TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1998

Just when you're certain you've heard about and explored every conceivable crime to which President Clinton has been a party, another bombshell drops.

Like so many other Clinton administration scandals, this one still hasn't been broken in the establishment U.S. press, but it has been covered extensively in Canadian papers -- from the Calgary Sun to the Ottawa Citizen. Those reports have also appeared in WorldNetDaily, bringing this story to the attention of radio talk-show hosts throughout America.

Here's the story: In the early 1980s, while Bill Clinton was serving as governor of Arkansas, his administration awarded a contract to Health Management Associates to provide medical care to the state's prisoners. The president of the company was, naturally, a long-time friend and political ally of Clinton and was later appointed by him to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Later, he was among the senior members of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial re-election team.

As part of the deal HMA struck with Arkansas, in addition to treating the prisoners, the company collected their blood and sold it. Because of the exploding AIDS crisis, U.S. regulations didn't permit the sale of prisoners' blood within the country. But HMA found a willing buyer in Montreal, which brokered a deal with Connaught, a Toronto blood-fractionator, which didn't know the source of the supplies. The blood was distributed throughout Canada by the Red Cross. Sales continued until 1983, when HMA revealed that some of the plasma might be contaminated with the AIDS virus and hepatitis. The blood was also peddled overseas.

Now the lid has been blown off this scandal by Michael Galster, who conducted orthopedic clinics in the Arkansas prison system during the period the blood was collected. Afraid to tell the story any other way, Galster authored a thinly veiled fictional book called "Blood Trail," which tells the story of an Arkansas governor's role in the mega-scandal -- an Arkansas governor, by the way, who later becomes president.

Galster charges HMA officials knew the blood was tainted as they sold it to Canada and a half-dozen other foreign countries. He also alleges that Clinton knew of the scheme and likely benefited from it financially.

"We now have solid evidence he not only knew about it, but he signed off on it," Galster told the Calgary Sun.

Galster says Clinton organized a payoff plan to various officials, including a judge, to make sure the blood sales continued. He claims millions were made from the conspiracy because between 5,000 and 8,000 units of blood were shipped every week from one prison alone. He has eyewitness reports that inmates were even drawing blood from each other with dirty needles.

So fearful of the dreaded Clinton attack machine was Galster, that he wrote the book under a pen name, Michael Sullivan. But now, as of last week, he has gone public with his story.

"Knowing the nature of politics in Arkansas, I felt unsafely exposed," said Galster.

Galster is understandably frustrated with the unwillingness of the U.S. media to seize on this latest Clinton scandal -- even as the impeachment process begins to move forward.

"If you would just listen to all of the dying people out there, you would understand that there are much greater atrocities than a sexual liaison in the Oval Office," he told the Ottawa Citizen.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are now investigating the blood trail, but Galster is frustrated that the FBI has not yet conducted a probe. I have some advice for Galster on that front: Don't hold your breath.

If even a small percentage of Galster's accusations are true -- and I have no doubt they are -- this is criminal behavior tantamount to mass murder. No one is certain how many people in Canada and other foreign countries died as a result of infections from the bad blood. It may have been hundreds. It may be thousands.

It's worth pointing out, however, that even if the catastrophe was all the result of innocent mistakes, Clinton is the president who wanted to take over the U.S. health-care system -- to nationalize it and, presumably, run it as efficiently and humanely as he and his friends in Arkansas did in the 1980s.

Can you imagine the kind of holocaust such a system would have wrought on America?