Reed Irvine - Editor
With the selection of the president hinging on a few hundred votes in Florida, passions rose on both sides. There was no indication that Gore, who was behind in the Florida tally by a mere 300 votes, would follow Nixon's example in 1960 and refuse to pursue a recount if he was still behind on Nov. 17, the legal deadline for officially certifying the winner. Feelings were running high, and the differences between Bush and Gore were too great for their supporters to suggest that their man concede defeat if he was behind on Nov. 17 if he had any legal basis for challenging the tally.
Was this because they desperately wanted all the good things their candidate had promised-Bush's tax cut or Gore's reduction of the national debt, for example? Or was it because they believed that the candidate they opposed was bad and they feared he would do bad things? We have posed those questions to several Democrats and Republicans who acknowledged that they were passionate about wanting their candidate to prevail. With one exception they all said that their dislike or distrust of the other candidates and their fear of what he might do motivated them.
One ardent Democrat said his biggest concern was that Bush would appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe vs. Wade. While they were not part of our informal poll, we learned of two black Cub Scouts who told their white den mother that if Bush were elected, they would starve. Apparently that is what they were hearing at home. A civilian Defense Department career employee was fearful that a Gore victory would mean a continuation of what he considered to be tremendously wasteful policies pursued by the Pentagon under the Clinton-Gore administration. A veteran Justice Department lawyer who was hoping for a change explained, "I have been with the Justice Department for 18 years, and I have never seen such an unlawful administration. They ignore the rule of law. They create their own law."
Neither candidate tried to convince a majority of the swing voters that their opponent was a bad person who would make a bad president. Bush thought a negative campaign would alienate the undecided voters. He only alluded to the Clinton-Gore record of corrupt and criminal activity in the first debate, mentioning the buck stopping at the Lincoln bedroom, his disappointment over Gore's denying that a fundraiser he attended at a Buddhist temple was a fundraiser and his use of the term "no controlling legal authority" without even explaining the context in which he used it-excusing illegal calls he placed from his office to solicit campaign contributions. Dick Cheney, shunning the traditional role of vice presidential candidates-exposing the flaws of their opponents-did little, if anything, to expose Gore's contempt for the truth and the law.
The Scandals: The Media's Choice
This worked to Gore's advantage because in a negative campaign he would have been vastly outgunned. There is a lot of evidence in the public record of serious violations of the law by Clinton and Gore and deliberate efforts to cover up their crimes. On the other hand, the worst crime committed by Bush that the pro-Gore reporters in the media could find was his arrest in 1976 for driving under the influence. A Maine newspaper that learned about the story in June didn't think it was worth running, but when a Democrat activist planted it with a local TV reporter five days before the election, it instantly became the biggest scandal of the campaign. A Nexis search found 843 stories about it in five days. An exit poll found that a quarter of the Gore voters said it influenced their vote.
The next biggest scandal, judging from Nexis searches of media coverage, was the Bush commercial that flashed the word RATS on the screen for a thirtieth of a second. A front-page story in the New York Times suggested that this was a subliminal attack on Democrats, an idea based on a 40-year-old hoax. This story got big play in all the media. A Nexis search found 638 stories about that in two weeks.
These stories were firecrackers compared to the dynamite Bush could have used. Two days after the RATS story broke, another front-page story in the Times linked Gore to solicitation of large contributions from Texas trial lawyers, dangling the promise of a veto of a tort reform bill as bait. A Nexis search found only 157 stories about this, none of them on television, the main source of news for 70 percent of the voters.
But that is nothing compared to the discovery that for a two-year period the e-mail of the Executive Office of the President was not properly archived and could not be searched for subpoenaed material. Gore also had a system in his office that prevented his e-mail from being searched. The way all this was handled indicates that a deliberate effort was made to hide incriminating evidence. This was kept secret until last January, when Sheryl Hall, a whistleblower who knew all about it, contacted Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch, which has filed a class action suit on behalf of individuals whose FBI files were illegally requisitioned by the White House, brought this to the attention of District Judge Royce C. Lamberth. Larry Klayman, who heads Judicial Watch, convinced the judge that the missing e-mails could include incriminating information relevant to their "File gate" suit. The judge has pursued it, hearing testimony from White House contract employees who first discovered that the e-mail had not been properly stored and searched for subpoenaed material.
