What set the deadly spiral in motion was the Waco assault two years before, and the cover-up that followed. No official has ever lost a day's pay for precipitating the incineration of 80 people, most of them women and children, in the worst abuse of power since Wounded Knee a century ago. Instead of shame and accountability, the Clinton administration accused the victims of setting fire to themselves and their children, a posthumous smear that does not bear serious scrutiny. It then compounded the injustice by pushing for a malicious prosecution of the survivors. Nothing does more to sap the life of a democracy than the abuse of power.
Public trust is dangerously low.
According to polls, barely a quarter of the American people now feel that they can count on the federal government to do the right thing. A police Polaroid shows a .22 calibre bullet wound in Foster's neck that the autopsy somehow failed to note. The Washington press corps has chosen not to report on this sort of thing, of course, because it always gives more weight to the utterings of an 'official' source, with a title, than it does to the testimony of a common citizen. It has the matter backwards, in my opinion, because the 'official' usually has the greater interest in lying. Evans-Pritchard makes the observation that contrary to the perhaps jealous, but definitely effective, smear campaign the mainstream media and the Washington administration has leveled at the credibility of the Internet, this medium has become the largest source of obtaining the very truth they attempt to suppress.