"Hugo" <conscience@minds.org> wrote in message

Any country under military occupation is not going to be posting
that kind of information, peroid.

So the search is a waste of time and electrons.

Arkansas Bloodsuckers

The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, the Arkansas state prison board awarded a
lucrative contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates or HMA. The
company was paid $3 million a year to run medical services for the state's troubled prison
system, which had been excoriated in a ruling by the US Supreme Court as an "evil place run by
some evil men."

HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a
profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 a pint to have their blood
drawn. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, splitting 50
percent of the proceeds with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Since Arkansas is one of
the few states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, inmates were frequent donors at the
so-called "blood clinic". Hundreds of prisoners sold as much as two pints a week to HMA. The
blood was then sold to pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and Baxter International, blood
banks, such as the Red Cross, and so-called blood fractionizers, which transformed the blood
into medicines for hemophiliacs.

HMA's contract with the Arkansas Department of Corrections and its entry into the blood market
coincided with the rise of AIDS in the United States. Regardless, HMA did not screen the
torrents of prison blood, even after the Food and Drug Administration issued special alerts
about the higher incidents of AIDS and hepatitis in prison populations. When American drug
companies and blood fractionizers stopped buying blood taken from prisoners in the early 1980s,
HMA turned to the international blood market, selling to companies in Italy, France, Spain and
Japan. But the prime buyer of HMA's tainted blood, largely drawn from prisoners Cummins Unit in
Grady, Arkansas, was a notorious Canadian firm, called Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd. Cryosan
had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from
Russian cadavers and relabeled it as from Swedish volunteers. The company also marketed blood
taken from Haitian slums.

Cryosan passed the tainted Arkansas prison blood on to the Canadian Red Cross and European and
Asian companies. The blood was recalled in 1983 after the contamination was discovered by the
FDA. But less than one-sixth of the blood was recovered. In Canada alone more than 7,000 people
have died from receiving contaminated blood, many of them hemophiliacs. More than 4,000 of
these died of AIDS. Another 40,000 people in Canada have contracted various forms of hepatitis.
A $300 million class action suit will be filed on behalf of the Canadian victims. The suit will
name Clinton and officials at the Arkansas Department of Corrections as defendants.

Dr. Francis "Bud" Henderson started HMA in the 1970s. As the company began to expand, he
brought in a Little Rock banker named Leonard Dunn to run the firm. Dunn was a political ally
and friend of the Clintons. He was appointed by Clinton to sit on the Arkansas Industrial
Development Commission and served as finance chair of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign.
Later that same year, Dunn purchased the infamous Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan from
Clinton's business partner James McDougal. Dunn now serves as chief of staff to Arkansas' Lt.
Governor, Winthrop Rockefeller.

Dunn's ties to Clinton served HMA well after the company came under scrutiny for both abusive
treatment of prison patients and shoddy management of the blood center. In 1983, the Food and
Drug Administration stripped HMA of its license to sell blood after it found that the company
had failed to exclude donors that had tested positively for hepatitis b, often a precursor of
HIV.

A state police report compiled as part of an investigation into the companies operations at the
Cummings Unit noted that the FDA pulled the company's license to sell blood "for falsifying
records and shipping hot blood." The report goes on to say that "the suspension was for
collecting and shipping plasma which had been collected from donors with a history of positive
tests for [hepatitis b]...the violations were directly related to using inmate labor in the
record and donor reject list."

Dunn, and the Arkansas Department of Corrections, convinced the FDA that the fault lay with a
prison guard who was taking kickbacks from prisoners in order to let them get back into the
blood trade. The license was quickly restored and tainted blood once more began to flow.

That didn't end the investigations, however. HMA's contract was up for renewal by the prison
board. When investigators began probing the company's practices, Dunn repeatedly boasted of his
ties to Bill Clinton. "Mr. Dunn spoke openly and freely and explained to these investigators
that he was the financial portion of the corporation as well as its political arm," noted
investigator Sam Probasco in his report. "Dunn advised that he was close to Gov. Clinton as
well as the majority of state politicians presently in office."

The allegations against the company involved numerous health and safety violations, failure to
test for diseases such as hepatitis and syphilis, bad record-keeping, falsification of records,
drawing blood from multiple patients with the same needle. Several former prisoners at Cummings
are now charging that they contracted hepatitis and AIDS from the blood program.

Another incident involved a botched operation in which an HMA doctor unnecessarily amputated a
prisoner's leg at the hip. According to Michael Galster, a prosthetics specialist who worked at
the Cummings Unit at the time, HMA hired Vince Foster, then with the Rose Law firm, to help
squash the investigation. Galster says that Foster approached Galster with an offer to build
the prisoner an artificial leg in the hope that it prevent the prisoner from moving forward
with a legal claim against the company.

"The purpose of his being there was to convince me to take this, smooth it over and everybody
would be happy," said Galster. "I refused him. He said, 'I understand your predicament. But
this could make it difficult for you to get a future state contract.'"

Although Galster refused to go along, Foster seems to have accomplished his task. The state's
internal investigation of HMA cleared the company of any wrongdoing. But an independent review
by a California firm found that HMA's work in the prisons was extremely deficient. The report
cited more than 40 contract violations and was replete with instances of negligent care of
patients and in its handling of the blood center. Much of the blame for the problem was placed
on another Clinton pal, Art Lockhart , who was the head of the Arkansas Department of
Corrections.

When the independent review came out, pressure mounted for Clinton to fire Lockhart. Clinton
swiftly nixed the idea, telling reporters that he didn't believe the allegations were serious
enough for him to "ask Mr. Lockhart to resign".

The Arkansas State police launched a half-hearted investigation into allegations that HMA was
awarded a renewal of its contract after bribing members of the state prison board. The
investigation soon focused an attorney named Richard Mays, a close friend of Bill and Hillary
Clinton. Mays was given at least $25,000 by HMA to act as an "ombudsman" for the company, a
position that had no job description and no apparent responsibilities.

Mays, who served as a vice-president for finance at the DNC, has been at the heart of several
Clinton scandals. In 1996, he was credited with securing Little Rock restauranteur Charlie
Trie's $100,000 contribution to the Democratic Party's coffers. He also appears in the
Whitewater probe, where he tried to stave off the federal prosecution of David Hale. Mays and
his week have been frequent visitors to the White House, including an overnight stay in the
vaunted Lincoln bedroom. Dunn claims that Mays was recommended to him by Clinton and prison
board chairman and Clinton intimate, Woodson Walker.

In 1986, HMA's contract was revoked. But that didn't stop the Arkansas Department of
Corrections' prison blood program. A new company, Pine Bluff Biologicals, took over the blood
center and expanded it to include two other prison units. The new company's safety record
turned out to be about dismal as HMA's. Screening for AIDS was particularly lax. Pine Bluffs
president Jimmy Lord dismissed such concerns and suggested that AIDS was not a problem in
Arkansas "If anyone got caught in a homosexual act," Lords said. "We took them off the roster."

By the late 1980s, Arkansas was the only prison in the United States still running a blood
program. In 1991, a reporter for the Arkansas Times asked John Byus, medical director of the
Arkansas Corrections Department, how much longer they planned to continue the operation: "We
plan to stick with it till the last day, to the last drop we're able to sell." The program
stayed in operation until Bill Clinton moved to Washington. It was finally shut down in 1993 by
his successor, Jim "Guy" Tucker. CP