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The 30-foot wave of powdery snow roared down the mountainside Sunday afternoon, while hundreds of snowmobilers enjoyed temperatures in the 40s and bright sunshine.
Two snowmobilers were found dead, and State Trooper Paul Burke said eight others were thought to be missing, based on phone calls from people reporting that friends, relatives and co-workers hadn't returned from snowmobiling trips to the area.
Burke asked the military for 200 people to help in the search.
"There's no tried-and-true way of doing this," Burke said. "The reality is we may not find anybody until spring. That's not a good way to do it, but that's where we're at."
The avalanche buried a grove of 10-foot-high spruce trees, and Burke said he fears some victims may be entangled in the uprooted trees.
Troopers also were analyzing a videotape taken by an eyewitness to try to pinpoint where some victims may be buried. The video shows several snowmobilers trying to outrun a part of the slide. They disappear in smoky clouds and aren't seen again.
About 85 volunteers moved shoulder-to-shoulder with the poles Monday, probing for bodies in areas where witnesses had reported seeing snowmobilers disappear or where machines had been discovered. Dogs trained to sniff out buried bodies accompanied searchers, but no signs of additional victims had been found by Monday afternoon.
The avalanche extended nearly two miles across the face of a mountain high in Turnagain Pass, a popular recreation area in the Chugach National Forest about 55 miles southeast of Anchorage.
It was the second of two slides that occurred about 20 minutes apart.
The avalanches may have been triggered by "highmarking," a contest in which snowmobilers drive straight uphill to see who can make the highest mark on the mountain, said Greg Wilkinson, a spokes person for the Alaska State Troopers.
However, Dan Hourihan, chairperson of the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group, said there were probably other causes, including the warm weather and eight feet of fresh snow that had fallen in the past week.
Arguing that Democrats were simply trying to embarrass prominent Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) for appearing before the Council of Conservative Citizens, House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) offered his own, more general resolution protesting bigotry. But the measure offered by Watts, the only African-American Republican in Congress, failed to garner the two-thirds vote required for passage under special rules.
"We cannot possibly condemn each bigoted organization, person or act individually," Watts said, adding that singling out one group would trivialize the issue: "Why do we make racism and bigotry that small?"
The controversy over the St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens, which advocates the preservation of the white race, first erupted late last year after Rep. Robert Barr (R-Ga.) spoke before the group. Barr later condemned the organization, as did Lott, who had appeared before the council in 1992 and on at least one other occasion.
Leaders of the group have insisted their purpose is to serve as advocates for whites rather than white supremacy. But on its web site and in its newspaper the group has promoted writings suggesting that integration and intermarriage lead to "mongrelization," and that preservation of the white race is essential if the fundamental values of the United States are to survive.
In attempting to defuse the issue, Republicans recently criticized House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo., for
speaking at least once in 1976 to the Metro South Citizens Council, a St. Louis branch of the precursor to the Council of
Conservative Citizens. Gephardt was running for Congress for the first time then. His staff described his appearance as a
routine campaign stop at a picnic for a community group in a St. Louis park.
Nearly two months ago Reps. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., and Michael Forbes, R-N.Y., introduced a measure condemning the
"racism and bigotry espoused by the Council of Conservative Citizens," as well as "all manifestations and expressions of
racism, bigotry, and religious intolerance wherever they occur."
Thursday, Watts introduced his resolution, which "denounces all those who practice or promote racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic
prejudice, or religious intolerance."
Watts said he offered his measure as a way to keep the two parties from getting into a "tit-for-tat" argument over bigotry.
"Racism is too painful, it's too hurtful to use it as a partisan tool," he said in an interview. "I talked to the leadership about it
and I could see what it was becoming: You name this group, I'll name this group."
But the two parties squared off on the House floor Tuesday. Rep. John Conyers (Mich.), the top Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee, blasted the GOP for blocking action on civil rights legislation and called the Watts resolution "a futile
attempt to show the country they're really not Neanderthals."
"We want action," Conyers added. "We can move on hate crime legislation. Now they ask us in good faith to support these
words. We can't do it."
Wexler noted that Congress condemned Nation of Islam leader Khalid Muhammad for making racist remarks at Kean College in
New Jersey 1994 and observed that at that time there "was no outcry about singling one man for criticism."
