In an interview with Salon, Armistead confirmed that he had investigated Camp, but would not reveal the identity of his client.
According to sources who reviewed Arkansas Project financial records, Armistead and two law firms received more than $250,000 from Scaife to look into allegations that President Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, ordered state law enforcement authorities to protect the activities of a cocaine smuggling ring operating from a remote airport in the town of Mena, Ark. The charges against Clinton were found to be baseless by two federal investigations.

Camp was targeted by Armistead, according to documents and sources, after he reported in a CNN broadcast that the Mena accusations were based on erroneous information.

One of those contacted by Armistead during his investigation was Patricia Byrd, Camp’s ex-wife, who is an assistant district attorney in Louisiana.

“He [Armistead] called me at home,” Byrd recalled in an interview. “He wanted to ask me about John’s personal life. I told him I used to be married to John, but not anymore. I told him that I probably couldn’t be of any assistance.

“I said that I didn’t know anything derogatory. I told him that I hold John in the highest respect. I said, ‘I live in Louisiana and John lives in Atlanta. We’ve now been divorced for 12 years.’ There wasn’t much I could know. But still he persisted and kept trying to ask me questions.”

After she spoke with Armistead, Byrd said, she called her ex-husband and told him of her phone conversation with the private investigator. Camp said that he called Armistead and left an angry message on his answering machine but the private investigator never called him back. Camp said that he had no idea on whose behalf the private investigator was making the inquiries.

A copy of Armistead’s report on Camp later found its way into the files of the House Banking Committee’s Mena investigation. A copy of the committee’s file with the information about Camp was provided to Salon.

Dave Runkel, a spokesman for the House Banking Committee, confirmed that the committee had information in its possession about Camp. But Runkel denied that the information was provided by Armistead or that it was solicited by the committee. According to Runkel, the information on Camp came from Louisiana state police officials, who had brought a libel case against the reporter that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Runkel said the personal material about Camp was included in court records from the libel case.

Runkel did acknowledge that committee investigators had spoken with Armistead on numerous occasions: “More than one of our committee staff spoke to him several times. But information for our investigation was gathered from hundreds of people. Mr. Armistead was not a primary source.”

In an interview with Salon, Camp said, “The fact that a House committee would even accept any kind of investigative file on a reporter to discredit his information is outrageous. The fact that they wanted to investigate a reporter suggests a political agenda.”

In a related matter, Salon has learned that associates of Scaife asked a second private investigator to obtain confidential telephone and credit card records in an effort to determine who might be providing information to this reporter for Salon. The effort began in May 1997, the sources said, and continued until only weeks ago. Sources said that Armistead was not involved in this effort.

The associates of Scaife were said to be concerned because this reporter was asking questions about an alleged financial relationship between individuals involved in the Arkansas Project and David Hale, a critical witness in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater case. Scaife was unavailable for comment.

In addition, Armistead and William Lehrfeld, a Washington, D.C., lawyer also connected to Scaife, told this reporter they had viewed law enforcement files about this reporter, but refused to be more specific. During an interview, Lehrfeld said, “I think I have seen your name in an FBI file.” When asked how he had come to see such a file, Lehrfeld said, “You can obtain FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act.”

In an interview with Salon, Armistead confirmed that he had investigated Camp, but would not reveal the identity of his client. According to sources who reviewed Arkansas Project financial records, Armistead and two law firms received more than $250,000 from Scaife to look into allegations that President Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, ordered state law enforcement authorities to protect the activities of a cocaine smuggling ring operating from a remote airport in the town of Mena, Ark. The charges against Clinton were found to be baseless by two federal investigations.

Camp was targeted by Armistead, according to documents and sources, after he reported in a CNN broadcast that the Mena accusations were based on erroneous information.

One of those contacted by Armistead during his investigation was Patricia Byrd, Camp’s ex-wife, who is an assistant district attorney in Louisiana.

“He [Armistead] called me at home,” Byrd recalled in an interview. “He wanted to ask me about John’s personal life. I told him I used to be married to John, but not anymore. I told him that I probably couldn’t be of any assistance.

“I said that I didn’t know anything derogatory. I told him that I hold John in the highest respect. I said, ‘I live in Louisiana and John lives in Atlanta. We’ve now been divorced for 12 years.’ There wasn’t much I could know. But still he persisted and kept trying to ask me questions.”

