The Death of Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN)

[Ed Jewett]

Revealed: FBI investigated claim that American Trucking Association threatened de-icing equipment when probing crash that killed Senator Wellstone

By John Byrne
Monday, October 25th, 2010

FBI files obtained by Minnesota Public Radio published Monday shed new light -- and perhaps shadows -- onto the life and death of former Democratic Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, who was killed when his twin-engine plane crashed in 2002. Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) published dozens of FBI files they obtained on Monday. Their series, titled "The Wellstone Files," tracks the bureau's documentation on the onetime senator from his college days through the investigation of his death. Wellstone was killed along with his wife and six others 175 miles north of Minneapolis in the crash.
"The U.S. Department of Justice released 88 of the 125 pages in Sen. Wellstone's FBI file, and 131 of the 227 pages in his wife's file," MPR reporter Madeleine Baran wrote Monday. "All of the documents included in Sheila Wellstone's file are related to the plane crash that killed the couple and their daughter Marcia.
"The FBI did not include 76 pages related to the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigated the crash," Baran added. "A request for those records is pending."
The 2002 crash has been the subject of considerable investigation, as no voice data cockpit recorder was recovered (data recorders weren't required for the small plane). The NTSB ultimately blamed the "flight crew's failure to maintain adequate airspeed, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which they did not recover," and said other elements -- such as ice -- didn't play a major role in the accident.
But the FBI files show that the bureau did investigate an alleged threat surrounding the plane's de-icing equipment. According to the files, MPR reports that "FBI agents investigated the claims of a caller from Jacksonville, Florida, who said that members of the American Trucking Association had planned to disconnect the plane's de-icers." "The man said that Wellstone had been trying to schedule Senate hearings to expose organized crime in the trucking industry," MPR writes. "In response to the call, a Wellstone staff member asked a Labor Committee member and a legislative director 'who both indicated that they were not aware of any Senate hearing being scheduled to discuss this topic.' The rest of the document has been redacted.'"
Adds MPR's Baran:

Agents also obtained a threatening postcard sent to Wellstone's St. Paul office the day before the plane crash. The handwritten postcard said, in part, "We need to gut (sic) the word out for the snipper (sic) to go after people like you, not real Americans … This voter fraud you propose will get you dead."
An FBI agent noted that the handwriting and stamp were similar to those sent to two members of the U.S. House of Representatives who, along with Wellstone, voted against the October 2002 resolution authorizing the Iraq War.
FBI agents also interviewed a former employee of Executive Aviation, the company that employed the pilots who died in the crash. A heavily redacted report describes a conversation between an FBI agent and the former employee regarding a November 2000 incident at the company's airplane hangar.
At a closed meeting the night of the crash, the NTSB directed the investigation, with assistance from the FBI and law enforcement agencies. During the initial investigation, NTSB investigators noted several problems that the agency would later identify as key factors in the crash, including the plane's low speed, unusual sharp left turn, and the lack of any apparent problems with the plane's equipment.
FBI agents met with the lead investigator for the NTSB the following day and handed over the results of its investigation. The NTSB investigator said the agency would continue to examine the wreckage for any sign of damage to the plane, including the deicing equipment, and would interview local witnesses and investigate any previous issues with Executive Aviation.
The Duluth FBI agents and the Evidence Recovery Team left the crash site on October 28, and the FBI files do not refer to any subsequent investigations.

There were reports of icing "in the area" before and after the crash, but a meteorological expert told Minnesota Public Radio in 2003 that icing didn't appear to be "particularly severe."

There were, before and after the crash, reports of icing conditions in the area. But pilots who flew there that day reported only moderate icing at worst. Still, the pilot in command of the Wellstone flight, Capt. Richard Conry, called off the trip after his first weather briefing...
"What we look at is the different weather data that's available for the case," says aviation research meteorologist Ben Bernstein, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which analyzed the weather at the time of the crash at the request of the NTSB.
He declined to discuss whether icing could have brought down the plane. But Bernstein told Minnesota Public Radio that his analysis for the NTSB concluded icing was not likely a major problem at the time the plane crashed.
"There's no way for us to know for certain how severe the conditions may have been, but looking at the data we did look at, it didn't appear to be a particularly severe situation," according to Bernstein.

