Posted on 07/12/2005 12:02:46 PM PDT by Richard Poe
HILLARY'S SECRET WAR
The Shadow Team
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If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on.
By Richard Poe
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
During the last presidential campaign, on Dec. 1, 2003, Diane Rehm of National Public Radio interviewed Howard Dean, who was then still running for president. A caller accused the Bush White House of "stonewalling" the 9-11 investigation. The following exchange ensued:
Caller: Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9-11 and not stonewalling?
Howard Dean: Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9-11.
Diane Rehm: Why do you think he is suppressing that report?
Howard Dean: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.
Like so many high-ranking Democrats today, Howard Dean – who now serves as chairman of the Democratic National Committee – does not shrink from publicly speculating on the possible complicity of President Bush in the mass murders of 9-11.
By contrast, most conservatives – whether in or out of public life – long ago abandoned any effort to investigate the "Clinton body count." The topic has become taboo.
With Hillary all but certain to run for president in 2008, that taboo needs to be lifted. No critique of Mrs. Clinton can lay claim to thoroughness without addressing these darkest of allegations against the Clinton White House.
As noted previously, the secret "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" report makes clear that Hillary feared the Internet in 1995 chiefly because it served as a conduit for speculation regarding the Clinton body count – the growing number of Clinton critics, whistleblowers, former lovers, business associates and eyewitnesses to Clinton scandals of one sort or another who had been threatened, beaten, murdered or, in several cases, reportedly committed suicide.
The Clintons were hardly settled in the White House when Internet chatter about the "body count" began spilling over into mainstream media – into foreign media, that is. Most U.S. journalists were no more willing to touch the story in the early '90s than they are now.
"[A] peculiar pattern of suicides and violence surrounds people connected to the Clintons or their associates," noted the staid British journal the Economist on July 9, 1994. "It may be no more than coincidence, but it prompts questions."
Why so many people with knowledge of Clinton scandals met sudden and often violent deaths remains a mystery. Perhaps the Clintons were just lucky. Whatever the reason, the "peculiar pattern of suicides and violence" that surrounded the Clintons was an open secret in Washington from the earliest days of their co-presidency.
When covering Clinton scandals, journalists in the know feared for their safety. The most widely publicized case of journalist-bashing on the Clinton beat involved L.J. Davis, a contributing editor of Harper's magazine. New Republic Editor Andrew Sullivan dispatched Davis to Little Rock, Ark., to look into the Whitewater scandal. Davis produced a brilliant report titled, "The Name of the Rose."
Published April 4, 1994, Davis' nine-page cover story artfully untangled the spaghetti-like business relationships that bound the Clintons and the Rose Law Firm to an elusive, global network of money launderers, drug runners, and S&L pillagers, many with links to the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
Davis told New York Post columnist Deroy Murdock that a "high government official" in Washington had warned him against lingering too long in Little Rock. "You've gotten into a red zone," said the official. "Work your ass off and get out of there as fast as possible."
Davis did not get out fast enough.
At about 6:30 p.m., on Feb. 14, 1994 – St. Valentine's Day – Davis went to his room in the Legacy Hotel and unlocked the door. The next thing he remembers is waking up four hours later with a lump "the size of a darning needle over my left ear." Davis' doctor told the Wall Street Journal that the wound was not consistent with a fall, but looked more as if Davis had been struck with a blunt object. The hapless journalist suffered a concussion and a blood clot on the brain, for which he was given medication.
Davis' watch and wallet were not stolen, but several pages of his notebook had been torn half through, as if someone had been rifling through them.
Davis bravely stayed on in Little Rock until his work was done. But things got stranger by the day. On March 8, Davis e-mailed a partial draft of his story to the New Republic. The phone rang in his hotel room three hours later.
"What you're doing makes [Iran-Contra Independent Counsel] Lawrence Walsh look like a rank amateur," said a man's voice.
"Who is this?" asked Davis.
"Seems to me you've got your bell rung too many times. But did you hear what I said?" the man continued.
"Yes, I did," Davis replied. The mystery caller hung up.
The man's remarks, especially his crack about Lawrence Walsh, seemed to indicate that he had intercepted and read Davis' draft. "Somebody seems to be reading my computer transmissions," Davis told Murdock. "Whoever called me knew what I'd just sent to the New Republic."
Hillary's War Room
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton strategists famously huddled in a so-called "War Room" under Hillary's direction. It was Hillary who gave the War Room its name. Later, Hillary designated the White House office where she directed Shadow Team operations as a "War Room." In December 2004, Democrats set up a "War Room" in the U.S. Senate, in obvious emulation of Hillary's longstanding practice. Outraged by this affront to the Senate's collegial tradition, Republicans responded by setting up a "Peace Room."