"When it's a black person who is a racist, it's okay for Congress to condemn him," Wexler added, "But if it's a white person or
white group who is a racist, Congress does nothing."
Watts replied that while he has been the target of Democrats' racist statements in Oklahoma, "my friend from Florida has never
come to the floor to defend me."
Thirty-six Democrats crossed party lines to support the measure, producing a final vote of 254 to 152 with 24 voting present.
One Republican, Mark Sanford (S.C.), voted against the resolution, while Forbes voted present.
No vote has been scheduled on the Wexler-Forbes measure.
LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST--03-23-99 2049EST
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Breaking her two year silence on the Whitewater affair, an emotional Susan McDougal finally answered questions yesterday about a series of byzantine land deals here in the 1980s and told a jury that President Clinton had been truthful about his own involvement.
As McDougal took the witness stand in her own defense in the third week of her contempt trial, her lawyer wasted no time in asking her some of the same questions posed to her by independent counsel Kenneth Starr's prosecutors in a combative 1996 grand-jury session.
McDougal says she refused to answer the questions before the grand jury - and as a result spent 18 months in prison and is being tried on criminal contempt and obstruction of justice charges - because Starr's people wanted her to lie in an effort to smear the Clintons. Yesterday, she answered her own lawyer without hesitation.
The key question: Did Clinton testify truthfully in a deposition videotaped for McDougal's 1996 trial on Whitewater-related charges?
"Nothing he said was untrue to me," said McDougal, a one-time business partner of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in Whitewater, a failed real estate development.
After objections by the prosecution, McDougal was asked the same question a few minutes later, and she again supported the president's sworn assertions that he had no knowledge of any criminal conspiracy surrounding Whitewater.
"I did not hear anything untruthful" in Clinton's 1996 testimony, McDougal testified. "If I had, I would have said something then. I would not sit in a room where people were telling lies."
McDougal's Los Angeles attorney, Mark Geragos, will continue questioning her today, and then Starr's prosecutors will begin their cross-examination.
Prosecutor W. Hickman Ewing Jr. said he found several of McDougal's answers "very interesting," adding that prosecutors would probe several key discrepancies in her account.
Ewing stressed that McDougal's newfound willingness to answer questions about Whitewater should not make up for her earlier
intransigence.
McDougal spoke directly to the jury for most of her more than three hours on the stand. She gave long, animated descriptions
of her business dealings in Arkansas, and she broke down in tears numerous times as she discussed her failed marriage to
business partner James McDougal, a Clinton friend. He died in prison last year while serving time for conspiracy, fraud and
other Whitewater-related crimes.
(Begin optional trim)
Although she acknowledged playing an active role in several controversial land deals, McDougal portrayed her former husband
as the decision-maker in the highly leveraged operation.
Often times, she said, she was simply following his instructions with little knowledge of where the money was going - as in
the case of a fraudulent $300,000 government-backed loan that she accepted and led to her conviction on fraud and other
charges. Prosecutors have sought to determine whether Clinton was involved in the loan.
McDougal testified Tuesday she never discussed that loan with Clinton, nor did she have any "substantive" discussions with
him about another controversial McDougal development, Lorance Heights.
(End optional trim)
After the McDougals'-owned Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan collapsed in the 1980s, costing taxpayers some $60 million, a
bitter James McDougal felt the Clintons had abandoned him, Susan McDougal testified. And she suggested that the
Whitewater-related allegations of financial impropriety were largely concocted by her ex-husband during the 1992 presidential
campaign as a way of getting back at the Clintons.
She quoted her ex-husband as saying that an Arkansas lawyer and political opponent of Clinton's had arranged to pay James
McDougal-
for meeting with a New York Times reporter to help "derail" the Clinton campaign. The payment totaled five figures, Geragos
said later. The newspaper published an investigative account in March 1992 that stirred interest in Whitewater, ultimately
leading to the appointment of an independent counsel.
Susan McDougal said she had wanted to tell what she knew of the Whitewater affair but, after seeing herself and other witnesses
bullied by people in Starr's office, came to "distrust them unbelievably."
In a 1995 meeting with officials from the independent counsel's office and the FBI, the interrogators seemed interested in
learning only what information she could provide against the Clintons, she testified. In exchange, they offered to "fix" her
pending legal troubles, she testified.
McDougal said she walked out of the meeting.
LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST--03-23-99 2145EST
03-24-99
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