WND Scoops 2000

• WorldNetDaily first reported actress Jane Fonda’s conversion to Christianity, a story subsequently picked up with attribution by virtually the rest of the establishment media, including Associated Press.
• WorldNetDaily was first to report that President Clinton signed off on the installation of eavesdropping devices on the phones of White House staffers. In addition, WorldNetDaily Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry found Clinton paid AT&T to change phone software to disguise long-distance caller traffic.
• WorldNetDaily first reported that the stash of unrecorded White House e-mails totals close to 1 million, and includes messages from the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. In addition, the newssite broke the story of how the supposedly independent contractor hired to “restore” White House e-mail records employs two senior Clinton officials. Sperry also first reported that the contractor that previously handled White House e-mail operations hotly disputes claims that it caused a computer “error” that led to a two-year hole in records of e-mail sent to West Wing officials.
• WorldNetDaily first reported that despite Vice President Al Gore’s tough talk, the U.S. throttled defense of Taiwan in 1996 — deliberately stationing only one carrier near Taiwan waters to avoid “antagonizing” China.
• WorldNetDaily first reported the Washington Post’s astounding $100 million loss in developing its Internet component, Washingtonpost.com.
• WorldNetDaily broke the story of how Citibank stopped serving “businesses that deal in weapons” — a policy that was reversed shortly after exposure.
• WorldNetDaily broke the story of the plan for transceivers to be implanted in humans and monitored by GPS satellites. The new technology, currently used to locate lost pets, has been adapted for use in humans, allowing implant wearers to emit a homing beacon, have vital bodily functions monitored and confirm identity when making e-commerce transactions.
• A declassified U.S. military report obtained by WorldNetDaily confirmed that communist China is indeed a threat to the Panama Canal — an assessment directly contradicting the public testimony given to the Senate by the U.S. military.
• The wildfire that burned over 16,000 acres in Lincoln National Forest in southern New Mexico — destroying homes and forcing residents to evacuate — would never have occurred had the U.S. Forest Service not stopped maintenance crews from doing their job, according to the director of the local electric cooperative, WorldNetDaily reported.
• WorldNetDaily first reported how a federal judge had ruled the Census Bureau has no automatic right to ask questions felt to be personal or intrusive and that it cannot threaten or prosecute citizens who refuse to answer such questions.
• WorldNetDaily first reported that China was aiding Pakistan on the development of long-range missiles. The New York Times followed up the story days later.
• Beating other media by three weeks, WND revealed that Indonesian billionaire James Riady, the shadowy Clinton-Gore fund-raiser, was about to be investigated by the Justice Department.
• Two days before the Washington Post ran an almost identical story, WND’s Paul Sperry reported that the FBI was pressuring Senate committee staffers to search their computers for e-mail messages relating to Energy Department whistleblower Notra Trulock. The Post later confirmed that it had gotten the story from WND, apologized and ran a correction crediting WND for first having reported the story.
• WorldNetDaily first reported on allegations that unauthorized foreign nationals were granted access to government supercomputers at the Army Research Labs in Aberdeen, Md. Reporter David Bresnahan also revealed long-standing charges of widespread plagiarism at the Army lab.
• WorldNetDaily’s Paul Sperry was first to uncover and report on the Internet pornography scandal in the Clinton White House, involving the downloading by White House staffers of massive amounts of hard-core porn video files. The story was subsequently picked by virtually all other major news media, including the Washington Post, Associated Press, MSNBC, USA Today and many others — all crediting WorldNetDaily with breaking the story on the latest White House scandal.
• In “Gore dashes for kid cash,” WND’s Patrick Poole first reported that Vice President Al Gore’s plan to expand a federal health insurance program for children (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP) by $42 billion would cost $42,000 per child.
• In U.S. helps Russia build better missile WND was first to report that the Clinton administration has been helping Russia to improve a deadly new missile — the Kh-31 “Krypton” anti-radar missile, which is designed to destroy American Patriot and Aegis radar systems.
• In one of the more controversial WND stories of the year, Geoff Metcalf was first (by at least two weeks) to report that President Clinton planned to make a trip to communist Vietnam before the end of his presidency. At first denied by all, the trip was later confirmed and widely reported in the news media. Another allegation, based on interviews with high-ranking U.S. Navy officials, that Clinton wanted to avoid offending Vietnam by lowering the American flag on a Navy ship to below the level of the communist nation’s flag while in Vietnam’s territorial waters, was refuted by the Navy. However, WND has multiple high-level Navy sources who confirm that lowering the American flag was indeed discussed — although intense publicity after WND’s four articles likely caused the plan to be abandoned, they say.
• In “Foster planned date with wife,” WND reported for the first time that, according to previously unreviewed files on the computer hard drive of a deceased White House attorney, Vincent Foster and his wife had plans for the night of July 20, 1993 — the day he was found dead. “One of the files referred to an engagement to go out that evening with his wife,” said former White House computer expert and whistleblower Sheryl Hall.
