselves with a court-ordered religion monitor in their school district and a bill charging them $41,706 for his services.

The Birmingham News reported that U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent appointed Birmingham lawyer Chris Doss, a Baptist minister and the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Church at Sanford University's Cumberland School of Law, to monitor the school district beginning last January. As required by the judge's order, Doss was to insure that the town complied with a 1997 curt order banning school-sanctioned prayer.

Six months later, as specified by the judge, Doss billed the DeKalb County Board of Education $180-per-hour for his services, an invoice totaling over $40,000.

The newspaper reported, however, that his charges covered more than just wandering the halls of the schools. He apparently billed the town for time spent in court preparing statements, various travel expenses and a number of press conferences including a half-hour interview with the Atheist Network. The county is expected to appeal.

The SPOTLIGHT September 21, 1998

REPORT FROM A U.S. PRISON LABORER

The SPOTLIGHT continues its investigation of prisons, prison industries in the United States and their relationship to the economy.

By Tony Blizzard

The following letter was received by this populist newspaper following the publication of our special insert on prison industries:

"I cannot unionize. I am not covered by workers compensation. I am not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. I agree to work weekend shifts, late- night and holidays.

"I am hired and fired at will, and I do not have to be paid minimum wage. I do not even voice grievances except at the risk of incurring arbitrary discipline.

"I pay no taxes because I receive no income, as most other states pay their employees. I am paid instead with an aberration called "good time for good behavior" as a form of control.

"My function is to save the state millions of dollars each year for work the state would normally have to hire free-world people to perform.

"You do not have to worry about NAFTA or your jobs going to Mexico, I will have 25 percent of your jobs within the next decade.

"I am called prison labor.

"John Zurborg, No. 544935, Ellis One Unit, Huntsville, Texas 77343.
PROPHETIC LETTER

On the heels of Zurborg's letter comes a newspaper clipping from a reader describing the ordeal of Tim Graves and his business, General Engineering Service, of Forest Park, Georgia. For 18 years, Graves made missile shipping containers for the government. But in 1991, UNICOR, the federal prison industry, moved into the business. Graves went to court, spending an estimated $150,000 fighting UNICOR's entrance into the field.

"They're tax exempt, they can borrow all the money they need from the federal treasury, they can build all the plants and equipment they need with our taxes and they employ prisoners," he said. He could have mentioned that htey don't have to meet deadlines or any other contractual agreement and they pay slave wages.

Graves finally won his battle with UNICOR, only to find that, in the meantime, the Small Business Administration (SBA) had decreed that only minority owned small businesses could contract to build missile containers. After his long fight with UNICOR, he had no funds left to begin the battle again against the SBA, so Tim closed up shop and laid off his 100 workers.

Although UNICOR is not connected to the state of Texas prison system it is the model that states are rapidly incorporating for their own prison industries. It is another strong tie binding all American wages to an artificially low rate in an increasingly expensive nation.

For information on The SPOTLIGHT'S prison industry special and all SPOTLIGHT inserts, call the Circulation Department at 202-546-5621.

The SPOTLIGHT September 21, 1998

LIBRARIES TRASHING LOTS OF GOOD BOOKS

When in doubt, toss it out, or, trashing history for fun and profit.

By Mike Blair

Those interested in the preservation of American history and patriotic lore are becoming deeply concerned by the practice of local libraries all across the nation. It entails either selling at book sales or dumping in the trash millions of non-fiction history books, including biographies of figures who played important roles in the nation's past.

Virtually, every state, local library authorities are urging community libraries to "cull out" from their shelves books that are not frequently utilized by the reading public. Some state authorities are making the process mandatory in order for the libraries to receive new books. Mostly works of fiction, from the state.

As an example, regional library authorities in New York state encourage local librarians to each year reduce their current books by about five percent.

HISTORICALLY BARREN

As most patrons of local libraries across America can readily find out, if they take the time to examine the shelves of their libraries, the facilities are becoming increasingly less viable as sources for books on American history and biographies.