Those employees had been warned not to tell anyone what they had discovered. They were threatened with jail if they did, a good indication that the White House senior officials knew that they were obstructing justice. The fact that they did nothing to correct the misdirection of the e-mail until November 1998 and that they have yet to recover most of it and have it searched for subpoenaed material shows that the obstruction of justice is continuing right down to the present time.
The House Government Reform Committee investigated it and issued a report in October. Its chairman, Dan Burton, described it as possibly the biggest case of obstruction of justice in our history. That is because the e-mails, most of which have not yet been searched, could cast light on many matters in which Gore played a role or may have had knowledge of wrongdoing.
These include the probe of the TWA 800 crash; Gore's secret deal with Chernomyrdin on Russian military sales to Iran; Gore's management of the Citizenship USA program to naturalize a million aliens to get more Democratic voters for the 1996 elections; Gore's solicitation of big contributions from trial lawyers in return for a veto; hush money payments to Webster Hubbell; the persecution of Billy Dale (Travel gate); File gate; illegal campaign contributions from foreign citizens, companies and China and the favors given in return; illegal use of the White House Data Base for political purposes; Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown's selling seats on his trade missions for campaign contributions; hush money for Hubbell from the Lippo Group in exchange for a high-level Commerce Department job for their employee, John Huang; and the funneling of illegal contributions to the DNC and Clinton's legal defense fund through Charlie Trie, Clinton's old friend who hid out in China.
A Nexis search found only 145 stories about the e-mail scandal in the three months ending in October when the Burton Committee's thick report was released. C-SPAN aired the committee's hearings, but they got no coverage on the TV networks. As a result, very few people knew anything about this scandal and its ramifications when they cast their votes.
This is one of several large gaps in the public's knowledge of Al Gore's character and record, information that could have influenced millions of votes. The media downplayed or suppressed it completely. That left it to Bush to call it to the attention of the voters and explain its significance. The pro-Gore journalists-and that was the great majority-were not going to dig up and report negative information helpful to the Republicans.
Bush may have been deterred from doing so by the belief that he would be accused of negative campaigning and mudslinging by the pro-Gore media. And he would have been, as his father was in the 1988 campaign. Some in the media called that the most negative, dirty campaign in memory. Dukakis had come out of the Democratic convention leading Bush by 17 percentage points, but the vice president demolished him, winning 54 percent of the popular vote and carrying 40 states with 426 electoral votes. The Bush campaign was managed by the late Lee Atwater, a firm believer in the value of exposing the dirty linen of your opponent.
What people remember most about that campaign is that the Republicans capitalized on an issue that had first surfaced during the Democratic primaries-the Willie Horton case and what it revealed about Gov. Dukakis? He had vetoed legislation that would have halted the practice in Massachusetts of giving murderers who were serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole-unsupervised furloughs from prison. He finally let the law be changed after it had passed the legislature with a veto-proof majority. Bush called Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the ACLU" and made an issue of the far-out ACLU policies that Dukakis supported. "Liberal" became a dirty word. He attacked Dukakis's hypocrisy, dramatizing his failure to clean up the pollution in Boston harbor.
Compared to Al Gore, Dukakis was squeaky clean, but neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney reminded voters of Gore's crimes, flip-flops and reckless lies. They were determined to avoid "mudslinging." That is what the establishment media call unpleasant truths about a candidate they favor. Lee Atwater demonstrated that you could tell those unpleasant truths and win. In the 2000 campaign, Bush and Cheney thought they would win with what Paul Weyrich has called a politically correct campaign. That means a campaign approved by the liberal establishment.
If they thought they could rely on the media to expose Gore's serious flaws, they were badly mistaken. Last February Newsweek published a chapter from a biography of Gore written by Newsweek correspondent Bill Turque. It revealed that from 1970 to 1976, when he decided to run for Congress, Al Gore had been a heavy user of marijuana according to John Warnecke, a close friend and colleague of Gore's on the Nashville Tennessee staff. Two other friends confirmed it. Warnecke said he and Gore smoked pot hundreds of times and occasionally marijuana laced with opium, which is known as Thai sticks. Warnecke said he supplied the drugs free.
