Reply #140: Mr. Parry's Trustworthyness Is Not At Issue, Ma'am

[The Magistrate]

He has in this intance reported things that people told him, most of them un-named. Probably he reports what he heard accurately, though he has certainly left himself some room for ornamentation. There is no easy way to assess whether what people told him is true, or even whether they were in a position actually to know the things they claimed to. None of this affects the basic point, which is simply that someone's choosing a course of action different than that Mr. Parry, or you, would have preferred is hardly sufficient grounds to denonce someone as a traitor to the Party and the Constitution.

Why you attach great signifigance to President Clinton making no mention of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International in his memoir escapes me. It was hardly his investigation, after all, and he was not writing a history of the U.S. or the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The questions posed by the sub-committee are interesting, and were interesting at the time. Their answers are in many cases open secrets. The bank was a criminal organization, led by promotors skilled at purchasing cover and influential front men. They made themselves useful to a great many people, and in addition to their own criminality, facilitated law-breaking by numerous other people. Intelligence services find the bent and crooked of great use, particularly. For better or worse, this is how the world works.

It does not strike me as anything of great importance that President Clinton did not place a high priority on pressing a partisan investigation of the administration preceeding his. One of the unspoken rules of our political system has always been that loss of an election does not entail time in jail: it is a convention that lubricates the orderly transfer of power from the regime of one party to another, and without it, matters would speedily a good deal messier, and sooner or later end in blood and defiance of the polls. It is, indeed, unfortunate that matters have been pressed by the present regime to such a point that it may well be necessary to break that convention in this particular instance. It would be best if the charges are garden variety items of money corruption, preferably related to campaign funding, and did not touch on the political elements that do constitute the heart of the criminal enterprise that has seized power here. In matters like this, it is best to preserve the gossamer of the decencies, rather than rip it down to reveal too clear a view of th mechanisms behind the curtain.

"Most problems start out as solutions."