CLINTON WATCH: Arkansas Blood Money
Antle, W. James III
CLINTON WATCH Arkansas Blood Money by W. James Antle III W HEN BILL CLINTON TRAVELS TO EUROPE, he normally receives a hero’s welcome. But in Glasgow last May, he was greeted by angry...
...People need to be held accountable and that’s the story that needs to be told...
...The fact that their questions are being asked at all is due partly to a little-known Arkansas filmmaker named Kelly Duda...
...But Duda would make a very strange candidate for membership in the vast right-wing conspiracy...
...Unlike a failed land deal, this is about human lives,” Duda says...
...Another Clinton associate, Richard Mays, was hired as HMA’s ombudsman for the inmates...
...Most of the attention will focus on the companies and regulators involved...
...Mark Kennedy’s reporting in the Ottawa Citizen has frequently examined Clinton’s role...
...They claimed that inmates with known histories of intravenous drug use, homosexual activity, and general jailhouse promiscuity were not excluded...
...I have learned more about my home state’s ‘good ole boy’ political culture than I ever cared to,” Duda says...
...The prisons were mainly supported by inmate farm labor...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41...
...The FDA shut the program down again in 1984 after finding numerous violations...
...His house was burglarized...
...CLINTON WATCH Arkansas Blood Money by W. James Antle III W HEN BILL CLINTON TRAVELS TO EUROPE, he normally receives a hero’s welcome...
...After an inspection in 1982, the federal Food and W. JAMES ANTLE III Drug Administration (FDA) reported that inmates were being “overbled” and that safety records were seriously inadequate...
...Japanese victims have banded together in a class-action lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies that used the plasma...
...It’s about the truth and about people’s lives...
...The plasma program continued for another nine years...
...Duda spent nearly a decade making Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal, a stark but compelling documentary about the prison plasma program at Cummins Unit in Grady, Arkansas, now wending its way through film festivals all over the world...
...Disqualified donors were still selling blood...
...Perhaps it soon will be...
...By the end of Factor 8, such stars of other Clinton scandals as Dunn, Mays, Linda Tripp, and even the late Vince Foster are mentioned...
...This isn’t about politics,” he insists...
...Officials may have had good reason to be wary of the publicity...
...Records were being altered...
...According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he acted as a consultant to two class-action lawsuits in Europe and Japan where Arkansas prison blood was distributed and he helped with a Peabody award-winning Japanese documentary about the subject...
...The former president, meanwhile, is working to establish himself as a leader in the global fight against AIDS...
...Michael Galster, who ran orthopedics programs in Arkansas prisons during the plasma program, goes further than Duda...
...The issue is returning to the international press at an inconvenient time...
...Nor is Duda the only person with questions for Clinton...
...Yet in 1985, Duda reports, the company that had been handling the prisoners’ medical care had its contract renewed...
...Foster, it is implied, was worried about the Arkansas prison blood scandal becoming a national controversy...
...Inmates even told stories about men who were living as women participating...
...Plasma center staff wasn’t being supervised adequately...
...Production was complicated by bureaucratic hurdles—or stonewalling, depending on your perspective—and a last-minute lawsuit by a former business partner delayed its release...
...Dunn and May’s names later came up in the Whitewater scandal...
...Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee all had similar programs as late as the 1980s...
...The government in Ottawa has already paid out a $1.1 billion settlement to about 5,000 Canadian hepatitis C victims...
...S KEPTICS MIGHT CHARGE that Duda makes too much of the Clinton connection...
...Hillary Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner, making her commitment to healthcare a central plank in her presidential platform...
...Duda collaborated with him and was similarly dogged in his 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 pursuit of the Arkansas connection...
...Yet at least a half dozen other men from both political parties served as governor of Arkansas while the blood was being collected and they mostly escape mention...
...While living in California in 1992, he supported Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign...
...The next summer, the FDA temporarily shut down the program following the recall of blood products suspected of hepatitis B contamination that had been shipped to Canada and given to hemophiliacs...
