Drip, drip, drip . . . Om K ----- tp://www.federal.com/jan25-99/Blood.html Clinton Responsible for Blood Scandal, Author Claims Interview with "Blood Trail" Author Michael Galster ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By RICKI MAGNUSSEN AND MARVIN LEE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If they have blood, we'll get it." --Dr. Francis "Bud" Henderson on the disease screening procedures employed in the Arkansas prison blood program. Few Americans took note of the small 1995 Associated Press story that linked tainted blood responsible for the death of hundreds of Canadians to Arkansas prisons. In Arkansas, however, a medical practitioner who had worked inside the prison system for years realized the horrible implications. The only way he could tell the story was to write a fictionalized account under a pseudonym. When it was published last year, the story still did not make much of an impact. It was not until he revealed his name and his first-hand knowledge of what had happened in Arkansas prisons more than a decade ago that the story hit the Internet in full force. What has led the recent interest is the potential involvement of then-Governor Bill Clinton. "His name will come into it and the truth is that without his support this group would have been shut down in 1982 when the FDA first came down on them," Michael Galster, author of "Blood Trail [1]" says on Clinton's involvement. "And if that had happened, if they had ceased operation in '82 thousands and thousands of people would have been spared. Now that is the truth. So is he responsible? Yes. Yes he's responsible and so are a lot of other people." Why hasn't this story been investigated long ago? Galster offers a possible explanation: "There are just as many Republicans involved in it as Democrats and that's one of the reasons why the Republicans haven't picked up the story because they don't know what their involvement might be." In an interview with the Washington Weekly, Galster gives the most detailed, penetrating description to date of the events in Arkansas that led to the unfolding contaminated blood disaster: GALSTER: My initial inspiration to do something was May 12 -- I know the exact date -- May 12 of 1995. A very small Associated Press wire story appeared in several newspapers, which I'll summarize briefly. It said: "Tainted blood responsible for the death of hundreds of Canadians linked to Arkansas prison." This single story really changed my life, because my background was as a medical practitioner years ago in the Arkansas prisons. During those years in the early 1980s, even though I was doing orthopedic work -- so I was totally uninvolved, I didn't have anything to do with the plasma program -- I was seeing more and more sick men for orthopedic problems. And they were also exhibiting signs of other diseases, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, but more especially hepatitis and the precursors to AIDS. And these very same people who were very sick were also telling me that they just donated plasma. Not being in that line of work, unfortunately I assumed that the people in the prison drawing the blood had some technique for cleaning it up. I didn't know enough about plasmapheresis or the plasma program to know the particulars of it. Now, years later, I wish I had investigated it more closely at the time. That's the way the story started for me. When I read this, years later in 1995, I anticipated immediately that there would be a fire storm of articles appearing and investigations undertaken to expose this thing. But there was not one single column inch of editorial or investigative reporting done concerning this story. That was the first and only article that ever appeared. So in the days following, when I finally realized that nothing was going to be done, I told my wife that I really needed to do something and she said, "You know it will be really dangerous to undertake an investigation the way things are in Arkansas," and I said "Yes." QUESTION: In what way dangerous? GALSTER: Well, without getting into a lot of conspiracy theories... there have been a lot of people associated with the Clinton administration who have tried to speak out and they have been eliminated. They've suffered unfortunate death, let's put it that way. Many of these people I knew quite well. And that was obviously a concern of mine. My wife said: "Mike, what would you do if one of our sons were infected with that plasma knowing what you know about it, what would you do?" And I said, just kind of off hand, "Well, I know what I would do," and she said, "Well, write it." That's the way "Blood Trail" came about. I wrote it as a novel, knowing at that point in time actually very little about the story, but knowing very well how things operate in Arkansas. I'm the son of a state trooper, I've been intimately involved with that portion of the state government, in and out of the prison all my life with my dad, and years later after school as a medical professional taking care of patients there. So it's part of my life. And I know the way scams operate here. So I started filling in the blanks and created a story around the facts that I had, and that's the way "Blood Trail" came about. QUESTION: Could you describe in more details the events the book is based on? GALSTER: The book kind of rolls in a lot of my experiences. I worked as a medical missionary, I started out in the Orient, especially in Korea. For the last 15 years I have worked almost exclusively in Central America. I go down 3 to 4 times a year and see patients down in the jungle. And I've had a lot of experiences -- especially during the Contra-Sandinista war in Central America, Honduras and Nicaragua. I have seen a lot of patients during that time, did a lot of flying back and forth. So I drew on all these experiences along with my experiences in the prison taking care of patients, these are things that I used to build the story. But especially I built the story around my childhood and my young adult years in Arkansas. Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I worked as a singing waiter in some of the night spots in Hot Springs that were important in Arkansas political circles. So as a young impressionable teenager I was running into the likes of Clinton and J. W. Fulbright, Bumpers and Pryor and all those guys. The movers and shakers in Arkansas politics. I saw the way things happened, the way meetings took place and the way issues were settled out of court and legislation. So I used a lot of those experiences, along with the normal things people who live in Arkansas grow up with. It's kind of a small intimate state. There were a lot of things that I was exposed to, especially as a son of a state police officer, I was exposed to the good guys and the bad guys. So I wrote a lot of these stories from my childhood into "Blood Trail." Actually, most of the characters in the book were based on several characters, they were a kind of composite of the different people that I have known and worked with, dealt with. The thing that probably inspired me most was when I went to Canada two summers ago, this was after reading the May 12 wire story and starting on the book, actually. Here I met the victims of this tainted blood that came from Arkansas, and I realized that the people that I had grown up with, people that I had worked with, other professionals, law enforcement officers and politicians had brought about this scam that affectedago, this was after reading the May 12 wire story and starting on the book, actually. Here I met the victims of this tainted blood that came from Arkansas, and I realized that the people that I had grown up with, people that I had worked with, other professionals, law enforcement officers and politicians had brought about this scam that affected so many people so tragically. Truly, when I say this, I can't state emotionally enough that it really changed my life to understand that these guys were not dealing with beef cattle or crops or tractors or manual labor, all the things that the prison is noted for scamming in the past. They were dealing with organ transplants, because that's the way we vie I was kind of possessed with finding out how it could have happened, how these people could have been so unethical and immoral to do these things. So that's the way I created the fiction, and then in the subsequent investigation so much of it was proved and, if anything, the things in the book were understated compared with what we found in our investigation. QUESTION: Can you describe what you experienced working in the prison during those years when the plasma program was running? GALSTER: Well, you have to understand that when I was working there I was not seeing any of that because I worked almost exclusively in the hospital through the later years. Most of the blood-letting was done at another facility, it was kept extremely quiet, out of public view, and no one wanted anyone to know that they were taking blood from inmates. The reasons were that they were shut down four different times by the FDA. The other reasons were that it was illegal and unethical to sell prison blood in the United States. So it was very important for the prison to keep this quiet. And there was a third reason why they wanted to keep it quiet. Remember during these years, the early 80s and mid 80s, the AIDS epidemic was soaring and there were all different kinds of information about AIDS and the transmission of AIDS, how deadly it was. At the same time, the media was telling how the prison population, because of its homosexual-type sex activity and IV drug use was one of the worst places, and that AIDS was running around prison populations. So it was important to the Arkansas administration, the Clinton administration, to keep their blood-letting operations very quiet. Many of us who worked there in other areas in the medical business had no idea what they were doing there elsewhere in the prison. The only thing we knew was what the inmates were telling us. That they were donating while at many times so sick they couldn't walk. Now to ask me the same question about what I found out since that time -- what we have done is that we've investigated and visited and interviewed some of the phlebotomists who were hired periodically. A phlebotomist is a guy trained in drawing blood. During those years they did employ a few, they kept them for a period of time until they'd trained the inmates, then they released these people. We've interviewed those people. We've interviewed lots of the inmates who were involved in the donor program. And we've found out horrible things. The first thing is that they were allowed to donate four units a week. Two separate bleedings -- they'd bleed on weekends and then they would bleed again on Wednesdays. So each inmate would donate four units of plasma. <snip <Snip Notes 1. The book "Blood Trail" is now available at a discount through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0915463849/washingtonweeklyA/ 2. The Krever Report is available at: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/krever/index.html 3. Linda Tripp's January 13, 1998 deposition is available at: http://www.judicialwatch.org/new/tripp_depo/tripp3.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published in the Jan. 25, 1999 issue of The Washington Weekly. Copyright © 1999 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com). Reposting permitted with this message intact.