As an example, it will be found that the libraries would be more likely to have on their shelves more popular romance fiction than biographies of U.S. presidents, the latter having long ago been removed from the shelves and sold for 10 or 15 cents or a quarter at a book sale, which most libraries hold at least annually, or simply throw away in the trash with other "refuse.' Sometimes the libraries hod "bag sales," with a whole shopping bag of discarded books going for 50 cents or a dollar.

One local library in upstate New York, which once had on of the finest collections of historical non-fiction for any library of its size, has virtually gutted its resources.

The facility, the Lowville Free Library in rural Lewis County, has even gone to the extreme of placing its shelves farther apart to cover the fact that it has less books available for its readers. The removed shelves rested for years gathering dust in an upstairs storage room.

Space is said to be a problem. However, the library, as well as others all across America, have considerable space that could be used for books of non- fiction historical resources that fall into the seldom used category but nevertheless are vital material for researchers.

The argument often is that virtually any book is available on request through a state library authority of regional systems. But it takes several days to locate a book for a patron and there is also the risk of the last remaining volumes being ultimately lost or not returned by borrowers.
SAME EVERYWHERE

Far south from New York, in Louisiana, the late Babs Wilson, a devout Southern heritage preservationist, spent countless hours going through thousands of volumes at local book sales in her state, retrieving for a few cents, often very valuable and rare books, about the history of the Confederacy of the American Civil War era. She compiled as a result on of the finest private collections in America of books on the history of the old South.

An effort is currently being made to establish a center for Southern culture and heritage, with her collection of thousands of volumes to be the central attraction.

Back in New York, a noted anthropologist specializing in Native American history, told The SPOTLIGHT that the pattern of destruction of local library collections could even be a plot, as far as hi is concerned, to eliminate certain aspects of the nation's history from the American psyche.

"If it's not 'politically correct,' so to speak, then lit's eliminate it or make it less available," he said.

He described how once he retrieved a "very valuable and rare" series of volumes on Native American history from his local library. They had been tossed into the containers used to haul ashes from the building's coal-fired heating system.

"What is happening to our libraries is really an atrocity," he said.

"I ask you," he concluded, "what should be saved for posterity, a copy of Belva Plain's latest romance novel or any one of a number of fine biographies that have been written over the years about Abraham Lincoln?

"Well, I can tell you that Lincoln's memory will not be what is salvaged in this case.

The SPOTLIGHT September 21, 1998

UK CITIZENS MOVE TOWARD SAFE SLAVERY

In late August, the British government enacted sweeping "anti-terrorism" legislation that, in practice will eliminate many of the freedoms United Kingdom citizens take for granted.

By The SPOTLIGHT Staff

In the wake of a fatal bombing in Great Britain, the Tony Blair government rushed "emergency anti-terrorism" legislation through Parliament. The results will be a definite loss of basic freedoms for UK citizens, and have little effect of terrorism, according to experts.

The British magazine The Guardian commented that the very nature of the bill was "illiberal, barely democratic and politically poorly judged."

According to the commentary, the House of Commons was well aware of this, as were the members of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and even some Conservatives. There were efforts made to block the bill's passage, but those parties interested in the denial of personal freedom and rights were successful with a large majority of members -- all of this done in one day's deliberations.

The Guardian columnist stated that the passing of the bill marked some dramatic changes to British law, but apparently with very little protest in the country, and no major dissent in Parliament.

LEGISLATION

The first part of the legislation provided for the conviction of a suspected terrorist on the authority of one policeman. The British government did establish that the evidence provided by a police official's testimony be corroborated. However, the so-called "corroboration" was simply defined as "silence on the part of the suspect." So, if a suspected terrorist fails to be speak up in his own defense, he can be sentenced just on the word of the accuser.

According to The Guardian, this means that "for a narrow segment of 'suspect terrorists,' who may not be terrorists at all, the rules are being drastically altered, and the courts invited to do their duty accordingly," The SPOTLIGHT has consistently been on guard for legislation such as this in the United States, which, for American citizens, would mean denial of their constitutional rights. The UK, of course, has no constitution.
POWER GRAB

Worse, the second part of the legislation gives the foreign secretary and attorney general effective powers over investigation and convicting suspected foreign terrorists in Britain. For the British, it is ultimately a surprising relinquishing of legal power to the executive branch, allowing for more action from elite governmental groups domestically.