In 1987, when Gore was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his nomination to the Supreme Court when it was revealed that he had smoked marijuana when he was teaching at Harvard Law School. Gore decided to immunize himself against that fate. He called a news conference to confess that he had used marijuana after coming back from Vietnam. He said it was "rare and infrequent." He was lauded for his honesty. Warnecke said Gore asked him to lie to reporters if they questioned him about this. Lie, he did, but he said his conscience had troubled him ever since.
Last year, when questions of possible cocaine use by George W. Bush were all over the media, Newsweek said, "There is strong journalistic justification for confronting any drug use in Bush's past." The establishment media didn't apply that to Al Gore. The AP put out a tiny story giving Gore's response to Warnecke's charges. It quoted him as saying, "This is something I dealt with a long time ago. It's old news." A Nexis search found only 54 stories about Warnecke's charges when the story broke in January.
Gore's drug use, which was a criminal offense, was far more serious than Bush's drinking problem, but measured by the number of stories found by a Nexis search, Bush's DUI became the biggest scandal of the campaign. It was on all the evening TV news shows, all the morning shows and was discussed on all the Sunday TV talk shows. For two days in a row it was on the front page of The Washington Post, the second day as the lead story. Nexis found 843 stories about it in five days.
Some papers showed greater restraint. The Washington Times focused on the motives of those who broke the story in the last days of the campaign. It was true but irrelevant. That is what an editor at the Portland (Maine) Press Herald decided last July when one of his reporters learned about it from a local police officer and brought it to his attention. This was classic political mud slung by a defeated Democrat candidate for governor of Maine. Bush had no need to sling that kind of mud, but he should have informed the voters of the truths about Gore that were relevant to his qualifications for the presidency. If he had only done that, he should have won in a landslide because lawlessness and lying are not what most Americans look for in their leaders.
In 1995, the National Security Agency released several thousand World War II-era Soviet spy cables intercepted by a top-secret program now known as "Venona." Although the program decoded only a tiny percentage of the intercepted messages, it revealed that more than 300 people in the United States were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. Almost half those identified as agents worked for our government.
Among those identified, as spies in Venona are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Julius gave the Soviets secrets about the atomic bomb and other advanced weapons. In addition, one of his assignments was to approve other spies in technical fields. Ethel dutifully typed copies of purloined documents and helped recruit new members of the spy ring. After Venona's release, even their staunchest defenders conceded their guilt. Walter and Miriam Schneir, authors of the book Invitation to Inquest, long maintained that the case against the Rosenbergs was "the fraud of the century." They now admit that "Julius Rosenberg was the head of a spy ring" and that his wife assisted him in performing his treasonous tasks.
The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, a new book by Herbert Romerstein and the late Eric Breindel, demonstrates that there were bigger fish than the Rosenbergs who were spying for the Soviets. One of them, it claims, was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who as director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos fathered the atomic bomb. Two presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, honored Oppenheimer after his security clearance had been lifted. They saw him as a victim of an anti-communist witch hunt, but they underestimated the extent of the penetration of our institutions by agents whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet Union.
"We can say for certain that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union," the authors claim. While he worked on the Manhattan Project, it was known that Oppenheimer's wife, brother, and sister-in-law were all members of the Communist Party. The fact that he regularly gave a large portion of his salary to the Communist Party was also common knowledge among government officials overseeing the project, but his security clearance was not lifted until 1953.
His efforts to get it back failed even though "40 great names in American science and education offered evidence of his loyalty," to quote his obituary in the New York Times. President Kennedy invited him to a White House dinner for Nobel Prize winners in 1962, "when, according to the Times, "the worst cyclones of McCarthyism had passed and many men and women were beginning to feel ashamed that they had bent to its winds." In December 1963, President Johnson presented him with the $50,000 Fermi Award, the highest award of the Atomic Energy Commission.
A few months later, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness-a Soviet Spymaster, written by Pavel Sudoplatov with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, was published. Sudoplatov a retired KGB general who was deeply involved in atomic espionage from 1942 to 1946. He claimed that four famous atomic scientists, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Oppenheimer, had all knowingly supplied the Soviets with highly classified reports on the development of the atomic bomb. His charges were hotly disputed.
