-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Impeached POTUS Starr Pursues More Oval Office "Groping" Julie Hiatt Steele indicted THE independent counsel Kenneth Starr is reviving his pursuit of Bill Clinton for allegedly fondling a 51-year-old socialite from a prominent Virginia Democratic family when she visited him at the White House, asking for help, in November 1993. Kathleen Willey has told of how the President embraced her in the Oval Office and lured her to his adjoining study to grope her breasts. She said: "I just could not believe the recklessness of that act." It emerged yesterday that Mr Starr is now building a solid case, indicating that he thinks Mr Clinton perjured himself about Mrs Willey. Republican prosecutors in the Senate impeachment trial said they now wanted to call Mrs Willey as one of their witnesses to bolster their case against the President. Towards the end of Mr Clinton's four-hour evidence to a federal grand jury on Aug 17, Mr Starr's deputy, Jackie Bennett, homed in on Mrs Willey's claim. The President's tone changed abruptly. Instead of carefully parsing his answers and looking shifty, as happened during the Lewinsky cross-examination, he was almost defiant. Asked if he made sexual advances towards Mrs Willey, he said: "That's false." Questioned about specific acts alleged by the woman, he said: "I did not" and "No, I didn't." He then said: "Mr Bennett, I didn't do any of that, and the questions you're asking, I think, betray the bias of this operation that has bothered me for a long time. She was not telling the truth." However, yesterday Mr Starr obtained grand jury indictments against a former friend of Mrs Willey, Julie Hiatt Steele, 52, charging her with lying to the jury in the Lewinsky investigation, and obstructing justice. Mrs Steele is being drawn into the affair because a television producer, Bill Poveromo, has insisted that she told him "the President had groped" Mrs Willey, and that she knew about it "right after it happened". She also supported Mrs Willey's account in what she said was an "off-the-record" interview in 1997 with a Newsweek reporter. However, she later retracted the statement. The indictment alleged that the retraction was a lie, which Mrs Steele provided under oath last February in a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against the President. The charges are a severe blow to the White House, which fears that Mr Starr might be putting pressure on Mrs Steele to become a witness against the President. Aides have tried desperately to paint Mrs Willey as too unstable to be believed. They were helped by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who lives near her in Richmond, Virginia. Apparently enraged that the author had defected from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, taking with her a $10,000 campaign contribution, Mrs Willey visited her home, leaving a pile of books and a vicious letter on the doorstep. If Mrs Willey becomes a Senate witness, she might be even more riveting than Miss Lewinsky. She claims that the President "put my hand on his genitals". He was "aroused" and grabbed her breasts, she alleges. As she drew away "I recall him saying he had wanted to do that for a long time". Senate prosecutors are interested in her evidence to a Washington grand jury in which, according to Newsweek, she told of a two-day visit to the estate of Nathan Landow, a wealthy Democratic ally of the President. She said he repeatedly pressed her about her version of the encounter, telling her: "Don't say anything." Of Mrs Willey, the President has said that she came to him because she was upset about domestic problems. He said that he was simply comforting her, he said: "I embraced her. I put my arms around her. There was nothing sexual about it." Mrs Willey, whose lawyer husband Edward shot himself on the day of the encounter because of financial problems, said that all she had wanted was to change her job as a White House volunteer to a paid member of the staff. Her marriage was in ruins and she was facing a desperate financial situation. The London Telegraph, Jan. 8, 1999 The Politics of Lying French See Danger in Too Much Truth "Lying gets a good press" PARIS - ''Truths!'' Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have shouted. ''Did you think I could have created a (Free French) government against the English and the Americans with truths? You make History with ambition, not with truths.'' The quote is from a new book by Thierry Pfister, a French editor, who uses it to illustrate his thesis that for the French mind, lying in politics is the norm, and that anyone trying to attach a standard of truthfulness to a politician's behavior is naive and worthy of contempt. The general, he suggests, said as much. This is part of Mr. Pfister's explanation of why he believes the French, and particularly France's elites, do not understand how President Bill Clinton could be impeached. He says that the French elite is terrified by the case's implications for its privileges, and that this is the reason, much more than in other democratic countries, that the yearlong reaction here to the impeachment process has been one of ridicule, self-satisfied righteousness, and feigned concern for the future of the United States. For the French elite, Mr. Pfister maintains, ''there are virtually no consequences for lying. It's O.K.'' Certainly nowhere in or outside the United States has the handling of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal been held up as a model of civic procedure. But in France, the circumstances are seen, Mr. Pfister says, as an ongoing means to contrast ''a reactionary American puritanism against progressive French tolerance.'' This week, while CNN's commentators were talking about the solemnity of the opening public proceedings in the Senate, the anchorman on the France 3 state television news at 11 P.M. was describing it as ''a lamentable show.'' In a Page One editorial accompanying the Clinton trial, Le Figaro cried out, ''Wake up, Tocqueville, they've gone mad. When you look at the