Guest David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories"

I had to look this up first because I wanted to know who the author was, since I missed his name in the intro.

He's rather interesting, and it would be very nice to silence all the people shrieking "conspiracy! conspiracy!" Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yes, he sure was a big fat nothing, and for this one big nothing to change history by killing John Kennedy is a bit appalling a thought, but it was the case. This half-wit, failure of a man wanted to impress the KGB so he could get a job with them and become important. That's all there was to it, period.

I do believe in a couple of conspiracies. I don't know whether Vince Foster committed suicide or not, but I do believe the evidence was tampered with and that that his office had evidence removed from it and probably destroyed. His briefcase was on tape being emptied, searched, and even turned upside down on two? occasions before the thirty-two separate pieces of the putative "suicide note" (with one piece missing, very conveniently the one containing his signature) fluttered out of it, which I believe is utterly impossible. The handwriting experts declared that note to be a rather sad forgery. What do I think really happened? I have no idea, but wherever he died, he left no blood or brain spatter in Ft. Marcy Park, and his hand had no powder residue on it.

A fuller version from the documents.

The other conspiracy theory is much more significant. It involves the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The Soviet government and Armand Hammer and Hammer's little puppetboi doctor, Robert Gale, all conspired to vastly diminish the body count to one or two percent of the actual number. I have it on good authority from the real head of the oncology team, that the dead must have numbered in the four digits as was originally reported by ham radio operators on the scene the first night after the release happened. "Considering that I was doing transplants on truck drivers who had spent just an hour in the area and then driven straight back out again," he said, "the ham reports had to have been much closer to the actual number of dead than the offical number" which claims only 32 dead.

Our press has never questioned the official Soviet statemtent, never delved into the mystery, but our press was then (and still is) full of overgrown hippies who honestly LIKED the Soviet Union and never once suspected its officials of wishing to hide something like a huge body count.

My disclaimer: I am not generally a conspiracy adherent. Rather, I believe in little conspiracies, a couple of people destroying evidence shouldn't stretch your imagination too far. The Foster conspiracy wouldn't have involved more than three or four people, all of them political buddies with much to lose. Apparently someone wanted to protect the Clintons from too careful a scrutiny, of the few people involved, most of the involvement would have been over politics. The left wingers would have been highly motivated to keep silence.

As for the Chernobyl incident, I will say first that I am not a nuclear power opponent; far from it. In fact I pretty much agree with Prager when he says "I would volunteer to store nuclear waste in my back yard." I do believe the Soviet government was unbelievably shoddy in their health and safety practices (we have seen how they will dump toxic waste into rivers, for example) because they didn't care a bit about the safety of their citizens, nor or their workers, any more than they cared about the deaths of six to twelve million Ukrainians during the thirties. The safety measures on that power plant were inadequate and the plant was not kept in good repair. When people died, who cared? Certainly not America. Not enough to expose their shoddiness, anyway, but just enough to halt the construction of more nuclear plants in our own country and across the Third World as well. Very smart.

I'm hearing Aaronovitch list a couple of real conspiracies. Michael Medved believes there are NO conspiracies. Maybe he defines "conspiracy" differently than I do.