I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998. There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed. No changes were made in the original entries.
The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days. It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription.
Take my two title characters, for instance. I must admit that until just a few days ago I had never heard of the first one until one of my numerous email correspondents—an exceptionally tuned-in group—asked me what I knew about his odd death. He asked me if I thought it might be “just another Vince Foster.” But even he called the guy “Mike” Middleton. With a quick Internet search, I was able to get the name right and to learn what little that has been released about the man’s very odd demise at the age of 59. There’s already a good summary of it on the Clinton Body Count Wikipedia page, and I must say it reads like something the satirists at the Babylon Bee might dream up:
Mark Middleton, an Arkansas business leader, mutual friend of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, and former finance director for Clinton’s presidential campaign and later special assistant to Clinton, was found dead hanging from a tree thirty miles from his home with a shotgun wound in his chest, May 7, 2022. Middleton’s family filed an injunction to prevent police photos of the scene from being released to the public, citing concerns that the images could encourage conspiracy theories.
Ya think? But could the images make all that big a difference? Well, maybe so if, as we have learned from official sources even without the images, there was hardly any blood and gore at the scene of the body discovery. As with Foster, they’re saying it was just another one of those damned suicides…or should we say Arkancides? (If you check that link, you’ll find from its second sentence that Conservapedia has a much more comprehensive Clinton Body Count list than does Wikipedia, but as of this writing, it does not yet include Mark Middleton.)*
Actually, maybe we should not say Arkancides, because the term is too restrictive. That brings us to our second title character, Daniel Best. Conservapedia does not have a page for the man. Wikipedia does have a page, but it’s for another Daniel Best, an interesting fellow who was born in 1838 and died in 1923. The definitive article, I believe, up to now on the death of the drug-price czar of the Trump administration, which they called a suicide, is mine posted on November 28, 2018, entitled “Daniel Best: Trump’s Vince Foster?” Further elaboration can be found in the final chapter of The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair.
What these two violent death cases have most in common is an almost complete news blackout. As with Middleton, I only learned of Best’s death belatedly through an email correspondent. The blackout also tells us with virtual certainty that the official suicide story is untrue. Why else would such obviously important news be suppressed? And the news suppressers seem to have learned a lesson with the Daniel Best case. You’ll see from my article that I got some of the best incriminating information from the all-purpose “debunker” site of Snopes.com. Their feckless attempt at debunkery proved to be quite valuable. As of this writing, the name “Mark Middleton” is not to be found there, although a lot of people have been searching for his name there. You know that to be the case, because when you start typing his name into their search box, the Snopes computer knows right off the bat who you’re looking for and quickly fills in the rest of the name.
As evidence of the general news blackout in the Middleton case, you can do what I describe in my Daniel Best article. Type in his name followed by your major news organ of choice. Starting with NPR, I drew a blank until I got to Fox News, and that didn’t turn up much. What I got there was a sketchy piece from Fox Metro News, which seems to be something different from Fox News, and it cites as its source the even more obscure Radaronline.com.
The closest that I could find to any regular news coverage of Middleton’s highly suspicious and bizarre death was in two British tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Sun.
The mobilization of Middleton’s family behind the very hard to believe suicide story echoes the Vince Foster case. In that instance, it was just one family member, Vince’s older sister, Sheila Anthony. Hugh Turley and I, with complementary articles, have demonstrated what a poor case she makes. My article, “Sheila Anthony Defends Her Changed Foster Story,” came first. Turley followed four months later with “Vince Foster’s Indignant but Curiously Unconcerned Sister.” In my “Seth Rich Equals Vince Foster?” we see that the same cover-up method was used in the Rich case, except that the family expressed its indignation through a man who is a paid publicist for the Democratic Party, that is to say, “a flack for the prime suspects in the hit.” As we point out in that article, when the family doesn’t go along with the official verdict and protests it, as with the profession of the innocence of James Earl Ray by the Martin Luther King, Jr., family, the press falls back on #1 in the truth suppression techniques and simply fails to report it.
My search of Middleton’s name online did happen to bear some additional interesting fruit. Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana had risen to the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Reform in 1999, during Bill Clinton’s second term, and he convened a hearing with this very intriguing title: “White House Insider Mark Middleton: His Ties to John Huang, Charlie Trie, and Other Campaign Finance Figures.” Not that it would have had anything to do with Middleton’s likely murder after all these years, but it would appear that when it comes to dirty money from China, Middleton played the sort of role for Clinton that Hunter Biden has played for his dad.
As a final note, when it comes to investigating sleazy activity connected to Clinton, Rep. Burton showed a lot more courage there than he did in the Vince Foster death case. Check out this recorded telephone conversation between him and Accuracy in Media’s Reed Irvine. You can learn about reporter Christopher Ruddy’s kid-glove treatment of Burton in Chapter 2 of The Murder of Vince Foster and more about Burton’s intentional fecklessness in the case in Chapter 5.
*Checking Conservapedia again on June 4, 2023, we discover that they still have no mention of Mark Middleton.
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