This Section of the legislation was apparently formulated under pressure from the U.S., Middle East and Asian governments, as London had been searching for ways to deal with complaints that it is a haven for foreign terrorists. However, as The Guardian points out, "defining the foreign enemy, proving that he is a conspirator, distinguishing between freedom-fighters and terrorists: anyone who has studied the matter knows these are complex tasks."

According The Guardian, this type of impetuous legislation does nothing more than to "put law at the service of politics, and individual liberties in the hands of the variety of secretaries of state." the implications are frightening.

The SPOTLIGHT September 28, 1998

GORE PRESIDENCY VIEWED WITH ALARM

A number of foreign governments prefer Bill Clinton -- warts and all -- to Al Gore.

By Warren Hough

American voters, who regard Vice President Al Gore as a somewhat stiff, plodding, but basically predictable figure, might be surprised by the nick- names this seemingly bland politician has attracted among U.S. allies around the world.

Foreign diplomats who spoke to The SPOTLIGHT -- most on the promise of anonymity -- point out he is notorious for his involvement in some of the Clinton administration's worst lies and most nefarious policies.

Among financial and political insiders in Moscow, for instance, Gore is known as "The Knuckle" -- a 19th century term for the strong-arm attendant who used to accompany crooked Russian gamblers. They were known to serve tea with rum to card players who were oblivious of being cheated, and then protected the shyster's getaway in case of trouble.

Well-informed Middle Easterners often refer to the vice president as "The Needle." They apparently, are alluding to trusted courtiers of the once- powerful Ottoman empire, who were assigned to "terminate" suspected rivals or critics of the sultan. The method of choice -- by surreptitiously injecting poison into their food from hollow silver needles.

NOT A FAVORITE

"Gore is despised in Russia for good reason," says Dr Ruslan Volkov, a Russian sociologist on a year's research sabbatical at the State University of New York. "Remember tht ever since the Democrats took over the White House, the vice president was the point man for the Clinton administration's drive to 'reform' the remnants of the once-feared 'evil empire.'"

What Gore did was to strike a back-room alliance with some of the most rapacious and cunning self-promoters in Moscow. Among them was Viktor Chernomyrdin, a long-time Soviet bureaucrat who had managed to turn Russia's huge gas reserves into a corrupt personal fiefdom after the communist regime's collapse.

With Gore's support, Chernomyrdin soon became prime minister of the Russian Federation, the heartland of the former Soviet Union.

"Chernomyrdin and his retinue -- a clique of Zionist financiers backed by gangs of killer thugs -- stole whatever they could, and what they did not steal, they corrupted," recounted Volkov.

With senior officials appointed by Chernomyrdin as willing accomplices, Russia's priceless natural resources such as oil, gold, timber and diamonds were hawked on the black market, for the most part abroad. The proceeds were then stashed in bulging numbered bank accounts all over Western Europe, regional experts say.

Following the lead of billionaire currency trader George Soros - another favored Gore associate -- international speculators trashed the ruble, Russia's national currency, and looted the country's hard-money reserves.
NO WARNINGS

During these years, when he held frequent meetings with Russian leaders and attended the monthly meetings of a joint committee on "democratization" he co- chaired with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, Gore never uttered a word of caution or restraint about the brutal plunder of Russia's national wealth, these sources noted.

"Just the contrary, Gore kept pushing for more and more financial aid for the gangster regime in Moscow, including billions from American taxpayers the vice president must have known would simply be stolen," asserted Derek Powell, a British broadcast correspondent who was stationed in Moscow during the mid '90s.

Last month, with Russia's economy in ruins and millions of its people facing a winter of misery and famine, Russian President Boris Yeltsin made another attempt to put his crony, Chernomyrdin - who quit earlier this year -- in charge again as prime minister.