Sudoplatov's charges against Bohr and Fermi lacked strong corroborating evidence, but the Venona intercepts include a message ordering an agent to re-establish contact with Veksel, Oppenheimer's code name. They also show that most of Oppenheimer's closest contacts in the Communist Party were Soviet agents. In a 1982 letter to Yuri Andropov and the Politburo appealing for restoration of his pension and other rights, Sudoplatov listed Oppenheimer as one of his sources for atomic bomb secrets. Herbert Romerstein believes this is enough to close the book on Oppenheimer.
The Venona Secrets adds to the evidence that Harry Hopkins, FDR's right-hand man, was a Soviet agent, showing that he was involved with the Communist underground apparatus soon after he came to Washington in 1933. It says, "Venona has shown conclusively that the highest-level American government official working for Soviet intelligence was Harry Hopkins, the close friend and advisor of President Roosevelt." Hopkins has been identified as the agent with the code number 19 in one of the Venona intercepts. During the war his controller was the spymaster Iskhak Akhmerov, who in a lecture at KGB headquarters attended by Oleg Gordievsky, described Hopkins as his most important agent in the U.S. during World War II. Gordi-evsky, who doubled as a British agent while serving as the top KGB officer in London, reported this in his 1990 book, KGB: The Inside Story. Further proof of Hopkins treachery was provided by another KGB defector, Vassily Mitrokhin, in his 1999 book, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive.
The Venona Secrets supports these charges by exposing Hopkins' ties with other Communist agents and his efforts to get FDR to do what Stalin wanted. He tried to persuade Roosevelt to send Viktor Kravchenko, a very important Soviet defector, back to the USSR. He failed because he couldn't convince Roosevelt that Kravchenko would not be killed. He succeeded in getting Col. Phillip R. Faymonville, a pro-Communist army officer, promoted to brigadier general and sent to Moscow to expedite our Lend-Lease operations over objections from army intelligence.
The Role Of The Communist Party
The Venona Secrets shows that before, during and after World War II, almost all of the Soviet spies in the U.S. were members of the Communist Party USA. It shows that they were recruited, vetted and supplied to the Soviets by Communist Party officials, including Earl Browder, the head of the party. Before they were turned over to the Russians the party for "political correctness" checked out the spies.
The book draws on the Venona intercepts, material Romerstein found in the Moscow archives, and information from investigations by the FBI, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Committee on Un-American Activities to show the extent of Soviet spying in the U.S. Its targets included the White House and U.S. government agencies, the Manhattan Project, and even ordinary Americans with contacts in Europe such as Jewish groups working to rescue potential victims of Hitler. U.S. government officials and American journalists were used to gather information and influence U.S. policies.
One prominent journalist, I.F. Stone was both an intelligence collector and a disinformation agent working for the KGB. In 1992, Romerstein, Reed Irvine and Joseph Goulden, who was then with AIM, charged that Stone, an icon of the Left, was a paid Soviet agent. This was based on information obtained from Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who re-recruited Stone after he had broken with the Soviets in the late 1950s. The Washington Post and The New York Times denounced Romerstein, Irvine and Goulden for using information from an unreliable source, the KGB. The Venona intercepts confirmed that Stone was a paid agent, but the Times and the Post haven't reported that, nor have they apologized.
The media's romance with the Communists has cooled since the collapse of the Evil Empire, but few journalists who had red stars in their eyes have publicly acknowledged that they were wrong. They seem to take no pleasure in reading books like The Venona Secrets and writing reviews recommending that others read them. That is still not politically correct.
The real victims of the Cold War, according to many journalists and academics, are not the millions who were executed or starved to death by Stalin or wasted away in the gulag. They were people like the Hollywood Ten and the Rosenbergs, who, as one noted apologist for American Communists said, merely "subscribed to a different form of patriotism." Those who looked upon American Communists with suspicion did so because they suspected that their loyalty was to a totalitarian power whose ultimate goal was the elimination of freedom in America and the rest of the Free World. And they were right.