...I lost my innocence...
...The cumulative effect will be to move the blood scandal discussion beyond the realm of obscure independent films and into the mainstream media...
...Official inquiries for affected users of Factor 8 are about to open in Great Britain, increasing the level of public interest...
...Rifle-toting prisoners reportedly guarded other inmates...
...But Duda and his fellow muckrakers will keep reminding people that, as far as the contaminated convicts’ blood is concerned, all roads lead back to Arkansas...
...Tripp is shown testifying that computer files giving information about the program were routinely locked...
...But Arkansas’ penitentiary system, far from being known for ideal practices, had been notorious for decades...
...Duda is as tough on the pharmaceutical companies and the health regulators as he is on any of the political figures or public officials involved...
...Tainted blood from the United States was later found to have infected hemophiliacs in Canada, Japan, Scotland, and perhaps elsewhere...
...During the suspension, it was discovered that an inmate clerk in the prison’s plasma center had been selling opportunities to bleed to ineligible donors...
...But in Glasgow last May, he was greeted by angry protestors who charged that actions taken by the state of Arkansas while he was governor infected them with diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis C. The demonstrators, mainly hemophiliacs who had been treated with contaminated blood products, said they wanted answers...
...In April, a BBC report discussing the scandal broadcast Factor 8 footage...
...W. James Antleis associate editor of The American Spectator...
...Robert Redford portrayed a heroic Arkansas prison reformer in a more famous movie, 1980’s Brubaker...
...Duda says questions, however uncomfortable, are necessary...
...The plasma so obtained couldn’t be distributed in the United States due to health concerns, so the prison system contracted to have it sent abroad, where it was often used in a clotting medication called Factor 8. Duda’s film of the same name tells the story in detail, complete with eerie guitar music playing in the background: the program’s lack of safeguards, the risks to innocent people exposed to the blood, and the state’s indifference to these problems, peaking during Clinton’s governorship in the 1980s...
...A key source who was still at Cummins was transferred to another prison in Utah and put into isolation...
...Reports by the Canadian government, for example, have been especially critical of local officials and the Red Cross...
...His wife left him...
...He has told reporters that state officials all the way up to Clinton knew about the dangers and didn’t want to stop selling the plasma...
...Prison inmates are an inherently high-risk population and, until the mid-1980s, there was no reliable way to screen HIV out of donated blood...
...Even under the best circumstances, Cummins’ plasma program was incredibly risky...
...In our conversations, he seemed worried that viewers would think he is politically motivated, saying that concern about what happened at Cummins Unit should transcend ideology or party affiliation...
...Duda says that when he tried to obtain records regarding the prisoners’ disease rates, the Arkansas State Health Department balked...
...Duda alleges that the plasma program was much like the rest of the system...
...He received threats and says his tires were slashed...
...While making Factor 8, Duda’s own life began to resemble a movie...
...Some tainted blood victims would like to see the former president deposed so they can determine the full extent of the government’s role...
...He maintains that he was forced to file a lawsuit against the state to access files that are supposed to be public record...
...The plasma storage practices were not sufficient to prevent contamination...
...federal courts declared the entire system unconstitutional in 1970...
...From the 1960s until 1994, inmates were paid to give blood at a rate of $2 to $7 per unit...
...About 1,200 Canadians ended up with blood-borne HIV and tens of thousands more were infected with hepatitis C. The Associated Press has estimated that some 3,000 people have died as a result—a figure now a decade old and, according to Duda, far too conservative...
...He even says he cut a proClinton commercial that year...
...That company, the now-defunct Health Management Associates (HMA), was run by close Clinton friend and ally Leonard Dunn...
...Present and former prisoners, as well as phlebotomists familiar with the program, told him that it was largely run by the inmates themselves with little supervision...
...The scandal first gained major exposure in the late 1990s, when the Ottawa Citizen’s Mark Kennedy published a series of hard-hitting pieces about the growing contamination problem in Canada...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
