25 - 31 January 2001
Issue No.518
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518 |
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Cleaning house
TIMING is everything in show business, and in the United States, politics comes second only to Hollywood as prime entertainment. US President Bill Clinton's last days in office were vintage Clinton: lifting trade and financial sanctions on the Yugoslav Republic, an 11th hour deal with Independent Counsel Robert Ray to avoid a rehash of the Monica Lewinsky trial and a slew of last-minute pardons from almost-forgotten scandals past.Clinton's final embrace of new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica's government on Friday brings to a close the ugly Serbian chapter of Clinton's tenure, brushing under the rug the broken pieces of persistent tensions in the province of Kosovo. Also on Friday, Clinton clinched a deal that would free him forever of the legal tangles surrounding the affair that almost cost him the presidency (bringing to a close a separate chapter of his tenure much closer to his heart). Ray agreed to close the case against Clinton in exchange for an admission that some of his testimony in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct suit was "false", payment of a $25,000 fine and a five-year suspension of Clinton's law licence -- quite a bargain.
The president celebrated his final day in office on Saturday by issuing 140 pardons only hours before he turned the country over to George W Bush. Among the lucky recipients: heiress-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst Shaw, Clinton's half-brother Roger, and Susan McDougal, who served 21 months in jail after she refused to give testimony to former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in relation to the Whitewater scandal.
Informed counsel
THOUGH time has diluted the once explosive issue of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, an unexpected aftershock surfaced this week in the form of civil rights activist and Baptist minister Jesse Jackson's disclosure that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a former aide. In a desperate rush to beat out the US tabloid The National Enquirer, Jackson released a statement last Thursday morning admitting to the extramarital affair and explaining that his family already knew of the 20-month-old daughter. Jackson asked forgiveness from his supporters and humbly announced his temporary withdrawal from public life to "revive my spirit and reconnect with my family."Karin L Stanford, a former professor at the University of Georgia, met Jackson while writing her 1997 book Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson and International Affairs. Stanford later became the Washington director of Jackson's social organisation the Rainbow Coalition. Called in as a spiritual adviser to President Clinton and his family during the emotional crisis following impeachment hearings, it is now clear that Jackson and Stanford's daughter was conceived during this time.
Out with the old
TYING in neatly with the closure of the Lewinsky file and serving as the dénouement in the dragged-out farce that began with real estate in Arkansas and ended with the legal definition of sexual relations, the routine purge of so-called Schedule C employees at the Pentagon -- political appointees attached to an administration and therefore not protected by Civil Service status -- resulted in the dismissal of Linda Tripp, the woman who secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky's confessions about her affair with Clinton. Many were astounded to learn that Tripp was still employed at the Pentagon, where she has worked since 1994 after being transferred from the White House.Tripp refused to acknowledge that the request for her resignation -- delivered to nearly all Schedule C employees, who numbered in the thousands, prior to incoming President George W Bush's takeover -- was anything other than a direct vengeful act by President Clinton. When Tripp failed to give her resignation, she was notified that her position would be terminated. She immediately announced that she intended to sue.
Bidding war
IN A story that has given new meaning to the notion of online shopping, the case of the six-month-old twin girls caught in the middle of an international adoption row climaxed last Thursday when police in Wales ordered social workers to take the girls into custody under an emergency protection order. The children were adopted by Alan and Judith Kilshaw through an online adoption organisation called A Caring Heart, now being investigated on charges of fraud by the FBI.Richard and Vickie Allen, residents of California, say they had already paid A Caring Heart to adopt the twins when the twins biological mother, Tranda Wecker, took them back in December -- ostensibly to bid them farewell. But Wecker instead turned the twins over to the Kilshaws, who say they had no knowledge of any prior arrangements. The Kilshaws adopted the girls in Arkansas and flew swiftly back to their home in North Wales. Both couples claim they have a right to keep the twins, but things became all the more muddled when Wecker reportedly had a change of heart and declared that she wants the girls back.
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