After she spoke with Armistead, Byrd said, she called her ex-husband and told him of her phone conversation with the private investigator. Camp said that he called Armistead and left an angry message on his answering machine but the private investigator never called him back. Camp said that he had no idea on whose behalf the private investigator was making the inquiries.

A copy of Armistead’s report on Camp later found its way into the files of the House Banking Committee’s Mena investigation. A copy of the committee’s file with the information about Camp was provided to Salon.

Dave Runkel, a spokesman for the House Banking Committee, confirmed that the committee had information in its possession about Camp. But Runkel denied that the information was provided by Armistead or that it was solicited by the committee. According to Runkel, the information on Camp came from Louisiana state police officials, who had brought a libel case against the reporter that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Runkel said the personal material about Camp was included in court records from the libel case.

Runkel did acknowledge that committee investigators had spoken with Armistead on numerous occasions: “More than one of our committee staff spoke to him several times. But information for our investigation was gathered from hundreds of people. Mr. Armistead was not a primary source.”

In an interview with Salon, Camp said, “The fact that a House committee would even accept any kind of investigative file on a reporter to discredit his information is outrageous. The fact that they wanted to investigate a reporter suggests a political agenda.”

In a related matter, Salon has learned that associates of Scaife asked a second private investigator to obtain confidential telephone and credit card records in an effort to determine who might be providing information to this reporter for Salon. The effort began in May 1997, the sources said, and continued until only weeks ago. Sources said that Armistead was not involved in this effort.

The associates of Scaife were said to be concerned because this reporter was asking questions about an alleged financial relationship between individuals involved in the Arkansas Project and David Hale, a critical witness in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater case. Scaife was unavailable for comment.

In addition, Armistead and William Lehrfeld, a Washington, D.C., lawyer also connected to Scaife, told this reporter they had viewed law enforcement files about this reporter, but refused to be more specific. During an interview, Lehrfeld said, “I think I have seen your name in an FBI file.” When asked how he had come to see such a file, Lehrfeld said, “You can obtain FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act.”

You might think, then, that the midst of SI’s annual journey to the bank would be precisely the wrong time to launch a competitor. But the publishers of the biweekly ESPN: The Magazine (that’s really the subtitle) have used the timing to offer the first criticism of the swimsuit issue that may actually hurt. Infantile? Sexist? These jibes roll right off SI’s SPF 15-coated back. (Anyway, the persons really degraded in the 1998 rendition — an equator-themed tour of the Third World — are not the high-paid Western professionals in their thongs but the Maasai tribesmen, Indonesian tambourine players and Ecuadorian guinea-pig chefs who serve as the Pier 1 background tchotchkes.)

No, what SI’s annual breastfest is, ESPN snipes, is lame. Its promotions on ESPN: The Network joked about producing an all-nude issue — “but tastefully done” — and editor John Papanek opens his first column, “We are not all nude, or even close.” ESPN, aggressively seeking young sports fans, has turned SI’s cash cow into a liability, a stringy comb-over, a Vitalis-drenched symbol of retro decrepitude. Thus Papanek’s declaration — no doubt aimed more at quotation in industry assessments like this one than at readers who have already spent enough time with the magazine to get around to the editor’s column — that “this is not your father’s magazine.”

So what’s your magazine, junior? It’s frightfully close to its near-anagram Spin, for one thing, with a large trim size, wry photo spreads and modish design riffs and fonts that could have come off a Blur album cover. (It’s a great format for the gorgeous Nike and Nautica ads, by the way — and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board bought nine full pages.)

But more important, your magazine is a TV show. This long-promoted launch is just another step toward the multimedia Ragnarok impending between ESPN and Time Warner’s SI, manifest in the launch of the CNNSI network in 1996 and escalating through their well-publicized bidding wars for writers. And the magazine quite literally looks like the cable channel on glossy paper, not only cross-referencing ESPN’s programming but also picking up the channel’s visuals, from the orange-and-brown color scheme of its NCAA tournament graphics to its use of the ubiquitous wide sans-serif headline type that everyone will be using on their late-’90s-party invitations five years from now.

But the tie-ins run deeper. ESPN touts its “forward-looking” philosophy: It will look, Papanek says, “to the next two weeks and beyond — not behind to last week’s events, the results and highlights of which we expect you will have already got from SportsCenter.” And that’s fine and good, but there are more than editorial benefits to that. There’s a greater percentage in prompting reader-viewers to flip to ESPN next week than in asking them to reset the dials on the wayback machine.