The NTSB ultimately blamed human error for the crash.
"During the later stages of the approach," the Board said, the pilots "failed to monitor the airplane's airspeed and allowed it to decrease to a dangerously low level (as low as about 50 knots below the company's recommended approach speed) and to remain below the recommended approach speed for about 50 seconds." The plane then stalled, and did not recover.
"The Board judged that while cloud cover might have prevented the flight crew from seeing the airport, icing did not affect the airplane's performance during the descent," the Board's press release read. "Cockpit instrument readings on course alignment and airspeed should have prompted the flight crew to execute a go-around.
"The Board did not find indications of any preexisting medical or other physical condition that might have adversely affected the crew's performance during the accident flight," it concluded. But a "review of flight crew records and interviews with co-workers, the Board said, indicated that both pilots had 'previously demonstrated serious performance deficiencies consistent with below- average flight proficiency.'"



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/revea...dly-crash/


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Perhaps Mr. Fetzer, Four Arrows and others would like to weigh in on this, but this strikes me as odiferous on several levels.

[James H. Fetzer]

What Happened to Senator Paul Wellstone?

By Jim Fetzer


The plane crash that took the life of Senator Paul Wellstone occurred on October 25, 2002, just ten days before the election that pitted him against former St. Paul Mayor, Norm Coleman. It was widely known in Washington that the Bush leadership had targeted Wellstone for elimination, although most would have assumed that was politically speaking rather than literally. One of the first to raise alarms was Michael Niman, a professor at Buffalo State College, who enumerated reasons why they wanted to get rid of him. In an early article, "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" (October 28, 2002), he explained that Wellstone was the only progressive in the US Senate and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. No one knew of Cheney’s assassination unit, but the circumstances of his death raised suspicions on their own. Control of Congress hung in the balance, since Jim Jeffords (R-VT) had left the Republican Party and become an independent. There were 50 Democrats and 49 Republicans.

Preliminary Indications

On the day of the crash, several signs suggested to me that something was not right. The crash had occurred at about 10:22 AM/CT, but the site was not discovered until 11 AM/CT by Gary Ulman, the Eveleth-Virginia Airport assistant manager, who then landed and picked up the local fire chief so they could fly over the crash site—which was in a wooded, swampy area—and figure out the best way to bring equipment to the scene. Remarkably, when Rick Wahlberg, the Sheriff of St. Louis Country arrived there at 1:30 PM/CT, he encountered members of the FBI’s Rapid Response Team from St. Paul, whom he knew personally, who told him that they had been there since noon. Christopher Bollyn, a reporter for American Free Press, noted in an article published on October 29, 2002, this was remarkable insofar as Gary Ulman had not notified them. Indeed, when I calculated the minimal time it would have taken to fly from St. Paul to Duluth, rent a car and drive to the crash scene, they had to have taken off at about 9:30 AM/CT, which was the same time the Senator’s plane had departed. It was very strange.

Moreover, after the plane crashed, even though the wings (which carry the fuel supply) had been sheared off by the surrounding trees and the tail had broken off (a common occurrence in plane crashes), the fuselage burned so intensely for seven hours the firemen were unable to extinguish it and the bodies would not be recovered until the following day. Nonetheless, an FBI spokesman, Paul McCabe, would announce that night that there were “no signs of terrorist involvement”. That struck me as rather odd, because terrorists are simply assailants with specific political motivation, who do not have special access to techniques for sabotaging aircraft. Since the cause of the crash was not yet known, how could the FBI have possibly known? It would be more than a year before the NTSB would announce its findings. According to its official report, the plane crashed because the pilots had lost track of their airspeed and allowed the plane to crash.

The plane, a King Air A-100, was akin to the Rolls-Royce of small aircraft and had an excellent maintenance record. While there had been many exaggerated reports about the weather—Wolf Blitzer, for example, attributed the crash to freezing rain and heavy snow—those of us in the vicinity knew that was not true. Indeed, a local TV-news anchorman, Denny Anderson, who was himself a pilot, spent much of the day correcting those false impressions. It turned out that other planes had landed there earlier in the day and that Ulman had had no hesitation in taking off to search for the plane when he noticed it was overdue. A pilot in the local vicinity, who had been out taking pictures across water in close proximity of the airport, sent them to me. It was clear by studying them that there was no rain, much less freezing rain. Indeed, the NTSB would eventually conduct simulations of the flight with pilots from Charter Aviation and, even though they had them fly abnormally slowly, they were unable to cause the plane to crash.