distressing spectacle that American democracy is offering, you say to yourself that the man who described it best must not be very comfortable up there in the heavens.'' For Mr. Pfister, who served as spokesman for former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy in President Francois Mitterrand's first Socialist government and as a writer for Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur magazine, there is more political lying in France than in other democracies because its democratic culture is weaker. In this context, he said in an interview, a historical climate of lies involving the reaction of the French to the Nazi occupation, the French colonial war in Algeria, and the corruption of the Mitterrand years, makes Bill Clinton's vulnerability for alleged lying under oath an almost otherworldly matter here. ''That's why the situation is incomprehensible for French public opinion,'' Mr. Pfister wrote. ''Punishing lies - what naivete!'' Among its officials, ''France has a cult of lying,'' Mr. Pfister insists. ''With us, lying gets a good press,'' he said. ''Some see it as a Latin characteristic, others as the sign of a superior civilization.'' He said, ''Attempting to limit its use makes you look ridiculous. Playing Don Quixote is the equivalent of confronting standard social usage, discussed from time to time, but never really brought into question.'' No particular fan of an American model, Mr. Pfister describes the investigation of Mr. Clinton by Kenneth Starr as partisan, inspired by the right wing of the Republican Party, and using inquisition-like methods. But he goes after the notion that there was some kind of elegance or refinement in the political circumstances that allowed Mr. Mitterrand to keep his double family life from public knowledge, at the same time that he published innocuous health bulletins that hid his developing cancer. The French were treated not so much as citizens, but infantile subjects, the writer said. If it was fine that the French hardly seemed disturbed on learning about Mr. Mitterrand's second family after his death, Mr. Pfister argued ''it is nonetheless unacceptable that the news was delivered to them so late.'' ''The reality is that it is this contempt, this institutional dissimulating that is being defended by everyone running to Bill Clinton's defense.'' Mr. Pfister singled out the Socialist president of the foreign affairs commission of the National Assembly, Jack Lang, as an example of the French public and media figures who were expressing shock about a so-called re-birth of McCarthyism in the United States, while their concerns, he said, were obviously elsewhere. ''It's not the drift of the American system that concerns them, but the risk of contamination. Suppose they were required tomorrow to give explanations?'' ''The Americans, British, Germans, Spanish, they all know that things can turn around against them, and that exercising responsibilities involves risks. Explanations are demanded of them, even on their private lives if they become controversial. That's the price that Clinton is paying because it's the price of democracy.'' Mr. Pfister's book, ''Lettre Ouverte aux Gardiens du Mensonge'' (Open Letter to the Keepers of the Lie) is published by Albin Michel. International Herald Tribune, Jan. 8, 1999 Information SuperSpyWay RSA Moves Down Under to Escape Export Restrictions But Australia signed Wassenaar A leading supplier of data-scrambling software opened an Australian branch office Wednesday to bypass US export restrictions and secure the talents of two renowned software engineers. Brisbane-based cryptographers Eric Young and Tim Hudson now form the core of RSA Data Security Australia. The branch plant will allow the company to more easily sell its security-software components to foreign companies. "[The Australian facility] is a harbinger of the way the world is changing," said Scott Schnell, senior vice president of marketing for RSA Data Security, based in San Mateo, California. "What we have just done allows us to compete on an equal technological footing with all the other companies that have sprung up internationally." The new office could also send the message to Washington that current US Commerce Department regulations prohibiting the export of strong encryption are outdated and short-sighted. Federal regulations forbid US software companies from exporting strong encryption technologies on the grounds that they might be used by terrorists to conceal their plans. The policy has long frustrated US firms that see the rule as pointless, because they say it has created an unfair playing field in the electronic-commerce age. The firms say that the rules have fostered a thriving overseas cryptography industry. The Australian government has historically been liberal with crypto exports. Software developed Down Under by Australian citizens such as Young and Hudson can be exported and used all over the world. Young is renowned in the software industry for developing an open-source version of Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, the crypto scheme that plugs into Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator to make the programs safe for online shopping. That open-source code library, SSLeay, underlies many software programs, including the California-based C2Net's Stronghold Web server and the Mozilla Web browser. Both Young and Hudson worked for C2Net until late last summer, in an arrangement that more or less guaranteed the free software code would remain robust. "We had Tim and Eric on our payroll in order to foster the development of SSLeay," said Steve Cook, vice president of sales and marketing for C2Net. "Now that RSA has turned the corner on that issue we will let someone else underwrite them." With Young and Hudson now working for RSA, SSLeay will be shepherded by a group of a few dozen volunteer developers, in the same way that the Apache Web browser was developed. Dave Del Torto, director of the CryptoRights Foundation, said that RSA was less interested in the SSLeay open-source software code and more