What goes on in these war rooms? Regarding the original 1992 War Room, the Washington Post reported:
The War Room was set up to gather as much intelligence as possible and quickly turn it to Clinton's advantage. Campaign advisers tried to anticipate what stories reporters were working on in hopes of shaping those stories before they were written. James Carville and others combed through daily news media reports like intelligence analysts, trying to ferret out information that would help them figure it out.
By some accounts, the War Room's activities were far less innocuous than those described in the Washington Post. In Judicial Watch's lawsuit on behalf of former Clinton lover Gennifer Flowers, Larry Klayman – who at that time headed Judicial Watch – charged that "Mrs. Clinton ... conceived of, ran, and used the War Room to smear, defame and harm perceived adversaries ..."
Could it be that illegal wiretapping, such as L.J. Davis experienced, was one of the methods the War Room used to "anticipate what stories reporters were working on," as the Washington Post so daintily put it? Could it be that cold-cocking journalists in hotel corridors was one of its techniques for "shaping" stories "before they were written?" We can only speculate.
Such speculation acquires a keener edge, however, when we consider some of the personnel whom Hillary recruited for her black operations.
The Chokehold
In his 1996 book, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," journalist David Brock notes that Hillary exerted her power chiefly through the White House counsel's office. "Hillary was the de facto [White House] counsel," he writes. "Through her control of the counsel's office, which functions as the president's in-house law firm, Hillary had a chokehold on the entire government."
In order to tighten her "chokehold," Hillary set up what Brock calls a "Shadow Counsel's office" – working parallel to the ordinary White House counsel's office, but answering directly to Hillary loyalist Harold McEwan Ickes (pronounced ICK-eez).
Ickes was well-suited to the task of heading this secretive operation. As a New York labor lawyer, Ickes had represented numerous corrupt unions controlled by the Gambino, Colombo, Genovese, Lucchese and other organized crime families. His work on behalf of gangsters and labor racketeers brought him perilously close to prosecution, but Ickes displayed a Houdini-like gift for evading the authorities. "There are more than a couple of prosecutors in this city who believe that the only thing separating Harold Ickes and a jail cell is his ability to go strong and silent in the face of tough questions," noted New York Post columnist Mike McAlary in 1993.
Ickes' personal loyalty to Hillary is impressive. He ran her successful Senate campaign in 2000 and continues serving her today as the Shadow Party's de facto CEO.
A former New Left militant during the '60s, Ickes traveled in 1965 to the Dominican Republic, where a junta of left-wing colonels was trying to restore deposed President Juan Bosch to power. Bosch was a socialist who had spent two years of his exile in Castro's revolutionary Cuba.
Fearful that the Dominican Republic would go the way of Cuba, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched 22,000 Marines to the island nation on April 29, 1965. After fierce fighting, the leftist colonels were beaten. The socialist Bosch stood for election on June 1, 1966, losing to the pro-American candidate Joaquin Balaguer, who took 56.3 percent of the vote.
Ickes' role in these events is obscure. In an Oct. 15, 1994, profile on Ickes, the Boston Globe stated:
[H]aving traveled to the Dominican Republic to help deposed leftist president Juan Bosch return to office, [Ickes] was present when Lyndon Johnson – citing a communist threat – dispatched the U.S. Marines to occupy the country and keep Bosch and his rebels from power. After touring Latin America, Ickes came home and joined the anti-war movement ..."
The Globe did not explain by what means Ickes sought to "help" Bosch and his leftist colonels "return to office." However, the episode suggests that Ickes' involvement with the far left went beyond the ordinary civil-rights activism and anti-Vietnam protests, which most of his journalistic profiles cite. Whether as a Mob lawyer or a covert participant in Latin American coups, Ickes has spent more than 40 years living and working in the company of killers.
Hillary's Private Eyes
A significant portion of the Shadow Team's operations were carried out by private investigators, among them: Terry Lenzner, founder and chairman of the powerful Washington, D.C., detective firm Investigative Group International; high-ticket San Francisco private eye Jack Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland; and Hollywood sleuth Anthony J. Pellicano.
Former congressional investigator Barbara Olson writes that, "In the political life of the Clintons, it was she [Hillary] who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists."
Hillary's detectives engaged in "a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public," former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998.
