"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" 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 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 view blood transfusions, as organ transplants. This is what they were dealing with. They should have never been allowed to deal with it. When you look at this and you realize that these were guys that I knew really, really well and that they were responsible for this, it impacted me and it really changed the course of the book as I was writing it.
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.
This plasma was sold at a minimum price of $50 a unit. So every inmate in the prison who donated plasma was worth roughly $200 a week to them. So you can start doing the numbers on this -- this was a huge money making operation for them. For the bleedings, inmates received $5 or $7 per unit which was paid either in blood scrip, which was a kind of prison issued money that they exchanged for cigarettes and things at the commissary. It also became a medium for getting drugs within the prison. Also, inmates were responsible for handing out painkilling drugs for many of those years, and that was the other incentive for donating plasma. So it became a business to trade Percodan and other narcotics for their "bleeding rights."
A very bizarre surrealistic exchange system developed completely around the blood program. So bizarre that it really deserves a story of it's own. For instance -- inmates always wanted to go bleed because they were taken out of the regular confines and sent to another part of the prison, which was under a little less control. It was pretty much monitored by other inmate trustees. During those times they were able to have sex with one another. Many of them told us that this was when a lot of the homosexual acts occurred, because there were many cubicles that they could ease into and have their sexual liaisons.
This creates the ultimate horrible image in your mind about what in the hell was going on there. Here these guys were sick and infected with numerous types of diseases, but most especially hepatitis and AIDS. Some of them were so sick that they couldn't walk but actually wheeled into the bleeding areas in wheelchairs. They were allowed to bleed during that time. Money exchanges, drug exchanges and sexual exchanges occurred. And then they would go back to their barracks.
The stories that the inmates and the phlebotomists tell us are horror stories. Reusing the needles, for instance. They would use the needles 7 to 10 times before they'd use a new needle. This obviously cross-contaminated the donors so instead of there being just a few infected, as it happens in a normal prison population, many, many of them became infected because of absolutely atrocious medical practices. And you ask "Why would that be done?" Well, because the inmates would be left to run the program. Also, when they run a plasma program they draw the whole blood out of your arm, they leave the needle in place, they take the whole bag and spin it in a centrifuge and that separates out the plasma, which is a yellow liquid, and they are supposed to come back and reinject the red blood cells -- the red portion of the blood -- back into your veins. Many times they would come back to the wrong person and inject someone else's platelets and red blood cells into their body and of course dependent on the Rh factor, this could cause an immediate shock, plasma shock to the person. They'd have to rush them off to the emergency room to save their lives.
The ones that were lucky enough not to have a plasma shock from a bad Rh would still suffer the contamination of whoever's blood they received. So if they had AIDS or hepatitis it was passed on.
You know it was these kind of stories that shocked us when we carried out our investigation. That was something that I didn't put in the book because I didn't know about it and couldn't even imagine that it was that bad.
Most importantly, there were the sick inmates who were allowed and encouraged and intimidated to come bleed. We have state police documents that show how the overall director of the prison was using his guards, making his guards intimidate the prisoners who were reluctant to go to the bleedings. I mean, everyone was involved, everyone was making money out of this and they saw to it that anyone that was in prison who was able to lie on a table was bled.
We had a doctor in Little Rock who was there during those years -- not in the plasma program but he went over to visit and he asked Dr. Henderson, the medical head of HMA, the group that was doing all this, he said: "Dr. Henderson, it kind of disturbs me that some of the people I saw on your program are allowed to bleed. What is your protocol, what are your standards, your prerequisites for allowing someone to bleed?" And Dr. Henderson looked at him and smiled and said, "The prerequisite is that if they have blood, we'll get it." You know, to hear this man, who is a practicing physician in Little Rock, make this statement -- it really floored me. That's the kind of operation that was being run in the prison and the results of it are these thousands of infected people.
Inadequate Screening Procedures
QUESTION: The book describes that it was a single event where a load of blood was not screened that caused the infections in Canada. How does that correspond to what happened in real life?
GALSTER: When I wrote the book, I didn't know. But this I knew: I knew for a fact that there were infected people there, that inmates were infected. I knew we had AIDS cases even though the prison wouldn't admit it. You would laugh if you saw the public statements about it. For instance statements like "We don't have homosexuality in the prison." Right! The first prison in the world that doesn't have it. And then, first, they admitted that they did have homosexual-type activity. They said "But we don't have AIDS." And then when they found out that they had AIDS they didn't admit it. They admitted that they had HIV but the statement on paper said "but there's no proof the HIV leads to AIDS and there is no proof that AIDS can be transmitted between people," all these brilliant statements, but the entire medical world was speaking against it.