The Russian parliament rejected the nomination with a blaze of furious oratory. "Had he been present in Moscow, Gore could have heard himself denounced by name as "Mr. Big, the corrupt political wirepuller of innumerable American gangster movies," and as "accomplice to the criminals who had stripped Russia to the bone,' recounted Powell

PROBE UNLIKELY

This may present "the long-delayed opportunity for the U.S. Congress to take a closer look at the role played by Gore and the Clinton administration in the plundering and pauperizing of Russia's national economy," commented Dr. Paul Adler, the noted international economic consultant. But Washington insiders doubt Gore will face a legislative probe anytime soon. "The vice president has built an intimate alliance with the most aggressive leaders of the Israel lobby on capitol Hill," said a former counsel to the House Commerce Committee, who "on second thought" asked not to be quoted by name.
Gore "makes sure AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and its cohorts get what they want from the White House, whether Bill Clinton himself wants it or not," this well-placed source related.

These enormously powerful alien pressure groups protect Gore in turn, making sure he stays "clean,' gets good press and stays in the running as a leading contender for the presidency.

"At least, that's what they've done till now,' explained Dr. Pierre Oweiss, the respected Middle Eastern political scientist. "Islamic leaders don't call gore "The Needle" for nothing. When Clinton tried to keep Israel from wrecking the so-called 'peace process' in Palestine, Gore subtly poised every U.S. policy designed to put pressure on the Zionists."

At the AIPAC annual conference this year, Gore openly encourage the ministate
s hard-line government to ignore any cautionary noted sounded by Clinton about their illegal occupation of neighboring Arab lands, this scholarly observer recounted.

"In fact, Gore masterminded the appointment of Stephen Grossman president of AIPAC and one of Israel's most militant partisans, as chairman of most militant partisans, as chairman of the DNC (the Democratic National Committee)," recalled this scholarly observer. "That maneuver pulled the rugh out from under Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who were trying last spring to push the Israelis into completing the peace process."

Will Gore be able to hold on as the "Teflon vice-president?" Will he ever be called to account for his intrigues and wrongdoing, ready to take over the Oval Office now that Clinton has been exposed and disgraced?

"That is the really big question behind the current White House scandals," asserted Powell.

The SPOTLIGHT September 28, 1998

'STRAIGHT ARROW AL' GORE BAD GUY BEHIND SCENES

If you think Al Gore doesn't have the imagination to rip you off, don't worry -- he's got more chutzpah than is immediately evident.

By Martin Mann

While playing "Straight-Arrow Al" in public, accompanied by a compaisant Congress and press, Vice President Gore has been a leading behind-the-scenes player in a financial scheme likely to prove the largest investment fraud ever foisted on Americans.

That's the consensus of seasoned Wall Street sources contacted by The SPOTLIGHT for this report.

"Gore is known in New York as 'the rabbi,' the protector and mentor of policymakers who manipulate our economy, among them Fed. Chairman Alan Greenspan and international currency speculator George Soros," says Dennis Alcott, a partner in Keefe Donnelly and Alcott, a U.S.-Canadian brokerage specializing in money market securities.

Greenspan reportedly met the woman who became his live-in girl-friend, and eventually his wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, at a small, intimate party given by Al and Tipper Gore in 1995.

When billionaire currency speculator Soros decided to fund a campaign to legalize narcotics in 1996 -- including a plan to let heroin users enjoy their favorite drug free of charge -- he turned to his longtime4 friend, Gore, for support.

"Gore endorsed the Soros program for coddling coke, smoke and smack junkies [i.e. cocaine, marijuana and heroin addicts] but the proposal was thwarted by vigorous opposition from just about every law enforcement agency" recounted freelance reporter Carey Wallen, who often writes about narcotics issues.
BACKS SCAM

Far more ominously, Gore threw his weight behind a broad economic strategy developed jointly by Greenspan, Soros and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the early '90s. The net effect of this scam has been to strip American families of their nest eggs and convert those indispensable individual savings into a coast-to-coast "casino economy," academic analysts say.