The NTSB Report

The NTSB pinned responsibility for the crash on the pilots. The principal pilot, Richard Conry, however, had some 5,200 hours of experience, an Air Transport Pilots certification--which is the highest civilian qualification short of astronaut—and had passed his FAA “flight check” just two days before the fatal flight. His co-pilot, Michael Guess, was not as highly qualified, but he was a competent pilot for a plane that did not require two. Indeed, one of the ironies of the FBI’s announcement is that Guess turned out to have known Zacharias Moussaoui, an accused 9/11 conspirator, whom he had met at the Pam Am International Flight Academic in Eagan, MN, where he had allegedly “inadvertently” allowed Moussaoui access to a computer program about flying a Boeing 747. So not only could the FBI not have known there was “no terrorist involvement” the evening of the crash but the co-pilot would turn out to have actually had contact with an alleged terrorist.

Several features of the crash caught my attention early on. Although there were two pilots, there had been no distress call. A loss of air speed brings with it a loss of altitude, and the plane had crashed two miles south of the airport, apparently flying on the wrong azimuth. I began to ask myself the probability that two pilots would neglect their air speed, their altitude, and their azimuth. If we assume that these are independent events that might happen, say, one time in a hundred—an absurdly high frequency—then for one pilot to neglect all three would be equal to 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 = 1/1,000,000 or one time in a million. And there had been two of them, where the probability that they would both neglect those factors was equal to 1/1,000,000 x 1/1,000,000, a very small number. And the plane was equipped with a loud warning alarm to alert them of any risk of stalling.

The more I investigated the case, the more peculiar it seemed. An odd cell-phone anomaly was reported to me, where the driver, passing just south of the airport en route to the funeral the senator had planned to attend, heard a loud wailing and war-belling sound, unlike anything he had heard before. I contracted an Australian colleague, John P. Costella, who has a Ph.D. in electromagnetism, and asked him if this could have been an effect of the use of a high-tech weapon, which could take out all the planes electronics, including its navigation system, communication system, and stall warning alarm. It would turn out that the props were on idle when it crashed, which the NTSB was unable to explain. A directed-energy weapon could not only have taken out the plane’s electronics, including its communications and navigation systems, but flipped the solenoids that control the pitch of the props and set them to “idle”. The more that I studied the case, the more it appeared that the plane was not under their control. They had apparently been unable to stop it.

AMERICAN ASSASSINATION

By this time, I had published ten columns on the case in an alternative newspaper in Duluth, which had led a Native American scholar from Northern Arizona University to contact me and offer to be co-author if I were disposed to turn my research into a book. We had both learned of an incident shortly before the crash where veterans at a meeting in Wilmer, MN, had learned from Wellstone that he had been threatened by Cheney, who told him that, if he opposed the administration on Iraq, there would be “severe ramifications” for him personally and for the state of Minnesota, which I confirmed with veterans who were there. He (Wellstone) had gone ahead and made a speech opposing the invasion of Iraq, which he thought might end his political career. Instead, he surged ahead of Coleman and was running 6-8 points and gaining at the time of the crash. Rove’s hand-picked candidate was going to lose to Wellstone.

We announced the publication of AMERICAN ASSASSINATION (2004) at the National Press Club exactly two years after the crash. My co-author, Don “Four Arrows” Jacobs, and I observed that the official account of the crash had a vanishing probability and that the NTSB had only considered accident-compatible alternatives, but that if you considered the possible use of a small bomb, a gas canister or a high-tech, directed-energy device, then the latter would confer a high probability upon the evidence, including the lack of any distress call, the odd cell-phone anomaly, and reports I had confirmed that garage doors in the vicinity had opened spontaneously that morning. I flew John to Minnesota and we visited the crash scene together in 35 degree-below-zero weather, picking up pieces of debris, studying the damage to the trees, and making other observations. He and I would also review some 2,500 pages of official documents and studies on which the NSTB report was purportedly based, where its report ran only sixty pages.