So I knew that we had AIDS and I knew we had a tremendous population of hepatitis, all the various forms of it. I knew we had tuberculosis because I'd been dealing with that for years. I knew we had every flavor of venereal diseases in the world. So I knew we had sick people and I knew that they were donating blood. I also knew that they weren't being tested because the inmates said that they weren't being tested. I would ask them, you know, "Didn't they do some kind of screen on you?" and they would say, "Oh yes, here's the screen: they sit you down and another inmate would sit down with a pad and he's in charge of the program and he says 'are you an IV drug user?' and you say no and he says 'are you a homosexual?' and you say no and he says 'are you sick?' and you say no, and then you get to give blood,'" and I said "That's it? That's the screening?" So when HMA and all these people were interviewed they said, "Oh, yes, we screened everyone," and they did. They asked them those three questions. That was it!
Now where it gets confusing is to understand the tests available during those years you are talking about. We did not have a good test for AIDS. We still don't have a perfect test but it's pretty close. But we did not have a good test until '86, '87. But what we had was a test for hepatitis B. If you are tested positive for hepatitis on that test there's about 85% chance that you have AIDS. So that was used along with the ALT test to give good indications that that person had AIDS. That was available to us in the very early 80's. But it was an expense. You know, it would cost money per unit to test. So that was the problem. Another problem was that if just one unit was infected it would contaminate the whole lot. In other words, they would take your plasma and my plasma and throw it all into a huge vat as big as a room with anything from 20,000 to 60,000 units in each vat. So if you had one infected unit you potentially infected the whole vat. This was then processed into the products such as Factor VIII, which is a clotting agent that hemophiliacs inject. That's why 100% of the hemophiliacs in America are infected with hepatitis C! These are the CDC numbers, not mine. 85% are infected with AIDS! Many of them have already died. 20,000 people who received general blood transfusions contracted AIDS during those years! Fewer than 5000 are still alive.
Not Limited to Canada
So this didn't just hit Canada. Our evidence points to that this blood went to Canada and came back to the United States. It went to Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan and other places. So it's a mistake to think that it only went to Canada and only Canadians were sick. That's not true. And it wasn't just single instances. This place bled inmates until 1992! Until Clinton went to the White House. So you can see the potential for infections. In fact, when you see the volumes they were taking, you can certainly see how it can create massive infections, in fact epidemics, in fact genocide.
QUESTION: Wasn't there any way to treat the blood?
GALSTER: No. Around 1980 a German firm developed a process which became known as the wet-heat treating process. What they'd done was that they'd run the plasma under a vacuum at a certain temperature for a certain time and they would almost kill 100% of the viral content of the plasma. And they had this available and they sent out notices to all the pharmaceutical companies and to everybody that could possible use it. And for the most part, they ignored it. That's the first of many large mistakes.
The reason why they ignored it was that it was an added expense to do that. By the end of 1983, the pharmaceutical companies involved here in United States decided that they'd come up with a process that was much cheaper to do and they called it the dry-heated process. What they did was to dehydrate the plasma, take all the water out of it, and then subject it to heat for a certain period of time and then rehydrate it. And they claimed it was safe, that it was free of viral contaminants. And they promoted it that way.
There was only one problem: that it wasn't safe. We've got copies of internal papers from those companies that state that they knew that they didn't have a good process. But they marketed it anyway. This was done until 1987, when by that time there had been so many of these infections and so many people getting sick and so many had died that the law suits were starting to erupt. Then they switched over to the wet-heat treating process. So when we talk about those people infected, the years that are important for me as an ethical caring person, are the years from 1980 to 1987. After that there were methods available that people began employing that made the plasma fairly safe. But before that, we had people ignoring good scientific documentation, scientific evidence, for instance, the evidence that stated that AIDS was blood-borne. Things we knew all along, they ignored all that. They ignored the available testing and the list goes on and on and on. And those are the people, in my opinion, who need to answer for all this.
The Vince Foster Connection
QUESTION: There are a lot of different characters in your book and some of them are quite similar to people in real life. Among others there is a character that is very similar to Vince Foster. Can you describe your dealings with Vince Foster at that time?
GALSTER: I remember the day when I was thinking about that twist in the plot and Mr. Foster came to mind as I was forming that character, simply because years before, in dealing with HMA in the prison, Mr. Foster contacted me. You have to understand that HMA were notorious for other things, other than the plasma program. They were notorious for hiring doctors who had lost their licenses and had fallen into disgrace in many different ways, drug addicts, alcoholics, guys who had had malpractice suits that had put them out of business. And HMA would find these guys, bring them into Arkansas where the medical board would turn their heads and give them a temporary license, that was against the law, and they'd go work for HMA at the prison.