The Venona Secrets concludes, "The Communists never admitted to being traitors who placed the interests of America's principal adversary (after the defeat of Nazi Germany) ahead of their own nation's. Yet over and beyond Cold War findings, documentation that has come to light since the breakdown of the Soviet Union has provided additional proof that a significant part of the U.S. Communist Party's energy was devoted to infiltrating the American government to obtain information useful to the Soviet Union."
A card is enclosed which may be used to make a tax-deductible contribution to Roger Hall's POW/MIA FOIA Litigation Account. The address is 8715 First Ave. #8276, Silver Spring, MD 20910.
SOME MAY CALL OUR STORY ABOUT HOW BUSH BLEW A CHANCE TO WIN IN A landslide Monday-morning quarterbacking, but I felt from the beginning that Bush could greatly improve his chances of winning if he and Cheney would do what I thought was their duty-to use the campaign to inform the public about the lies and crimes of the Clinton-Gore administration. That's what they had to do if they were to win a mandate to clean up the corruption in Washington and prosecute those who have been thumbing their noses at the law. Sheryl Hall, the whistleblower who informed Larry Klayman of the hidden e-mails, believes that they were hidden and are still being hidden because they contain information that could be devastating. She says that is why they have dragged their feet on recovering the missing messages and making them available for searches for subpoenaed material.
IF GORE EKES OUT A VICTORY, HE WILL CERTAINLY DO HIS UTMOST TO SUPPRESS ALL such evidence. He will make sure the Justice Department doesn't bring any charges against those who have committed crimes and obstructed justice, beginning with himself and Bill and Hillary Clinton. If Bush is the winner, the narrowness of his victory in the Electoral College and his failure to win a plurality of the popular vote will deter him from exposing the criminals. The razor-thin Republican majorities in both houses of Congress will induce him, if not force him, to forgive and forget. I hope that the resistance to releasing important evidence from the many rigged investigations, including the Foster death and the TWA 800 crash, will end. If it does, it will be easier for private organizations like AIM and Judicial Watch to obtain and publicize the facts that the Clinton White House desperately wants to keep hidden. However, that is by no means assured.
WHAT WE HAVE MISSED IN ALL THAT HAS BEEN PUBLISHED AND SAID OVER THE AIR since November 7 is any discussion of how the two candidates will deal with this very serious problem. Are we to have four or eight more years of a president who violates the law with impunity because he knows from the experience of the past eight years that neither he nor his appointees need fear prosecution no matter what they do? That is because they control the Justice Department and its prosecutors. Since this issue was not raised before election day, it seems that no one wanted to raise it after. But now the solidly Democratic Supreme Court of Florida has ruled unanimously that the legal deadline for certification of the vote is arbitrary and that the decision of the Florida legislature to give the Secretary of State the power to enforce it is null and void. The seven justices substituted their arbitrary judgment for the date set by law and decreed that the hand recount in three heavily Democratic counties must go on for an additional five days to see if enough hanging chads, pregnant chads and maybe dimpled chads could be found to give Florida's 25 electoral votes to Gore. This should give the Bush voters a better appreciation of the importance of the rule of law and the need to have a president who respects it.
MY FRIEND ROGER HALL HAS BEEN TRYING FOR YEARS TO GET THE CIA TO RELEASE under FOIA documents about POWs in Vietnam that were all supposed to have been declassified on orders of President Clinton by Veterans Day, 1993. He is suing the CIA to force them to comply with FOIA. A federal judge recently rejected the CIA's motion for summary judgment, and Roger now wants to get depositions from current and former CIA officials. The court also informed him that it had received a list from the CIA of live POWs and their last known locations. He said the agency didn't want him to see the list because he didn't have permission from the relatives of the POWs. Roger doubts that the family members even know about the list.
Roger is a mature graduate student at the University of Maryland who depends on student loans. He has pressed the CIA and the Defense Department to come clean about the POWs for seven years. With each passing year the chances of rescuing the men we abandoned are reduced, but a few Koreans who were taken prisoner during the Korean War 50 years ago have managed to escape in recent years. Our POWs in Vietnam would be 15 to 20 years younger than the Korean War POWs, and we should be focusing on finding them more than finding bones. I personally contribute to help Roger pay his attorney, and AIM has given him assistance. If you wish to do so, you can make a tax-deductible contribution to help him. A card for that purpose is enclosed.
