Smear tactics, exposure of Militias show danger on the right: Access book linked to Dole campaign operative

This article was reprinted from the July 6, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

NEW YORK - Gus Hall, national chair of the Communist Party USA, warned that a recently published book of unadulterated lies and slander, Unlimited Access, by a former FBI agent who infiltrated the White House "once again raises the specter of fascist-like developments in our country."

Hall raised the issue of the new threats in a discussion on the 1996 elections at a meeting of the CPUSA's National Board at its national headquarters here July 2. He connected the release of the book to other signs of extreme, fascist-like and terrorist developments, including the arrest in Arizona July 1 of 12 members of the extremist "Viper Militia" on charges of plotting to blow up federal buildings in Arizona. The militia had stockpiled the ingredients for a fertilizer-fuel oil bomb similar to the one that destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building last year, killing 169 people.

Hall linked the release of this Nazi-like book to the growth of extremist, terrorist and Ku Klux Klan groups in the U.S. - now active in almost every state - the more than 40 church bombings, the racist Supreme Court decisions, especially against affirmative action, the new level of racist violence and the right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Clinton administration.

The book, containing lies, gossip and unsubstantiated accusations about President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was written by a 30-year veteran of the FBI, Gary Aldrich.

An example of Aldrich's smear tactic is his description of the White House staff: "There is a unisex quality to the Clinton staff," he writes. "Hillary ... had an affirmative action program [for White House hiring] that favored tough, minority and lesbian women, as well as weak, minority, and gay men."

White House spokesman Mark Fabiani denounced the book as "trash for right-wing cash." Craig Shirley, who is handling publicity for the book, did volunteer work involving talk radio for GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole during the primaries. The New York Daily News reported July 1 that Aldrich's credibility "withered" with disclosures that his source for at least one accusation against President Clinton was a right-wing journalist who had told him the story was "wild speculation."

Even many Republicans are distancing themselves from the book. "I'm a little skeptical," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The publishing of this vicious book by a former FBI agent has brought into the open a new layer of active extremely reactionary forces and individuals," Hall said. "This book of total fabrications is part of a much larger, ultra-right conspiracy against the Clintons and our democratic institutions. It is a campaign to destroy the Clintons in the public eye and divert voters from the real issues like jobs, insecurity, entitlements and defeating the Contract-on-America Republicans."

The book is part of a campaign to reverse the public's increasing disgust and concern about right-wing extremist terrorism and the overall right-wing domination of our country, Hall said. "The recent fascist-like developments further verifies our policy that the number one priority in the 1996 elections must be defeating the ultra-right Gingrich 'Gang of 73,' [ending] the domination of U.S. politics by the ultra-right and preventing their takeover of the White House."

The Aldrich book is but the most recent example of the ultra-right conspiracy to destroy the opposition. The financial and political backing for the conspiracy is revealed In the book's acknowledgements in which Aldrich thanks the Southeastern Legal Foundation "for providing legal backstopping" for the project, suggesting that it had been planned well in advance. The Southeastern Legal Foundation is bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife of the Gulf Oil and Mellon bank fortune. Scaife is a moneybags for scores of right-wing extremist outfits. He has been linked to the white supremacist militias.

Alfred Regnery, owner of Regnery Publishing Inc. which published the book, admitted "some of it is second-hand. Some of it is hearsay. Some of it is third-hand. Some of it is directly from the author."

Regnery said the proposal for the book had come to him through a lawyer, Jay Stephens, a Republican who angrily denounced Clinton in 1992 when the White House removed him as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Aldrich published the book without receiving the required clearance from the FBI.

Hall assailed the mass media for its coverage of this book, thereby promoting its lies. He said, "It is not so much the book itself, but the coverage and publicity given by the mass media, without any serious denunciation of it."

These recent developments, Hall said, point up the need for the people, and the labor movement in particular, to become more urgently involved in ridding the country of the ultra-right Republicans who would give the extremist and fascist forces a freer hand to destroy not only the people's hard-won entitlements, human, civil and democratic rights, but democratic structures and traditions as well.

The CPUSA National Board announced a campaign of press conferences, press releases, mailings, letters to the editor and articles in the People's Weekly World to alert and rally trade unions and the U.S. people to the new fascist-like developments and, thus, the much higher stakes in the 1996 elections.