According to a Huffington Post blogger , Clinton cronies are set to mention Senator Barack Obama's past and his use of cocaine, but this proves how the Clinton Camp is starting to panic and for two reasons:
1) It opens up the question of Senator Clinton and any past drug use she may have done. (Important, because Senator Obama is not covering up his past; what about Clinton?)
2) Now Senator Clinton has to answer -- again -- for the MENA controversy, which is expresses in this video:
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
The video's description reads:
An independent group of researchers in Arkansas are charging that Governor Bill Clinton is covering up an airport used by the CIA and major cocaine smugglers in a remote corner of the Ozark mountains. According to Deborah Robinson of In These Times, the Inter mountain Regional Airport in Mena,Arkansas continues to be the hub of operations for people like assassinated cocaine kingpin Barry Seal as well as government intelligence operations linked to arms and drug smuggling.
In the 1980's, the Mena airport became one of the world's largest aircraft refurbishing centers, providing services to planes from many countries.Researchers claim that the largest consumers of aircraft refurbishing services are drug smugglers and intelligence agencies involved in covert activities.In fact, residents of Mena, Arkansas, have told reporters that former marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North was a frequent visitor during the 1980's. Eugene Hasenfus, a pilot who was shot down in a Contra supply plane over Nicaragua in 1986, was also seen in town renting cargo vehicles.
A federal Grand Jury looking into activities at the Mena airport refused to hand down any indictments after drug running charges were made public.Deborah Robinson says that Clinton had "ignored the situation" until he began his presidential campaign." Clinton then said he would provide money for a state run investigation of the Mena airport. But according to Robinson, the promise of an investigation was never followed up by Clinton's staff. In fact, a local Arkansas state prosecutor blasted Clinton's promise of an investigation, comparing it to "spitting on a forest fire."
...and in this Salon article , where the makers of the video "Citizens for Honest Government" paid their sources, which taints their claims, but one of the allegations is of President Clinton's cocaine use and the person behind the story is sticking to it.
Here's the article below, in full:
Among the allegations spread by Citizens for Honest Government's paid "expert witnesses" was that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, provided protection for the cocaine trade.
Beginning in late 1993, Nichols and three other individuals who received payments from Citizens told the press that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, ordered state law enforcement officials to turn a blind eye to a cocaine trafficking ring operating out of Mena, a small Arkansas airport 120 miles west of Little Rock. Nichols and the group's other paid "witnesses" alleged that Clinton protected the cocaine operation because one of the ring's backers was a Clinton campaign contributor. They also alleged the drug smuggling ring was connected to a covert U.S. intelligence operation in Central America.
The allegations quickly found their way to talk radio programs and onto the Internet and began moving into the mainstream via articles in the American Spectator and the conservative Washington Times.
But what ultimately legitimized the allegations was a series of editorials and articles on the subject that appeared in 1994 on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
Rep. Jim Leach, (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Banking Committee, acknowledged in an interview in the fall of l996 that he had directed his committee staff to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the Mena allegations after first reading about them in the Wall Street Journal.
"I read the Journal editorial page with great interest," Leach told Salon. "They raised some very serious and interesting issues. And I made the decision that it should be an appropriate subject of a committee investigation."
Two committee sources told Salon that House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., also had read about the Mena allegations on the Journal's editorial page and had learned more about them from conservative supporters of his political action committee, GOPAC. Gingrich personally urged that Leach investigate the matter, the sources said.
David Runkel, a spokesman for the House Banking Committee, said that despite an exhaustive two-year investigation, the committee found absolutely no evidence showing any Clinton involvement in Mena drug-smuggling operations. "We engaged in an appropriate inquiry that uncovered valuable information about money laundering and other issues," said Runkel. "Regarding the president, we found no evidence of wrongdoing."
An investigation by the CIA Inspector-General also concluded last year that there was no evidence that Clinton had any role in protecting the Mena cocaine ring. Leach's House Banking Committee requested the CIA investigation.
Rep. Henry Gonzalez, D-Texas, the House Banking Committee's ranking minority member, was highly critical of the investigation. Gonzalez said it took up more than 13,000 staff hours at the Department of Justice -- "the equivalent of about one year's worth of work by eight full-time employees," said Gonzalez.
The request by Leach to have the CIA Inspector-General investigate, Gonzalez said, led to "six [additional] full-time [CIA] people reviewing over 40,000 pages of documents." In addition, four banking committee staffers worked on the probe at the expense of other important committee business, Gonzalez said.
Among those who were cited as sources about the alleged Mena operation in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- and received generous payments from Citizens for Honest Government -- was John Brown, a former deputy sheriff of Saline County, Ark. In l994 and l995, Brown received more than $28,000 from the organization, according to the accounting records. Brown also appeared on a Citizens-produced video about Mena.
"I did investigative work for them," Brown told Salon, adding that Citizens paid him while he worked as a private investigator and not as a police officer.
On Sept. 21, l996, Brown received at least one additional payment of $1,000 from the joint bank account controlled by Matrisciana and Ruddy, according to a copy of the canceled check obtained by Salon.
Another recipient of Citizens funds was Jane Parks of Little Rock. Shortly before the l996 presidential election, the American Spectator published a story by the magazine's editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., that quoted Parks as saying that she had personally witnessed Clinton using cocaine in 1984, while he was governor of Arkansas. At the time, Parks said, she had been resident manager of an upscale Little Rock apartment complex. Parks claimed that her office was subdivided by a flimsy temporary wall. Parks told Tyrrell that she worked on one side of the partition while on the other side, the president's brother, Roger Clinton, maintained a bachelor pad.
"Mrs. Parks observed cocaine being brought into the apartment," Tyrrell wrote. "She also had to relay complaints to Roger about noise from his parties ... She stated: 'Once when I opened the door, Bill Clinton was sitting on the couch. He was staring straight ahead, looking stoned ... There were lines of cocaine on the table in front of him."
Later, she told the London Daily Telegraph that her husband, a private investigator who once did security work for the l992 Clinton presidential campaign, was killed because he had been involved with drug smuggling at the Mena airport. Parks also claimed she found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in the trunk of her late husband's car. She said that her husband had told her that Vincent Foster had directed him to smuggle drugs at Mena.
In l994 and l995, Parks and other members of her family received more than $16,000 from Citizens for Honest Government, according to the organization's accounting records. In 1995 Parks received an additional $6,000 from the joint bank account maintained by Nichols and Patterson, according to records and individuals with direct knowledge of the transactions.
Parks declined to comment for this article, but her son told Salon that she stands by her stories.
A former employee of the American Spectator told Salon that Tyrrell had several conversations with conservative activists in the closing days of the l996 presidential race to discuss ways to publicize Parks' charges against Clinton. The former employee said in an interview that "a lot of us had serious questions about the 'the president is a cocaine addict story,' and [Tyrrell's] sources ... But he does believe in these things, and it is his magazine."
Tyrrell did not return several phone calls from Salon.
A massive can of worms.