DURING HIS RECENT VISIT TO VIETNAM, PRESIDENT CLINTON GAVE AN INTERVIEW TO CNN in which he said that "students of American history, several of them, have come out in the last few weeks saying that I had kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than any president in modern history." He chose the wrong place to make such a claim. Those of who have been concerned about the POWs and MIAs we abandoned in Vietnam bitterly recall Clinton's promise that he would get a "full accounting" of the missing men. That promise was doomed from the start. We learned in the spring of 1993 that Clinton's first Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, was accused of having accepted a $700,000 bribe from Vietnam, plus a cut of foreign investments in that country, in return for his promise to work for lifting our embargo and normalizing our relations with Vietnam.
THIS INFORMATION CAME FROM A VIETNAMESE RESIDENT OF THE U.S. NAMED BINH Thanh Ly, who had been a partner of Ngyuen Van Hao, a former deputy prime minister of South Vietnam who had been kept on as a seniorofficial after the Communist takeover. Hao, who resided in Florida, was the agent who negotiated the terms of the bribe between the time Brown was designated as Clinton's choice for Secretary of Commerce and the time he was sworn in. Binh Thanh Ly became worried about his involvement in this illegal deal, and he told his story to the FBI. He passed their polygraph test and provided them with information they were able to check out. That included the opening of an account for Brown in the Banque Indosuez in Singapore. Brown's denials that he had ever met Ngyuen Van Hao were proven false, but he was allowed to change his story. Attorney General Janet Reno decided to spare Brown the embarrassment and risk of having to testify before the grand jury. She ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to justify pursuing the investigation, and it was abruptly dropped. Secretary Brown succeeded in getting the embargo lifted and relations with Vietnam normalized. We haven't been told if the $700,000 was ever deposited in the account set up for him in the Banque Indosuez.
DESPITE THE FACT THAT 1,992 POWS AND MIAS WERE STILL MISSING AND UNACCOUNTED for, Clinton lifted the trade embargo of Vietnam in 1994 and opened diplomatic relations in 1995. This year, oblivious to his broken promise, he signed a trade agreement with the Communist dictatorship, and he has now topped that off with a personal visit to Vietnam accompanied by representatives of over 30 American corporations. The League of POW/MIA Families refused an invitation to go along. It strongly rejected statements by administration officials that Clinton's trip would in some way put the Vietnam War behind us. Their spokesman said, "Given their official statements that reflect an expectation of reparations in one form or another, even the Vietnamese do not view it that way. We see this visit as the last step of the Clinton Administration to normalize economic and political relations with Vietnam." Dolores Alfond of the National Alliance of Families sent Clinton a letter saying that he should concentrate on finding the live prisoners that we abandoned and work for their release. She said Vietnam has not even returned the bodies of many of the prisoners who died there in captivity.
CLINTON'S TRIP SHOULD HAVE BEEN USED AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO INSIST THAT THE Communists honor their commitments with respect to the POWs and MIAs, but Clinton has forgotten his promises and has forgotten them as well. So have our media. Instead of raising this important issue, they give us stories such as the one appearing on the front page of the Washington Post on November 19th. It referred to Clinton choking up and his eyes "welling with tears" as Americans and Vietnamese looked for evidence of an American aircraft shot down during the Vietnam War. Clinton created this image by deliberately dabbing his eyes. It was an Oscar-winning performance made for television and the cameras, and the media fell for it. Dolores Alfond believes that the site where they were digging had probably been "salted" for the occasion.
THE PURPOSE OF THE TRIP WAS ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL. COMMERCE SECRETARY Norman Mineta presided over the signing of a number of agreements between U.S. businessmen who accompanied the president and the Communists in Hanoi. U.S. private investment in Vietnam has declined sharply as the investors have found that the Communists don't keep their promises to investors either. The opportunities were not as good as the investors expected. The companies involved in the new deals included Boeing, Oracle Corporation, and Corning International. It wasn't disclosed whether or not they paid for their seats on the plane with contributions to the Democratic National Committee, as was the practice when Ron Brown was flying around the world with businessmen on trade missions. The White House announced that the U.S. would give Vietnam over $22 million for health research and claimed without any sign of shame the money was "predicated" on progress on the POW/MIA issue.