Talk or Face the Starr Treatment

They transported her from prison to court in shackles inside a wire mesh cage in the middle of a bus, surrounded by male prisoners who exposed themselves and taunted her with obscenities. She has been held mostly in solitary confinement, denied exercise as well as a Bible. On several occasions, she has been chained to a toilet for hours at a time. She was “housed on the same row with murderers, molesters, abusers and psychotic prisoners, one of whom attempted to stab her with a sharpened pencil,” according to a brief filed by her attorney last week.

Doctors report that a precondition of scoliosis has degenerated to the point where parts of her vertebrae are fused. She is in constant back pain, exacerbated by sleeping on mattresses on concrete floors and spending many hours forced to sit upright in holding cells.

She is Susan McDougal, and her constant degradation as outlined last week in a motion by her attorney, Mark Geragos, to reduce her sentence cries out for a full-scale civil rights investigation. Maybe then we will learn the facts of her prison condition. But one only need observe those photos of her manacled with heavy shackles as she moves through Kenneth Starr’s never-ending inquisition to know that something very wrong is afoot. This barbarous treatment, unprecedented for a civil contempt prisoner, was not intended to prevent escape.

The plan to break her spirit and force a denunciation of the president is obvious with each turn of the screw. She served 18 months for civil contempt, and now, in the last hours of the Little Rock grand jury, Starr piled on the more serious charge of criminal contempt.

Her original crime stems from her signing of loan papers, on her husband’s instructions, in April 1986 at the office of then-business partner David Hale. Largely on the basis of Hale’s testimony, she was convicted in a Whitewater-related incident that occurred 12 years ago and was sentenced to a two-year term.

McDougal must complete that sentence even though she already has served two months longer for contempt than she would have on the original charge. Much of her incarceration has been in the Los Angeles County Jail under conditions far below the minimum standards of the federal prisons. Even now, she is incarcerated not in a federal prison but under the more repressive conditions of Pulaski County Jail in Arkansas.

Hale, who is an admitted felon in various fraudulent schemes over a six-year period, has served less time in custody than has McDougal, who was the most peripheral of those convicted in the Whitewater case. Hale is now suspected of being a highly compromised witness and is under investigation by Starr’s office for allegedly receiving money and other favors--while he was providing information to Starr--from those eager to damage the president.

While McDougal has been shackled, even in meetings with her attorney, Hale has been coddled by Starr. Hale also has enjoyed the loans of a car and a fishing cabin provided by a representative of the American Spectator magazine, which was funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and which has been the source of many anti-Clinton articles. The magazine has admitted to paying for some of Hale’s phone calls from Arkansas, and Geragos this week plans to ask for a subpoena for the records of Hale’s prison calls and conversations.

The stark difference in treatment is due to the fact that Hale gave Starr what he wanted: a basis for attacking the president. McDougal has not been willing to tell Starr what he wants to hear because she insists it would be a lie, but he evidently intends to keep her in jail until she does.

Far too few people in the media seem shocked by these inquisitorial tactics. Instead, the talking heads on television impishly inquire as to why McDougal doesn’t just cut a deal for immunity and testify. The risks of such a deal with Starr were made abundantly clear with the indictment April 30 of Hubbell, his wife and two associates. Hubbell had an immunity deal and has served his time, but he did not provide damaging information against the Clintons. Are the new tax-evasion charges Starr’s retribution?

The media were hard pressed to find anyone knowledgeable about tax law who did not think it wildly out of line for Starr to raise such charges without going through the normal and well-established vetting process. Criminal tax evasion charges usually are first investigated by the IRS and the Department of Justice.

The lessons of the Hubbell and McDougal cases are the same: Tell Starr what he wants to hear or rot in prison.