The influence of broadcast journalism comes through too in ESPN’s promise that the magazine will not be so, well, magaziney. “No press-box pontificating, no wistful reminiscences,” Papanek hammers; in Newsweek (March 16), Richard Turner writes that its founders intend it to “‘celebrate’ sports and be a fan.”

Now the implication that SI takes more of a crusty sportswriter’s attitude than a fan’s is exaggerated to begin with — but why should that be a damaging attack at all? Pontification — or criticism, if you will — is the offshoot, not the opposite, of fandom. Sports journalism hardly lacks for see-no-evil boosters. The last thing it needs is another outlet that thinks its job is to prove to the fans it loves this game (any game) as much as they do and avoids rocking the boat with too much bad-mouthing, sarcasm or, God forbid, investigation.

Fortunately, ESPN, spin notwithstanding, does not seem to be that magazine. It is fresh, succinct and fun in all the right ways, particularly in the front-of-book “Jump” section. But it’s also thick with well-written — if occasionally purple — features and profiles. The strongest is Tom Friend’s “The Mismatch,” about boxer Tommy Morrison, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1996 and has refused all conventional treatments and medications. It’s a complicated portrait of a man from an abusive background, his jumble of stubborn and apocalyptic beliefs and his decision to gamble not only his life but his wife’s.

It’s also, though, a case study of the advantages and pitfalls of the TV-print marriage. By this past weekend the story was on ESPN network as a feature narrated by Friend himself. Condensed by necessity, the TV profile (with photo stills from the mag) was naturally sketchier, but its script was balanced; however, compared with the print piece, the production of the broadcast clip made Morrison’s self-treatment decision seem practically inspired. “He decided not to trust the doctors,” went the voice-over as inspirational music swelled. “He decided to trust himself.” The piece closed noting, as a fairly strong-looking Morrison walked away from the camera, that the year the doctors gave him to live was almost over. (No doubt concerned over implicitly endorsing self-doctoring for a killer virus, the network tacked on a disclaimer: “The Morrisons stress anyone … should educate themselves about HIV before making the same decisions that they did.”)

There’s no point declaring a winner between ESPN and SI on the basis of one thick, long-planned, well-funded launch issue — nor is it clear there needs to be one, ever — but SI has justification to worry: The first ESPN is a far better read than the same week’s rather slight March Madness SI (March 16). Still, for all ESPN’s done to accentuate its difference, it’s a nuanced one. Just like SI, it focuses heavily on the major team sports; and after the year of Venus Williams, women’s sports magazines, Tara and Michelle and the WNBA, there are no features on women athletes except an overview of the women’s NCAA Tournament and yet another column on UConn scoring champ Nykesha Sales. Cheap shot? Maybe, if every page of the issue weren’t obviously calculated to scream, “You are holding the future of sports, boyyyy!”

ESPN’s back page is titled “0:01″ — “a last-second shot at the buzzer” — as compared with SI’s “Point After,” and that about captures the shading of hipness ESPN seeks: to be basketball to SI’s football, not ahead of the moment, just close enough behind to use the moment as a wind break. This is not your father’s magazine, but it’s not your kid brother’s — or sister’s — either.

Repurpose This Graphic! It’s a fine line between Nostradamus and Nostradumbass, as several of our more excitable media outlets discovered over Asteroid 1997 XF11′s not quite 24 hours of infamy. Thursday morning CNN Interactive was blaring the headline: “Collision Course: Bracing for an Asteroid Impact.” By Friday we were reading, “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye” on the cover of the New York Post. But the memento mori moment wasn’t too brief for the CNN site to immediately cook up a nifty graphic, no doubt intended as the heraldry for a score-and-a-half years of exercised call-in shows and nightly countdowns. We can never mend the broken dreams of the network-news-theme composers whose “Symphonies for Vertebrate Species Die-Off” lie half-scribbled beside their synthesizers — we will never read that Roger Rosenblatt essay on how our nemesis in the sky reminds us that we are all brothers at heart — but we don’t have to let this computer-enhanced rock go to waste! A few possible uses:

• Cover art for a comeback concept album by Rush
• Emblem for a really, really dystopic 2028 Summer Olympiad
• Campaign poster for the first presidential candidate of the Heaven’s Gate Party

Send your suggestions to Save the Rock ’98.