Well because of all that you can imagine what kind of medicine was practiced out there. And in this particular instance -- one of the things the inmates would do in order to get narcotics was that they'd take a straw and make a tiny cut in their leg or their arm and spit into the straw and blow it up under the skin, just a little bit of spit under the skin. This would cause a terrific infection. Really horrible. It looks like a snake bite because of the bacteria that live in our mouth. After two or three days, these things were life threatening. Well, the inmates would do this so that someone would have to come in and do surgery on the leg and open it up and clean it. They would receive morphine or Demerol. These idiots would do this just to get a charge of narcotics. What they didn't know was that some of these doctors were totally inept in taking care of them.
One guy did this, and his doctor, who happened to be a drug addict, mistreated him, and ended up amputating his leg at the hip -- literally at the hip -- he took the leg completely off. In my business that's one of the worst amputations that you can suffer. I was out of the system at the time, I had already quit because of other reasons. HMA contacted me and asked me if I would come in and look at that case because they had all kinds of difficulties, and I refused.
After a few weeks I was contacted by Mr. Foster, who I knew and had met several years before, and he asked if he could ask me to take a look at this case. And I said: "Well, I've already turned it down," and he said: "No, I'm asking a special favor, if you'd take a look at this," and I said: "Well, send the patient over now, and I'll look at it." They did and I did and he [Foster] came down to visit with me here at my office, and he said: "Well, do you think that you can help us out?" and I said, "Well what exactly do you want me to do?" and he said, "Well with your expertise we would like you to do the absolute best job you can with this patient, provide him with the best prosthesis available, money is no object, but we want you to bring his family in and visit with him and really smooth things over with them and see if we can get these people satisfied. And I said, "Now, why are you taking an interest in this?" and he said, "Because they have filed suit against HMA and the Clinton administration and everyone involved over this issue because this doctor amputated his leg." And I said, "Well, in light of what I'm saying on the case I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole." He said, "You really need to reconsider," and I said, "No, this man certainly needs whatever he can settle for because he was rigorously harmed and he will never regain this leg. He will be a hip disarticulation patient for the rest of his life and this should not have happened. Your people were involved and they should be sued."
Foster was very nice. He said, "Oh, you're certain that you won't reconsider?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "Well, I understand, actually, but I must inform you that it's probably going to make it very difficult for you ever to get another state contract here in Arkansas," and I said, "Well, that's fine because I don't ever want another state contract." We shook hands -- a very nice guy -- and he said, "Thanks for taking your time, send me the bill for doing the review on this," and that was it. That case went on to be settled out of court, actually. I think the initial suit was something like $12 million. It was against Bill Clinton and HMA and everyone involved. The settlement in court was sealed and bound and never made public, only that it had been settled, and no amount given.
I was always intrigued by that. And then when Foster died, it always bothered me because my main contact with him had this single incident. And I always wondered what caused him to kill himself or what caused him to be killed. What could have been so important, so terrible? And then, when I found out in '95 what had happened and then in '96 as I was writing the story, I found out that in '93 when Foster died, all of this was hitting the fan in Canada. Here were all of these infected people, they were raising hell with their doctors, with the Red Cross, with the government. And their government naturally had to be coming back, knowing the link to Arkansas, they had to be searching for what the hell happened. In doing that they would have gone to the state here, they should have found all of the records from Clinton's gubernatorial days. But the twelve years of records were no longer here. He took every one of them with him. Finding that out they would have contacted his legal counsel. It would have been Vincent Foster. Here Foster would have received the call knowing that they were implicated, knowing he was implicated, knowing that Clinton and all of the administration was implicated in this. It must have been a terrific blow to him.
I happen to think that he was a decent guy. He was wrapped up with the wrong people. And I think that the news certainly would have created a great deal of stress for him. I played up the scene as if he was getting ready to go forward to the Canadians and tell the story and set up some sort of reparations for them, and for that he was eliminated. That was certainly imagination on my part but based on my dealings with him.
QUESTION: And now evidence has come out that an anonymous man called the White House just after Foster's death to report that Foster was involved in a blood scandal.
GALSTER: Yes, in fact almost the exact scenario out of my book.
QUESTION: Were you aware of that when you wrote the book?
GALSTER: No, I wasn't. Everybody is aware of several things that are in the book that we really didn't know until afterwards. When I wrote the book the Krever Commission [1] had not even finished its inquiry into the blood scandal in Canada. So a lot of things have been played off as paranormal, I guess you can say. I happen to think that it's just coincidences.
QUESTION: But you know the story with the mysterious caller now.
GALSTER: Oh yes, and I'm aware of Linda Tripp's testimony [2]. All along I always assumed that she would have known about this because that office would have been the office contacted once the Canadians came searching for information.
QUESTION: Have you got any idea who that caller could be?
GALSTER: I guess personally I do. I wouldn't want to guess on it. But I think, more importantly, several people. Probably not just one but several people involved in this -- many of them in the administration of the prison would have made that call. Many of these people are still alive and many of them are still involved with the prison.