Hillary's secret police tend to be a tight-lipped bunch, professionally skilled at keeping a low profile. However, we know more about Anthony "The Pelican" Pellicano than about most Hillary operatives, thanks to his boastfulness and taste for the limelight. Pellicano's violent career as a private investigator reveals much about the sorts of qualifications Hillary sought in her Shadow Team.
In the January 1992 issue of GQ magazine, Pellicano boasted of the dirty work he had performed for his clients, including blackmail and physical assault. He claimed to have beaten one of his client's enemies with a baseball bat. "I'm an expert with a knife," said Pellicano. "I can shred your face with a knife."
FBI agents raided Pellicano's West Hollywood office on Nov. 22, 2002, and arrested him on federal weapons charges. In his office, they found gold, jewelry, and about $200,000 in cash – most of it bundled in $10,000 wrappers – thousands of pages of transcripts of illegal wiretaps; two handguns; and various explosive devices stored in safes, including two live hand grenades and a pile of C4 plastic explosive, complete with blasting cap and detonation cord.
C4 is a military explosive that cannot be sold legally to civilians. Pellicano had a surprisingly large quantity in his safe. "The explosive could easily be used to blow up a car, and was in fact strong enough to bring down an airplane," noted Special Agent Stanley Ornellas in a sworn affidavit.
The FBI raided Pellicano's office after an accomplice ratted him out. Ex-convict Alexander Proctor told the FBI that Pellicano had hired him to threaten and intimidate Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had been poking her nose a little too deeply into a feud between Mafia kingpins and actor Steven Seagal. It seems that Seagal's former friend and production partner, Julius R. Nasso, was tied to the Gambino crime family. When Seagal and Nasso quarreled, the dispute got ugly.
Rough stuff
On the morning of June 20, 2002, reporter Anita Busch approached her car, which was parked near her home. To her horror, she saw a bullet-hole in her windshield. A cardboard sign taped to the glass bore one word: "Stop." A dead fish with a long-stemmed rose in its mouth lay on the hood.
Busch took the hint. She immediately went into hiding, staying in a series of hotels at her paper's expense, while the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Deprtment's organized-crime division investigated.
A break in the case seemed to come when ex-convict Alexander Proctor spilled the beans to an undercover FBI informant. Proctor reportedly told the informant, on tape, that it was not the Mafia who were harassing Anita Busch – it was Steven Seagal! Proctor said that Seagal hired detective Anthony Pellicano to intimidate the woman into silence. Pellicano, in turn, had subcontracted Proctor to do the dirty work.
"He wanted to make it look like the Italians were putting the hit on her, so it wouldn't reflect on Seagal," Proctor told the informant. Proctor accused Pellicano of ordering him to "blow up" or set fire to Busch's car to frighten her. However, Proctor said he got cold feet and merely damaged the car, leaving the dead fish and "Stop" sign as calling cards.
A federal judge sentenced Pellicano to 30 months in prison for possession of the hand grenades and C4. Later, on June 17, 2005, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley charged him with conspiracy and making threats against former Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch. He will likely face prosecution for illegal wiretapping.
Pellicano's 2002 arrest was big news in Hollywood. Article after article touted Pellicano as a "celebrity sleuth" and a "private detective to the stars," whose client list had included the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Roseanne Barr, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson (whose chronic problem with child molestation charges provided Pellicano with plenty of damage-control work).
Despite the sensational coverage, few mainstream news organizations uttered the name of Pellicano's most famous client: Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Of the more than two dozen media reports on Pellicano's Thursday arrest so far, none have mentioned his ties to the Clinton attack machine," reported NewsMax on Nov. 23, 2002."
A detailed, 1,680-word round-up of the Pellicano case published in the New York Times on Nov. 11, 2003 – a full year after his arrest – made no mention of Hillary's name, nor even hinted at Pellicano's White House connection. Only Internet media such as NewsMax.com focused relentlessly on his Clinton ties.
The omission was deliberate. Pellicano's involvement in Clinton damage-control operations – including his well-known efforts to discredit former Clinton lovers Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky – has been public knowledge for years, the details available to any journalist with a Nexis account.
The taint of violent criminality that infected Hillary's Shadow Team cannot be denied. Pellicano's arrest and conviction – not to mention Harold Ickes' Mob law practice – speak for themselves.
Less clear are some of the specific uses to which Hillary put her Shadow Team. Here, we must enter the realm of deduction and speculation – an endeavor of which Howard Dean and his fellow Democrats would surely approve – and one which leads us inexorably to that most perplexing of Clinton mysteries: the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.
Richard Poe is the investigative editor of David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, as well as managing editor of Horowitz's group blog Moonbat Central. The views expressed in Poe's book, "Hillary's Secret War," are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
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