I am posting this for the purposes of showing parallels between the
investigations of Vince Foster's "suicide" and the "suicide" of Marine
Colonel James Sabow.  The objective is to show that military
investigators can explain a murder scene as "suicide" and get away with
it.

In addition, Sabow's "suicide" is one of at least 40 U.S.
military-ruled "suicides" whose deaths were difficult to self-inflict.

BTW, Sabow had found evidence of drug-trafficking at the Marine Corps
Naval Air Station in El Toro, Calif.

Larry
________________

Excerpt from:
"Tangled investigations leave trail of questions"
by David Zucchino
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
December 22, 1993

The last time Sally Sabow saw her husband alive, he was deep into his
usual morning routine.  Col. James Sabow had risen early, showered, shaved,
had coffee and settled in to watch CNN coverage of the Gulf War.

It was Jan. 22, 1991.

About 8:30 a.m., Sally Sabow recalls, she drove off to morning Mass,
leaving her husband sitting contendedly in front of the TV inside their
military quarters on F Street at the marine Corps Naval Air Station in
El Toro, Calif.

An hour later, Sabow says, she returned home to discover her husband
lying dead in the back yard, part of his head blown away by a blast
from a 12-gauge shotgun.

Two weeks later, still numb with grief and shock, Sabow was stunned yet
again by a development that has since dominated her life: The Navy
concluded that Col. Sabow, 51, despondent over an allegation that he
had transported personal items on military aircraft, had committed
suicide.

It didn't make sense to her.  Jim was determined to prove his
innocence, Sabow says.  The night before he died, she recalls, she had
watched her husband vow to a fellow officer to fight the charges in
military court.  She heard him threaten to expose alleged drug
trafficking on the base.

Beyond that, Sally Sabow says, the evidence she had seen suggested
murder, not suicide.

She had seen a lump half the size of a baseball behind her husband's
right ear, as if he had been bludgeoned.

The television was on "mute."  She knew Jim used the mute button only
when he has to step away to answer the door.

And the two family dogs were locked in the garage.  Her husband never
locked up the dogs, Sabow says, unless someone came to the back door.

Now, almost three years later, Jim Sabow's widow and his brother say
their experts have found evidence proving the colonel was murdered.
They accuse the military of covering up a homicide, mishandling
evidence, rearranging the death scene, and plotting to discredit the
family.  They maintain that Sabow was killed because he planned to
expose the alleged use of military aircraft to smuggle drugs.

"My brother was murdered -- and I can prove it," said John David Sabow,
a South Dakota neurosurgeon.  "I know who killed him.  The military
knows who killed him.  And they know I know.  It will all come out."

For other families of dead servicemen, there are nagging fears that the
truth never will come out.  Because the military has so mishandled
investigations into the deaths of their loved ones, they say, they may
never know how the men died.

Worse yet, the Sabows and a few other families say, killers have gotten
away when murders were wrongly ruled suicide.

Forty families have told THE INQUIRER that the military deceived them
and improperly investigated the cases of servicemen whose deaths were
ruled suicides or accidentally self-inflicted.  The newspaper's review
of the case found a pattern of perfunctory and incomplete
investigations in which evidence was mishandled or destroyed.

In some cases, lab tests were not performed.  Blood and tissue samples
were not analyzed.  Fingerprints were not taken.  Evidence was thrown
away.  Leads were not pursued.  People were not questioned.

With each passing day, trails grow colder and witnesses' memories grow
faint.  As the 40 cases lie closed in military files, families' demands
for new investigations grow more urgent.

<snip>

The death of Col. Sabow was ruled suicide two weeks after Sally Sabow
found his body.

It was too quick, Sabow's brother says.  The fingerprint, blood and
gunshot residue tests weren't back from the lab yet.  It seemed to
David Sabow that the Navy was eager to lose out his brother's case.  He
suspected the military was hiding something.

Sabow decided to have the entire case investigated.  He hired Gene
Wheaton, a former Army and Air Force investigator who had supervised
hundreds of investigations, and Ted L. Gunderson, the former chief of
the FBI office in Los Angeles.  He also hired forensic specialists to
study the autopsy and crime scene photos.

What they found convinced Sabow that his brother had been murdered by
someone on the military who feared the colonel would reveal drug
trafficking via military aircraft.

Sabow said his forensic experts have concluded that the shotgun blast
blew away his brother's brain stem, instantly ceasing all breathing.
Yet the experts found evidence that Sabow breathed blood into his lungs
for four to five minutes before he was shot.

That evidence, combined with the large bump on Sabow's head, led the
experts to a conclusion: The colonel was bludgeoned from behind by a
right-handed person, knocking him unconscious, and then shot in the
head minutes later.

That conclusion is supported, David Sabow said, by the position of his
brother's hands.  If the colonel had shot himself, he said, his arms
would have flown out and away from the body.  But the arms were folded
in a prayer position in front of Sabow's face, Sabow said.

Beyond that, investigator Wheaton contends, the crime scene was
rearranged to fit a suicide scenario.  Wheaton said the first
investigators on the scene told him Col. Sabow was found lying a few
feet away from a lawn chair.  Crime scene photos show the chair lying
on top of Sabow, according to Wheaton.