John Costella made the remarkable discovery of an odd meteorological phenomenon in the atmosphere above the crash site, where clouds that were normally loaded with ice were filled with water instead. This would be otherwise inexplicable, since the heat from the intense fire would fall off as a function of distance from its location. But it would be a predictable effect of the use of a directed-energy weapon. We authored a report, “The NTSB Failed Wellstone", summarizing our findings, which Michael Ruppert would publish in his “From the Wilderness” newsletter. Indeed, his own research would lead him to the same conclusion, as he explained in his CROSSING THE RUBICON (2004). Ruppert had even been contacted by someone in the business of assassinations (“wet work”), who told him that some reinvigorated old white guys were in charge, that they were nobody to screw around with, and that he could anticipate there would be other “strategic accidents” in the future.

Outing an “Executive Assassination Ring”

My own inference is that this was a small-scale conspiracy, which might have involved as few as ten persons. The King Air A-100 is manufactured by Beechcraft, which is owned by Raytheon. A military-industrial colossus, this company also owns numerous patents for directed-energy weapons. I believe it could have been as simple a matter as a phone call from one of the directors of Charter Aviation to Dick Cheney, telling him that Wellstone would be aboard. After consultation with Rumsfeld and Rove, a phone call to Raytheon would provide the information necessary about the best way to take the plane down. A small team from the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) could be entrusted with the assignment, where the crucial problem would be to lure the plane into the kill zone, apparently by manipulating the on-board GPS system, which is completely under military control. I even discovered corroboration that this is how it was done, as I have explained in a one-hour video lecture about 25-30 minutes into the program.

My suspicions have been strikingly, albeit indirectly, confirmed by subsequent revelations. The story broke on Minn Post.com (March 11, 2009), when Eric Black wrote of a “Great Conversations” even at the University of Minnesota, where, during the question and answer session, Hersh reported not only that the CIA has been “deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state” but that a special unit of our military called the JSOC had been set up independently of the normal chain of command, reporting only to the Vice President and to neither the Joint Chiefs or even the Secretary of Defense:

“Congress has no oversight of it,” Hersh explained. “It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.… Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the Ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on in the name of all of us.”

If the only targets were foreign terrorists who were threatening to attack the United States, of course, many Americans might be sympathetic and even forgiving. But, after publishing ten news columns, co-authoring a book, and following up with an expert in extending the scope of my research about the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, I am personally convinced that Dick Cheney deployed one of these JSOC teams to bring about his death. There is no proof that Wellstone was assassinated unless you look at the evidence.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer and McKnight Professor Emeritus at UMD, has archived “The NTSB Failed Wellstone” on http://assassinationscience.com, where a one-hour video lecture about the plane crash may be found at the bottom of the menu bar.

[James H. Fetzer]

What's ironic about this? It is meant to settle conspiracy theories:

"FBI finds no foul play in Wellstone plane crash" by Joel Siegfried
http://www.examiner.com/airlines-airport...iner-email

I was trying to figure out how to submit a rebuttal, when I took a
closer look. Joel appears to have done just a modicum of research.

[Ed Jewett]

Thank you, Professor; it answers a post in another section. Someone has shared with a critique of your book written after having read part of the book; I asked the fellow to let me know when the critic had finished the entire thing. hot:

[Peter Lemkin]

Minnesota Public Radio has obtained the FBI record of the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in a plane crash eight years ago this week. The records show the FBI first tracked Wellstone in 1970 after he was arrested at an anti-Vietnam War protest. The records might also raise new questions about the plane crash that killed Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and three staffers. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash was caused by pilot error, but the FBI documents reveal for the first time that specific criminal leads were pursued by investigators. Part of the FBI probe focused on problems with the plane’s de-icing equipment. A caller from Florida said members of the American Trucking Association had planned to disconnect the plane’s de-icing equipment because they were upset with Wellstone’s efforts to expose organized crime in the trucking industry. The FBI files also reveal that Wellstone’s St. Paul office received a threatening postcard the day before the plane crash.

[Dawn Meredith]

The threatening post card gave me shivvers. With JFK etc. there was no before hand threat. The bastards are just more daring now. And why not? They always get away with it. So many murdered, it is hard to keep track. Just plane crashes alone; huge.
And the sheeple yawn.

Dawn

[James H. Fetzer]

I should have written more: Joel appears to have done a modicum of
his own research, which is not going to please the FBI! On the left-hand
side of his article is a photo of the plane, a photo of Paul Wellstone, and
my one-hour lecture on his death, one of the best I've ever presented!