interested in having aboard two of the world's leading minds in cryptography. "Really they wanted the engineering talent more than that particular library," he said. "It's wonderful. Tim and Eric are extremely talented guys who will go on to do great things." But the pair may not always operate in a favorable political climate. Last year, an Australian defense department official threatened to prosecute the programmers under that country's Weapons of Mass Destruction Act. That threat was later dropped. More menacing, del Torto said, is the fact that last month Australia signed on to the Wassenaar Arrangement, a global arms treaty that recommends tighter restrictions on crypto software. While the exact rules were left at the discretion of the 33 nations that signed the treaty, del Torto said that the agreement was a bad omen for crypto, which maintains privacy all over the world. "I am extremely concerned about the whole thing, and a lot of people are," he said. "Wassenaar is a really clever end-run by the US government to try and lock a bunch of developed countries into their way of doing things." Wired News, Jan. 6, 1999 Single Currency The Euro's First Week And the worrying U.S. current account deficit Everything is the same but different. In one sense, the launch of the euro on to the world's foreign exchange markets this week did not change very much. The 11 euro-zone currencies were, after all, closely synchronised already, and short-term interest rates in most of the countries had been converging for more than two years. Wim Duisenberg, president of the European Central Bank, emphasised the continuity on Thursday when he announced that euro interest rates would stay at 3 per cent - the level fixed before the launch - for "the foreseeable future". As if to confirm the impression that the launch of the euro was no big deal, foreign exchange markets switched their attention after its first day of trading to the yen, driving it up to almost 110 to the dollar at one point. This was some 32 per cent above its low point last August, and high enough to revive anxieties about Japanese recovery. The rising yen also focuses attention on the sources of potential weakness for the dollar and the dangers that they pose for the world economy. Yet the euro is far from being a ringside spectator in a tussle between the US and the Japanese currencies. Its emergence has changed the global financial landscape profoundly, even if this week's performance did not give much indication of its future role as a heavyweight alternative to the dollar. There are several reasons why the euro could strengthen. In trade weighted terms the "synthetic" euro, calculated from the 11 member currencies, has gained 19 per cent from the beginning of last year. In comparison with the other two main currencies, a continuation of this strength looks rational. The dollar is increasingly vulnerable to a ballooning trade deficit, or a sudden change from exuberance to pessimism in Wall Street - perhaps both. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Worrying aspects The US current account deficit, expected to be about $230bn (£137bn) for 1998, is now heading back to the unsustainable levels that caused such alarm in the late 1980s. This year it will be about 3 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.6 per cent at its previous record in 1987. There are two worrying aspects to this trend. First, the external deficit is clearly linked to a soaring US stock market that reached new highs this week. These gains have persuaded Americans to run down their savings while continuing to spend at a high level. But this will not go on indefinitely: asset prices cannot be expected to rise at recent very rapid rates for much longer, and there is increasing unease that the market is overvalued. Second, the trade deficit, exacerbated by the consumer boom, is now matched by a rising net debt to foreigners. This already represents 16 per cent of GDP. On present trends it would double by 2003. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ External deficit Just to complete the inventory of danger signals, US oil imports, now running at 10m barrels per day, make the country much more vulnerable than a decade ago to any world price increase. A return to $20 per barrel oil, for example, would add $30bn to the US's already over-stretched external deficit. It may be that the rest of the world (including the Japanese, who hold a fifth of US Treasury securities) will continue to finance this deficit. But a change of sentiment by lenders or equity holders or both could put strong pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile any further appreciation of the yen would douse the already faint embers of Japanese economic recovery. The authorities must now pump large quantities of liquidity into the economy. A weakening dollar might allow them to do this without a collapse of the yen, but in any case, they have it in their power to stop it rising. A combination of dollar weakness and official action to cap the yen could give a strong boost to the euro, especially if the ECB were to continue to show itself reluctant to cut interest rates. Would this be a desirable outcome? Exports from the zone would come under pressure. But with weak demand in Asia and the US running a large deficit, there is little chance that Europe can export its way out of its unemployment problems. The health of its own economy, and to some extent that of the rest of the world, must depend on domestic growth. However, upward pressure on the euro, if it materialises, would add to the deflationary forces in Europe, and might bring it close to the dangerous spiral of falling prices that afflicts Japan. The euro-zone is not as vulnerable to such deflation as Japan. But in conjunction with the uncertainties that beset the dollar and the US economy, the dangers are real enough. The ECB should do all it can to stimulate growth before it is too late. The Financial Times, Jan. 8, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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