The photos also show open shotgun ammunition boxes lying on the garage
floor.  Wheaton says investigators told him that the boxes were found
closed and stored inside a cabinet.

"They rearranged the scene so their reports would flow properly,"
Wheaton said.  "They dummied it up.  They thought the suicide made more
sense that way."

Although the colonel was not wearing gloves, the Naval Criminal
Investigative Services (NCIS) report said no fingerprints were found on
the gun or the two shells loaded into it.  Moreover, Wheaton said, an
agent told him that two investigators handled the gun with their bare
hands, tainting the evidence.

Sally Sabow noticed that her husband wasn't wearing his glasses when he
died.  He was extremely far-sighted, she said, and could not see up
close without them.

So how, she wondered, did he select 12-gauge shotgun shells from a
jumble of boxes, buried in the garage cabinet, that also contained
16-gauge and 20-gauge shells?

The NCIS said no fingerprints were found on the ammunition box.  Yet
Wheaton said an investigator told him that another investigator handled
the box with his bare hands.

And, according to David Sabow, the breech of the shotgun was devoid of
blood.  If Sabow had put the barrel to his mouth and fired, as the NCIS
report said, the breech should have been spattered with "blowback"
blood and brain tissue.

In October, the Sabows filed a civil complaint in federal court against
the government and military, seeking damages for emotional distress and
alleging a conspiracy to conceal circumstances of Sabow's death.

The government, which has until mid-January to formally respond, has
not yet done so, according to Sabow's attorney.  A spokeswoman for the
U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles did not return calls seeking
comment.

The suit alleges that the military conspired to "oppress, threaten,
harass, coerce, intimidate and inflict emotional distress" on the
Sabows.  It charges that El Toro commanders plotted to portray Col.
Sabow as a "crook" and "felon," and prepared a letter to the South
Dakota Board of Medical Examiners accusing David Sabow of misconduct.

According to the suit:

Investigators failed to cordon off the death scene and left Sabow's
body exposed and uncovered for about seven hours on a warm afternoon.

They failed to properly "bag" Sabow's hands to preserve evidence that
he fired the shotgun.

They stuck the shotgun into three paper bags instead of proper evidence
bags, possibly tainting the evidence.

They failed to check beneath Sabow's fingernails for possible evidence
that he struggled with an attacker.

They failed to preserve Sabow's organs and tissue samples.

They misquoted witnesses to bolster a suicide scenario.

"You'd do a better job as a criminal investigator if you watched old
PERRY MASON reruns," said Sabow's lawyer, Paul Copenbarger.

According to the suit, Col. Sabow's military attorney was quoted by the
NCIS as saying the colonel was "desperate" when the two men spoke the
morning Sabow died.  The lawyer later said he actually told the NCIS
that Sabow "exhibited the normal anxiety associated with being under
investigation, but did not appear irrational or desperate," the suit
said.

The NCIS quoted Sally Sabow as saying she saw a "look of terror" in
Sabow's eyes the morning her died.  She denies saying that.

"If I had the slightest hint that he was despondent, I would never have
left him alone," she said.  "He was anxious about the allegations, of
course, but he was perfectly functional and normal."

Col. Sabow's commander expressed doubt that Sabow would kill himself
over minor allegations that a military plane in which he rode delivered
stereo speakers and posters to his son at an Air Force base.  Similar
charges were successfully brought against the top two commanders at El
Toro, where Sabow was third-in-command until he was suspended 10 days
before his death.

One of the commanders told the NCIS: "It is illogical that Colonel
Sabow would take his life solely on the basis of events in the very
early stages of investigation."

The Sabows say they have spent more than $100,000 trying to prove that
Jim Sabow did not kill himself.  They say he was a straight-arrow
Marine, a proud officer and Vietnam War hero who exemplified the best
of the Corps.

It pains them, they say, to be deceived and bullied by the very Marine
Corps that Jim Sabow loved so deeply.

"The disgust I now feels towards the military is overwhelming," David
Sabow said.  "What they've done to this family is sickening."

Sally Sabow says she feels betrayed.

"I used to be one of the most patriotic people in the world," she
said.  "Now I won't pledge the flag.  I won't sing the national
anthem.  My faith in my country is destroyed."

< rest of article about other military "suicides" snipped >

*************************************************************************
These sites are filled with facts about CIA covert operations and how 
they work against the best interests of the citizens of the United States.  

David Feustel's great archive on CIA cocaine smuggling:
    http://www.mixi.net/~feustel/

Duane Roberts' Mena documents are archived via FTP to 
"pencil.cs.missouri.edu" and look in directory "/pub/mena"

Lisa Pease's Real History Archives:
   http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/

Bob Parry's The Consortium is filled with important investigative
reporting that the mainstream media won't touch:       
   http://www.delve.com/consort.html

Whitewater & Vince Foster site:
   http://www.cris.com/~dwheeler/n/whitewater/whitewater-index.html 

Covert Action Quarterly home page:
   http://www.worldmedia.com/caq/

Federation of American Scientists' library of U.S. intelligence documents
   http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/
*************************************************************************