Hillary Clinton hasn't won a single primary yet, but the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is back at work cranking up vast right wing conspiracy theories involving Arkansas, the Rose Law Firm, Vince Foster, "suicides," Mochtar Riady, Jackson Stephens, FBI investigations, Clipper chips... and Satanism!
Yes folks you'll find all that and more in one delightful smorgasbord from one of our favorite vast right wing conspiracy sites, WorldNetDaily.
Alltel features Pentagram-earring TV spot
Cell-phone company has long, controversial history
Cell-phone carrier Alltel is raising eyebrows with a TV spot featuring a woman wearing large earrings in the shape of a Pentagram, the symbol of Satanism and other occult beliefs and practices.
Alltel, an Arkansas-based company, has long ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Little Rock Rose Law Firm and has been shrouded in mystery and intrigue since its inception.
Previously, the company was called Systematics and was owned by Jackson Stephens, the billionaire partner of Chinese agent Mochtar Riady of the infamous Lippo Group.
In November 1999, the FBI confirmed to WND in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that there were "law enforcement" investigations involving the Arkansas Rose office law firm, former employer of Hillary Clinton, and its relationship with Alltel.
According to FBI Section Chief John M. Kelso, the bureau could not release the records because they had been compiled for "law enforcement purposes" and "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."
The relationship between the Clintons and Systematics dates back to the mid-1980s when the man who would become chief executive officer, William Cravens, was working for the Worthen Bank, also owned by Riady and Stephens. Mrs. Clinton and her Rose law partners, Vincent Foster and Webster Hubbell, worked on Worthen legal contracts.
Later, Cravens left Worthen and took the top position at Systematics and brought its legal work to the Rose law firm. Systematics would go on to develop the secret computer "Clipper" chip capable of bugging every phone, fax and e-mail transmission in America.
Cravens was succeeded by Charles Wilbourne Miller, who became the CEO of Alltel. On Nov. 17, 1998, Miller, 63, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a shallow pit about 300 yards from his ranch house near Little Rock.
Police found a .410 shotgun near Miller's body and a Ruger .357-caliber revolver submerged in water. Investigators concluded the Ruger was the weapon used by Miller to kill himself. Yet, two rounds in the handgun's cylinder had been spent. Even though two weapons were found at the scene and two rounds from the Ruger had been fired, Miller's death was ruled a suicide.
There was one other high-profile "suicide" among the inner circle involved with the "Clipper" chip project – Foster, who attended critical National Security Agency planning meetings on the Clipper chip project, along with then-Associate Attorney General Hubbell, Attorney General Janet Reno and then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, the man who cleaned out Foster's office after his death.
How big and how sensitive was the Clipper chip project? According to a 1996 report to Vice President Al Gore by former CIA Director John Deutch, Reno proposed an all-out federal takeover of the computer industry. The Justice Department proposed legislation that would ban the import and domestic manufacture, sale or distribution of encryption that did not have key recovery.
Prime targets for monitoring were to be foreign governments, banks, corporations, and individuals opposing the Clinton administration. The keys were to be held by "key recovery agents" licensed by the Commerce Department. Key recovery is a government back-door system designed to monitor computers secretly.
So for the conspiracy-minded, is it merely a coincidence that this story appeared just after Karl Rove left the White House and began attacking Hillary on TV?
Now that Rove is liberated from his tedious White House responsibility for manufacturing conspiratorial character assassination campaigns against foreign leaders, he can go back to his one true love - conspiratorial character assassination campaigns against the Clintons! Why it's 1998 all over again!
So the only question with Rove's new anti-Clinton campaign is whether Republicans are really afraid of Hillary and want to destroy her now, or whether this is a gigantic head-fake to encourage Democrats to vote for Hillary now so Rove can destroy her later.
Hillary says we should vote for her because she knows how to beat the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. OK Hillary, prove it - starting now!
Update 1: Terry K. at ConWebWatch rebuts the lie at the center of WND's conspiracy theory:
It asserts that Alltel "was called Systematics"; in fact, Alltel was founded as Allied Telephone in 1943, changed its name to Alltel in 1983, and purchased Systematics in 1990. The article further claims that "Systematics would go on to develop the secret computer 'Clipper' chip capable of bugging every phone, fax and e-mail transmission in America." That's highly unlikely, since Systematics, as described in a 1990 Alltel press release announcing the company's acquisition, was "the leading provider of data processing management, services and advanced applications software exclusively for banks, savings institutions, mortgage companies and credit unions." Given that the company's expertise is in financial services, it's doubtful that it would be terribly involved in "develop[ing]" black-ops spy chips; its role, if there was one at all, was likely minor at best, probably limited to information-gathering (the bulk of Systematics' business was performing back-room processing for banks). Systematics was renamed Alltel Information Services in 1995; Alltel sold the company in 2003.
This is a little factually dubious conspiracy WND has been peddling for years; Joseph Farah was spouting the same stuff in a February 2000 column. A November 1999 WND column by Charles Smith spoke in similarly conspiratorial terms about Systematics.
Of course if WND was truly interested in government spying on Americans, they would be all over George Bush and Dick Cheney for illegally capturing every email and phone call by Americans and putting it into a massive NSA database. What's that I hear? Crickets?