What's ironic about this? It is meant to settle conspiracy theories:

"FBI finds no foul play in Wellstone plane crash" by Joel Siegfried
http://www.examiner.com/airlines-airport...iner-email

I was trying to figure out how to submit a rebuttal, when I took a
closer look. Joel appears to have done just a modicum of research.

[James H. Fetzer]

Yes--and I was not previously aware of those threats. But I was aware of
the far more ominous threat delivered by Dick Cheney. The airplane was
not brought down because of the failure of its deicing equipment to work.
It was much more elaborate than that. In fact, I would suggest that this
is a nice example of an attempt to distract attention from others who had
the motive, the means, and the opportunity to take him out. (I noticed,
by the way, that the file on newspaper articles included several columns
that I had written about the case. It is interesting to me that the FBI, as
I had supposed, was aware of my arguments about the crash, yet there
is no indication that they investigated any of the leads that I provided.)

Minnesota Public Radio has obtained the FBI record of the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in a plane crash eight years ago this week. The records show the FBI first tracked Wellstone in 1970 after he was arrested at an anti-Vietnam War protest. The records might also raise new questions about the plane crash that killed Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and three staffers. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash was caused by pilot error, but the FBI documents reveal for the first time that specific criminal leads were pursued by investigators. Part of the FBI probe focused on problems with the plane’s de-icing equipment. A caller from Florida said members of the American Trucking Association had planned to disconnect the plane’s de-icing equipment because they were upset with Wellstone’s efforts to expose organized crime in the trucking industry. The FBI files also reveal that Wellstone’s St. Paul office received a threatening postcard the day before the plane crash.

[James H. Fetzer]

Thanks for mentioning it. Here is a link with four reviews by serious people and two more reviews that are clearly intended to mislead potential readers:

http://assassinationscience.com/American...ation.html

I think we need to be able to tell the difference, but that usually requires at least having read the book under review. Some reviews are simply "hatchet-jobs".

Thank you, Professor; it answers a post in another section. Someone has shared with a critique of your book written after having read part of the book; I asked the fellow to let me know when the critic had finished the entire thing. hot:

[Albert Doyle]

Another good example of FBI leading people off the path of true evidence is the shootdown of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. A similar program of disinformation was conducted through the media when they needed evidence to go away. James Sanders, an ex-cop private investigator got a piece of missile propellant-stained seat fabric and was arrested by FBI under an airliner crash law designed to prevent removal of crash material from the scene. In no way was the law Sanders was threatened with 5 years in jail over designed to protect government criminals from conducting a fraudulent investigation in violation of federal airline crash investigation laws.

In Wellstone's case FBI probably found an old Hoffa-era device in the form of trucker union intimidation in their tool closet of tricks. If you can keep people aimed in fear at the right people like arabs, militia, environmentalists, or unions it has a beneficial effect while running people around with red-herrings.

FBI knows what it is doing. It has time to study this stuff and knows most people won't risk personal cost or freedom by chasing FBI Gestapo over an issue like a dead Senator or airline crash. There's too much "pursuit of happiness" at risk to waste it chasing down such mundane matters. FBI knows that people inherently don't want to have to get up off the couch and run after government crooks. It's too uncomfortable and disrupts the "buzz" provided by our government in its 'deal' with the public. So the brave free American people are ones who will buy a wing-icing, or center fuel tank explosion, excuse when offered because they know it means they won't have to do anything difficult.


What we need is a "Deep Politics"-type cable TV "News" channel where the people use their freedom of check and balance of government through a free press to expose these government crimes and do what the original founding fathers intended before the nation was corrupted by big bureaucracies and businesses. The nation is so corrupt that a new cable TV "News" channel could be set-up and run continuously just by covering the corruption in what is being offered on the other "News" channels.


Isn't it amazing that the solution to our national problems is something we've had lying around unused -Constitutional Democracy. Thank God for the internet! Unfortunately, at one point or another you're going to have to arrive at one of the "gates" and deal with some of the "gate-keepers". Those gate-keepers have figured-out how to get out ahead of the democracy game. In America we pay the media mirror to tell us we are looking good - even though we're starting to get to the Dorian Grey point...