• In “Cyberporn scandal hits Commerce Department,” Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry disclosed that the White House porn scandal (first revealed by WND) had spread to the Commerce Department, where the security official in charge of investigating the private backgrounds of Commerce employees was suspended for downloading and storing pornography on his government computer.
• In her report entitled “Scientists: Relic authenticates Shroud of Turin,” Mary Jo Anderson, reporting from Oviedo, Spain, revealed how scientists and forensic specialists gathered in the Spanish city to examine the “Sudarium of Oveido” (widely believed to be the linen facial covering of Jesus Christ), have determined that the Sudarium in turn authenticates the Shroud of Turin — believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The Sudarium is reportedly the other linen cloth found in the tomb of Christ, as described in the Gospel of John.
• In an amazing and previously unreported story filed from Copenhagen, Denmark, WND international correspondent Anthony LoBaido revealed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has sent hordes of female assassins to Denmark as well as other European destinations to wipe out Kurdish refugees and defectors fleeing Iraq, and even has installed spies on the Danish Refugee Council, according to the Danish Red Cross.
• In an exclusive WND radio interview with reporter Geoff Metcalf and subsequent news story, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly, a victim of a 1997 laser assault from a Russian merchant ship — the Kapitan Man — charged several government officials with treason for their role in a cover-up of the attack and related espionage activity.
• In his Nov. 6 column, “Voter fraud, again!” WND Editor Joseph Farah revealed that election mailers sent out by the California Democratic Party and signed by President Bill Clinton, urging newly registered Hispanic voters to vote for Democrats, was apparently intended for a target group that included non-registered non-citizens. Furthermore, as detailed in Farah’s column and subsequent news stories by reporter Julie Foster, the mailers contained an unofficial “voter identification card” — the “Clinton card” — which the president urged recipients to take to the polls. It is believed that with California’s lax election laws (which prohibit poll workers from checking voters’ ID), non-registered non-citizens presenting such a card at a California polling place could have voted in the Nov. 7 election.
• One of the defining issues — and perhaps the most strongly felt — in the 2000 presidential election was first brought to light by WorldNetDaily. Three days before the Nov. 7 election, Jon Dougherty reported that many members of the United States military were unable to vote for their next commander in chief. After the election, Dougherty continued to probe allegations from service personnel and their families that they either never received asked-for absentee ballots, or got them too late to vote.
• WND news editor Diana Lynne’s exclusive, entitled “‘Condo commandos’ caused ballot snafu,” revealed how Palm Beach County’s “condo commandos” — leaders at condominium complexes for those 55 and older — and other Gore operatives created the perceived need for a recount by giving the wrong instructions to loyal voters about how to cast their ballots in the Nov. 7 election. The bad information, in turn, created confusion that ultimately contributed to more than 19,000 ballots being thrown out.
• Between early September and election day, Nov. 7, 2000, WorldNetDaily published an exhaustive series of investigative reports by native Tennessee reporters Charles Thompson and Tony Hays on Vice President Al Gore and his Tennessee past — including his vast connections to Soviet operative Armand Hammer, his alleged interference with various criminal investigations involving family and friends, and even documented reports of the environmental champion being a notorious polluter in his home state. As a result of these reports, claim radio, newspaper and law enforcement representatives in Tennessee, Gore lost his home state — and its 11 electoral votes — and lost the presidency.
• A pair of Russian warplanes that made at least three high-speed passes over a U.S. aircraft carrier stationed in the Sea of Japan in October constituted a much more serious threat than the Pentagon has admitted and were easily in a position to destroy the ship if the planes had hostile intentions, WND’s Jon Dougherty was first to report.
• WorldNetDaily Managing Editor David Kupelian filed an exclusive report on the surprising results of the Israeli military’s investigation into the high-profile shooting death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, an event that helped to spur on the bloody 2000 “intifada” (or uprising) in Israel. “Who killed Mohammed al-Dura?” also revealed the widespread recruitment of “martyrs” among Palestinian children, who are promised heavenly rewards (or divine punishment if they don’t cooperate) for sacrificing their lives in the pursuit of their leaders’ nationalist and religious goal of expelling Jews from Israel, which they consider their historic homeland of Palestine.
• In “Judge orders Florida’s military votes counted,” WND was first among the American media to report the judicial reinstatement of many previously disqualified military absentee ballots in Florida.
• In “Why Iraq’s buying up Sony Playstations 2s,” WND editor Joseph Farah broke the surreal Christmas story of Saddam Hussein’s clandestine purchase of thousands of Sony Playstation 2s in order to bundle them together to form a crude supercomputer for military applications. At the same time, a week before Christmas, one of America’s most popular gifts was almost impossible to buy, thanks to the “Butcher of Baghdad.”

 

WND SCOOPS

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