QUESTION: There's been some speculations that Richard Mays could be the mysterious caller.
GALSTER: Yes, that's a very real possibility. You have to understand that Richard Mays was Clinton's first-hand token black buddy. I'm saying it that way not to sound like a bigot but to explain his relationship with the governor at that time. Clinton used him in several different ways to show that he was promoting a black person to higher office. He appointed him to several different committees and he appointed him to the state Supreme Court. Mays was intimately involved with Clinton. His list of sins is long and varied and you'll only have to look in the Arkansas newspapers for the last 15 years and you'll uncover them. He did a scam with HUD money, ripped the federal government off for about $4 million, he was Charlie Trie's attorney, he took the first $100,000 from Charlie Trie to the DNC. He was investigated by Kenneth Starr, not over the blood issue, certainly, but over the DNC deposits and all of that. He was David Hale's attorney initially. Intimately involved with Clinton. And then he was the one pointed to by Clinton to receive this money from HMA as kickback money to ensure that there were no other contract in 1985. We have state police depositions on that, so that's factual. So yes, he certainly could have been the one to call because even though he was not part of the Rose Law Firm he was close to them. He was working with all those involved. So yes, that's a real possibility.
QUESTION: Now if we go back to the investigation. What do you think was the reason for Canada not starting investigations before? The first infections were in the early '80s?
GALSTER: In Canada the infections really started in '83, '84. So what they did was what we would do. They immediately started checking back and they called Connaught, the drug company in Canada and they called the Canadian Red Cross where many of these people had received their infections, and they said, "What's going on?" What happened was a vast cover-up, and that's why it got stalled. The Red Cross refused to cooperate and covered everything they could cover. So did Connaught, so did the fractionaters -- the blood processors, the pharmaceutical companies, and the government officials, everyone. When it finally hit a peak and they knew they couldn't put off an investigation any longer, in one evening the person in charge of those records from the Red Cross's blood arm, the Canadian Blood Committee, destroyed ten years' worth of documents. In one evening! He has never been prosecuted, he has never had to answer for that, but because of that action everyone knew that the Canadian Red Cross was liable, so they pursued them and they eventually shut them down. In September they filed for bankruptcy.
It was because of things like that, a vast cover-up, that it took so long to really trace things back. The Krever Commission, which was headed by a retired judge, Horace Krever, who was charged with the duty of finding out what really happened in Canada, started the investigations in late '93 or early '94 and concluded in late '97. So it's the same reason why the story doesn't come out here. There are a lot of powerful people involved that do not want the story to be told.
QUESTION: In an interview you have said that your reason for writing this book was that you hoped that reporters would start to investigate this.
GALSTER: Yes, I was naive enough to believe, or stupid enough to believe, that some investigative reporter would read my book, say, "My God, this sounds like it could be true, or parts of it could be true, this sounds intriguing," and then hear about the stories in Canada, and then carry out the investigation that I had to do over the past years. But it didn't work that way. You know, for generations people have used this form, fiction, to point a finger at social problems and political problems, and do it quite well. I thought that hopefully my book would bring it to light. It has, but only after I have been willing to come forward and do the work, do the ground work to get the story out there.
Clinton's Responsibility
QUESTION: You have also said that some journalists even started investigating you instead of your story.
GALSTER: Well, there were people around who certainly didn't want to believe another bad story about Clinton. I always approach their questions and inquiries like this, "Forget Clinton, forget him. The important thing are the victims. That's what's important to me because that's what I live with every day. Let's approach it not from a Clinton standpoint, let's approach it from, 'who was involved, who created these victims?'" His name will come into it and the truth is that without his support for it, this group would have been shut down in 1982 when the FDA first came down on them. 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.
So that's the way I approach it and these reporters look at it and they find that I'm not political connected. I'm certainly not connected to Republicans or Democrats. The truth is that this is not a Democratic story. There are just as many Republicans involved in it as Democrats and I suspect that's one of the reasons that the Republicans haven't picked up the story -- because they don't know what their involvement might be. No one wants to pick it up. Even the victims in America are afraid to pick it up because they have been lobbying for a bill, which was signed by Bill Clinton in November, for reparations and help in their disease. They are afraid that if an investigation ensues because of this evidence, that the chance of them getting money before they die of their disease will be down the drain. And that's a real theory and I don't blame them. I don't really expect them to jump in behind this unless they want the truth.
Ricki, it's a difficult story, it was difficult to tell, it was difficult to investigate and it's even more difficult to expose. We will be going before the world in a multinational news conference in Washington D.C. in the next couple of weeks and call for a full investigation. We never asked for this and we are ready to turn it over to people that have the authority to carry the investigation to the level it needs to go to.
1. The Krever Report is available at:
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/krever/index.html
2. Linda Tripp's January 13, 1998 deposition is available at:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/new/tripp_depo/tripp3.txt