Information Wants to Score a Book Deal: “In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings.” No, you’re not reading a display ad for the New York Times’ new Thursday Circuits section — this bit of Brave New Worldery sprung from the keyboards of a dozen of the heppest commentators in new media. It kicks off the founding document of Technorealism, a statement of principles on the social meaning of technology that seeks “to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism.” Said fertilizer is being earnestly spread at Feed, where several TechnorealistsTM — who include editors and contributors to Feed, Wired and the late Word — are debating the role of government in cyberspace and whether “information wants to be free” or “information wants to be protected.” Long-overdue, level-headed, intellectual effort to wrest tech dialogue from hyperventilating extremists? Bald-faced attempt by professional phrase-coiners to form a cyberpundit cartel for the new millennium? Who says it can’t be both? Judge for yourself — but for the love of God, hang on to those bearings.

A major symbolic clue for Iranians had to do with the interviewer herself. Amanpour is a source of pride for Iranians. As an award-winning journalist of Iranian extraction, her mere presence in the presidential palace constituted an important statement about the Iranian government’s liberalizing attitudes toward women in positions of importance.

More important, she wore a head covering for the interview — but significantly did not cover her hair entirely, as would be required of a woman in Iran (where women’s hair is considered erotically provocative according to conservative Islamic views).

Islamic officials might have been able to insist that she conform fully to the most conservative dress standards as a condition of the interview, but they clearly did not. Iranian citizens will read the fact that she only partially observes the letter of the female dress code as a sign of liberalization on the part of their own government. It will be interesting to see if Iranian women attempt to follow Amanpour’s example in head-covering — such small changes in behavior often presage much larger shifts in social attitudes and policy in Iran.

As for President Khatami, although he was in full clerical garb, his language was remarkable. He was relaxed and spoke in nearly colloquial Persian, in contrast to the highly Arabicized, convoluted Persian, intoned in sermonlike pronouncements, that has long been a principal characteristic of Iran’s religious leadership.

In Iran, rhetorical styles are keys to political attitudes. A politician talking like a cleric advertises his conservative leanings. By eschewing such language, Khatami identified himself as something new — a cleric who doesn’t sound like one. Overall, Khatami handled Amanpour’s questions like a seasoned diplomat. He was frank, forthcoming and not condescending. One hopes that U.S. foreign policy analysts noticed that this leader is qualitatively different from those who have preceded him.

Washington also needs to pay attention to Khatami’s subtle message about how a potential U.S.-Iran rapprochement could proceed. U.S. officials reacted strongly against Khatami’s call for “people to people” rather than government-to-government diplomacy at this stage. But what Khatami is really saying is that Iran will not enter into communication with the U.S. government as a lower-status partner. Iran sees the
relationship between the two nations before the revolution of 1978-79 as
one of patron (U.S.) to client (Iran), all engineered by the Shah without
any Iranian public input. The current regime vehemently rejects this
relationship and Khatami must defend this position in order to
retain his own power.

This means that Iran will respond to U.S. accusations of wrongdoing and support of terrorism only with denial and counter-accusations, because to accept the American
accusations, even as a topic for discussion, places the U.S. in the
higher-status position.

On the other hand, Khatami provided a way to talk about
matters of mutual concern without pressing the hot button of status
difference. In the interview, he brought out analogies in U.S.
history for all of the bad behavior of which the Iranians have been
accused. In effect he was saying: “We can discuss our mutual pasts in a
common framework without needing to determine who was the wrongdoer.”

In the same way, Khatami’s call for people-to-people contacts was a way
of opening discussion between Americans and Iranians without confronting
the status-guilt problems that loom in government-to-government contacts
favored by Washington officials.

In short, Khatami wants to eschew the need to admit guilt and
place Iran in a lower status position as conditions for renewed dialogue with
the U.S. There is precedent for this in the business world, where
companies sued for liability quietly fix the problems they have with
consumers “out of court,” without admitting guilt.

This could be a model for making progress with Iran. A mediated
dialogue (Saudi Arabia has wisely volunteered to serve as mediator), no
requirements for admission of guilt and a commitment to fix global
problems of mutual interest could put the two nations on the road to
healthy communication. As a start, the U.S. would be wise to graciously
endorse the Iranian leader’s suggestion to wide “people-to-people” contacts.