http://www.nypostonline.com/commentary/2153.htm COMMENTARY A VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY? By SAM DEALEY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHEN Larry Flynt went public with the ''hypocrisy'' of Rep. Bob Barr, exposing him as a past adulterer and one of the ''biggest horn dogs in Congress,'' the Georgia Republican seemed certain the White House was in part behind the matter. ''I don't think that one can look at this situation with the close ties ... between the private investigators, the White House, between Sidney Blumenthal and these folks on the outside and come away with any other reasonable conclusion other than the fact that this is part of an overall scheme,'' Barr said. Other Republicans chimed in. But, as it has with similar charges these past few months, the White House denied the allegations and demanded that Republicans produce proof. ''If they've got evidence, they ought to bring it forward,'' said presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart. ''If not, they ought to knock it off.'' Reporters, too, questioned whether the president's inner circle was passing on dirt. Were White House aides involved? they asked Flynt. ''The only connection that I have got with Bill Clinton is that I voted for him twice. I've never met the man. I've never been to the White House.'' Presidential pit-bull James Carville? ''Well of course I am friends with James, we made a movie together ... But I've never discussed what I am doing with James.'' How about Clinton dirt-digger Terry Lenzner? ''No.'' But asked if he knew Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Flynt said, ''I haven't seen Strobe Talbott in years. ... But he is married to a sister of a very good friend of mine.'' Surprisingly, that red flag went unnoticed. So who is Talbott's brother-in-law? His name is Cody Shearer, and a review of his White House connections reveals the possible workings of a new plumber operation. A self-styled ''free-lance journalist'' (although he hasn't published in nearly a decade), Shearer is a former business associate of Terry Lenzner's Investigative Group International - the premier opposition-research firm that Dick Morris calls ''the White House secret police.'' Lenzner's connections with Clinton go to the seamier side of politics. The Clinton campaign hired his firm in 1992 to do ''opposition research,'' a euphemism for dirt-digging. Since '94, the president's personal lawyers have had Lenzner on the payroll, reportedly searching under the beds and sniffing through the panties-drawers of Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and members of Hillary's ''Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy,'' including Starr's team. Lenzner and Shearer are also old tennis buddies from Washington's tony St. Albans Tennis Club. Shearer's a close friend of Sidney Blumenthal's, too, according to published accounts. Could Shearer be passing Flynt the goods on GOP members? Neither Shearer nor Flynt returned calls seeking comment. But if this was the case, it wouldn't be the first time Shearer smeared a Clinton critic. In 1997, Cody Shearer tried to broker a deal between Lenzner and the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribes to investigate the Senate's Deputy Whip, Don Nickles (R-Okla.), who was a member of the committee probing an alleged shakedown of Indian tribes by the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. (Lenzner demanded $17,000 for the job, but tribal leaders ultimately decided not to hire him.) Shearer has tried to ingratiate himself with this White House before. Last summer, the State Department learned he was doing some free-lance negotiatingwith Serb and Muslim leaders on partitioning Bosnia - all while claiming he had the backing of the Clinton administration. Talbott himself had to write his brother-in-law to tell him to knock it off. The Shearer connections with the White House don't end there. Cody's twin sister Brooke - Strobe Talbott's wife - has been a friend of Hillary's since their college days. Brooke used to work for Terry Lenzner as an investigator, where her specialty was dumpster-diving, the fine art of sifting through the trash, and she reportedly remains in close contact with her old boss. Brooke joined the Clinton's 1992 campaign as an aide to Hillary. ''Sometimes at the end of the day, when Bill telephoned,'' she reminisced of the campaign, ''we'd be laughing so loud, doing imitations and carrying on, that he'd say, 'You guys sound like you're having a lot more fun than I am.''' After the campaign, she headed up Hillary's White House fellows program, and later moved on to become a senior advisor to the Interior Department. The Shearer family has yet another relative close to the president: Cody and Brooke's brother, Derek, an old Oxford chum of Bill's. They've kept up over the years: Derek Shearer played an instrumental role in the 1992 campaign. After serving on the transition team, he took a job at the Commerce Department, and was later awarded the ambassadorship to Finland. ''I want to be known as the ambassador who brought Ben and Jerry's to Finland,'' he said. And then there's Strobe Talbott himself. He also roomed at Oxford with Bill Clinton while they were both Rhodes Scholars, and went on to Yale Grad School when both Clintons were at Yale Law. Prior to joining the Clinton administration, Talbott was a Time columnist who carried a lot of water for his old pal's 1992 presidential campaign. Days after the Lewinsky story broke, ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos first warned of a possible scorched-earth defense: ''The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him.'' Could this be the makings of a not-so-vast left-wing conspiracy, or is it all Shearer coincidence? --- Sam Dealey is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator. --- Floyd Flake returns next week.