Beyond its intricate mechanics, the Greenspan-Rubin-Soros scheme worked simply as follows: the Federal Reserve enabled bankers to reduce interest payments on term deposits and savings accounts to a nominal level, ranging from a derisory one-and-a half to two percent.

Simultaneously, the Fed broadened its secret efforts, begun by Greenspan in 1987, to boost the stock market with surreptitious infusions of federal cash, driving share prices ever higher regardless of the underlying economic realities.

DISASTROUSLY DOWN

Even nationally syndicated Establishment economists like Robert J. Samuelson late last month, noted that for the first six months of this year, Americans saved only 0.6 percent of their incomes - disastrously down from the 6.7 percent individual savings totaled during the previous decade.

"As the stock market has risen, the savings rate has dropped," reported Samuelson. So has the number of working and retired Americans who are gambling their nest eggs in the unstable, rigged and unpredictable stock exchanges.

In recent years, the share of families owning stock has risen from 32 to 41 percent according to the Fed's own data. The real figure is "surely higher," argued Samuelson.

The speculative atmosphere of a nationwide casino economy has also increased the urge to borrow heedlessly. Consumers are now spending an unprecedented 16.8 percent of their after-tax incomes on debt and interest payments, noted Samuelson.

WARNING

But what happens when the U.S. finds, as it must sooner or later, that it can no longer "lubricate the various marketplaces" as the buyer of last resort? "We may soon find out," warned Samuelson gloomily.

When the market slump does come, impoverishing millions of ordinary Americans, will Gore once again play the "straight-arrow" Mr. Clean, innocent of any responsibility for the ensuing enormous losses?

"The one man who had made the most money from manipulating the financial markets is Soros," says Alcott. "Make this speculator talk, and his confederates -- including Greenspan, Rubin, and, yes, Vice President Gore -- will not be able to duck their share of the blame for the public debacle."

The SPOTLIGHT September 28, 1998

TAKE A HIKE, BILL

As of Wednesday, September 16, 16 members of Congress had signed the following letter urging President Bill Clinton to resign:

The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing to you today to express our outrage and sorrow over your conduct during the last eight months.

Your admission of directly lying to the American people and a broad range of improper and illegal conduct has precipitated a crisis of governance of the highest order. You have abused the power of your office to sustain a predatory and repugnant relationship with a young employee, and did so using the facilities of the office to further that relationship, and those actions clearly bring forth the questions of impeachable behavior.

Your use of the resources of the Office of the President, including employees, appointees and associates to cover up your actions and obstruct justice by withholding information from a duly constituted Independent Counsel investigation also raises the issues of impeachable behavior.

Your providing of false testimony in a civil case, refusal to provide duly subpoenaed information to the Independent Counsel and 267lapses of memory during sworn testimony further raises questions of Impeachable behavior.

As a result of these actions you have diminished the Office of the President and removed the dignity, honor, integrity and trust in the Office necessary for effective conduct of the affairs of the United States.

Mr. President, twenty-five years ago during the Watergate crisis you said, "There's nothing left to say. There's not any point in his putting the country through an impeachment since he isn't making any pretense of innocence now..Now that the President admitted wrongdoing, he should resign."

Mr. President, a crisis of governance is at hand. We ask you to take the right course of action and spare our nation the pain, turmoil and agony of impeachment and removal proceedings. It is with sorrow, and with a firm conviction that this is the right course of action, that we ask you to immediately resign the office of the President.

Sincerely,

George P. Radanovich, California Republican
Paul McHale, Pennsylvania Democrat
Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland Republican
Henry Bonilla, Texas Republican
Majority Whip Tom Delay, Texas Republican
John T. Doolittle, California Republican
Robert L. Ehrilich Jr., Maryland Republican
Tille Fowler, Florida Republican
Wally Herger, California Republican
Sam Johnson, Texas Republican
Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr., Mississippi Republican
Joseph R. Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican
Vince N. Snowbarger, Kansas Republican
Mark Souder, Indiana Republican
Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican
Gene Taylor, Mississippi Democrat*