Critics have pointed out that Amanpour didn’t ask the really tough questions, for example concerning the fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie.
But her interview with Khatami made a
significant step toward establishing just such non-governmental dialogue.
And for Iranians, the message is quite clear: Iranian officials no longer take
a negative view of talking to Americans. If nothing else results from
this event, conveying this message will have been a significant
achievement.

My guess is that he’s tortured by the revelation of his HIV-positive status, and the bloody trail he’s been leaving since April is his way of mourning his lost fly-girl lifestyle by making other fags pay, as well as the occasional heterosexual who just happens to be in possession of the perfect getaway vehicle.

Thinking about the pass-the-smelling-salts delicacy of the above-mentioned script reader, I reflect on a glorious tradition of gay men treating other gay men to their own special brand of endearment: For example, the legacy of club queen Michael Alig — who shot his gay roommate due to a dispute over rent and then threw him into the river — will live on in homo hearts forever. I’m also reminded of something Spike Lee once said: Black people are incapable of racism. Seemingly, this kind of idiot’s logic has worked its way into the PC conscience of certain homosexuals who simply can’t believe that all us “gays” aren’t living in a fairy paradise of Shabby Chic sofas, post-workout iced mocha lattes, George Clooney look-alike lovers and a closet full of Gianni Versace.

Of course, there is far more anonymous, if less sensational, violence played out on a daily basis behind more gay and lesbian doors than we care to think about. I’ve witnessed a fair share of it myself; I’ve even doled it out. I’m aware that, to many gay folks, image equals credibility. After the Versace killing, a cultured homosexual gentleman of my acquaintance groaned, “Why does he (Cunanan) have to be gay?” The fact that most of the victims were gay didn’t seem to enter into it. After all, what is the sound of a queer tree falling in a hetero forest?

Why is this? Partly because we seem to have embraced that utopian myth that gay people don’t — can’t — actually hurt each other, unless of course it’s consensual. Sure, we argue, we get drunk, we get flirty with strangers at a bar, a little carried away with our fave drugs or debt. But such peccadilloes never make us violent. How could they? We are, as the word implies, gay.

We might be better off if we tossed out the batter-bowl of mushy, fluffernutter queer correctness that still dictates how we’re supposed to come across to the world. Rather than thinking about what a Cunanan does to our collective image, we would do well to face the fact that we’re as capable of the same destructive behavior as everybody else. I used to think during the glory days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation that we queers were all in it together. I realize now how ridiculously naive a notion that was. I have seen more instances of bad behavior perpetrated by one gay person against another than I have space to describe; usually, it’s in a “harmless” social context — rampant selfishness, egotism, dishonesty, power plays, head games. But sometimes it isn’t so “harmless.” And there’s no gay bashing, emotional or physical, like one from a “brother.”

At this point, I’d like to vent on the weasel Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Obviously you can’t apply Emily Post’s rules of etiquette to psychopaths, but Cunanan is the most obnoxious kind of spree killer to have driven down the Florida freeway: prissy, pouty and preppy. With all due respect to the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, I had more sympathy for Dahmer’s sickness than for Cunanan’s. At least Dahmer, when he spoke of being relieved that he was finally behind bars and away from a world vulnerable to a psychosis he couldn’t control, showed that some embers of humanity still glowed within him. All evidence seems to indicate that Cunanan wants to be caught, too. But as I look at his smarmy, smirking smile flashed on TV and read the newspaper accounts, all I see is a squinty-eyed, ostrich-eating, champagne-swilling, social-climbing whore who barely worked a day in his life, who flirted and fucked his way to nowhere but the next gay pit stop, who just couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t born a Kennedy, that his father didn’t own a sugar plantation in the Philippines but was just a sad, allegedly crooked loser who deserted the family, and who’s furious at the world for being HIV-positive.

Then there was the other image splashed across my TV screen — the ambitious, excessive, hedonistic, sexy, celebrated Gianni Versace being rushed down a sun-drenched Miami street on a stretcher, his handsome white head thick and dripping with blood. And for a moment it was easy to forget (especially for the FBI) about Cunanan’s other victims, who were not necessarily friends of Madonna and Naomi and Courtney, the lesser-known ones like Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese. Or maybe it’s all just a bad dream. After all, we’re not violent. As the script reader insisted, we’re lovers, not killers.