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April 4, 2021 - Jim Fetzer
57:27
Paul Wellstone: Third of Three on JFK, 9/11 and Wellstone - Jim Fetzer at UMD (16 November 2005)
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It's overwhelmingly improbable that the pilots were responsible for this crash.
And overwhelmingly probable that the crash occurred because the plane was no longer under their control.
And I'm telling you that considerations here are so elementary and so straightforward that I'm going to be acutely disappointed if you don't agree that the case has been made here.
But that's the case I'm going to make.
Paul Wellstone, as you all know, died in a plane crash that occurred on 25 October 2002.
It was about three weeks, actually it was only ten days before the election.
His wife was aboard, and a daughter, three aides, and two pilots.
They would have been heading for Duluth afterward, but of course the crash interrupted the plans for the day.
They flew out of St.
Paul Airport on Friday about 9.30 in the morning.
They were expected in at Evolith Virginia Airport at about 10.20.
When the plane didn't show up, Gary Ullman, the airport assistant manager, hopped up in his own plane, took right off.
Other planes landed at the airport earlier that day without any difficulty and started surveying, looking around for the crash.
He saw some bluish-white smoke in the distance and discounted it because jet fuel burns coarsely black.
That was what he expected to see.
So he flew around the airport trying to find another crash location, found none, returned to the Blue-ish white smoke and discovered that that indeed was the location of the crash.
This was at 11 a.m.
Okay?
So plane was overdue.
It was due in at 10.20.
It actually crashed at 10.22.
Gary Ullman didn't realize it was overdue for nearly half an hour.
Then he located the crash site not until 11 a.m.
First thing he did was go down and bring the fire chief up so they could figure out a way to get into the crash site which they determined by about 11.15.
Now, the plane was a terrific aircraft.
It's something like the Rolls Royce of small planes.
It's a Beechcraft King Air A-100.
Experts marvel at the plane it practically flies itself.
It's got a lot of sophisticated de-icing equipment which are shown here.
It's got these boots that can be expanded that will break off the ice.
The fact of the matter is that although there were a lot of reports even on the national News channels like CNN reporting that there had been freezing rain and snow.
This was, in fact, not true.
There had been a major storm that had passed through southern Minnesota, but not in northern Minnesota, where the weather was really rather typical, not a whole lot different than it's been today.
In fact, I'd say probably somewhat better.
But the plane is a very sophisticated aircraft.
This plane happened to have an excellent maintenance history.
Here's a photograph of the Wellstone plane.
There just were no problems with the plane.
The NTSB would undertake an investigation.
It would take them more than a year to arrive at the conclusion that the pilots had been at fault.
But that's a very difficult conclusion to sustain.
What I have discovered is that the NTSB can only investigate a plane crash as a crime scene if the Attorney General declares it to be the scene of a crime.
Absent the Attorney General's declaration, it can only be investigated as an accident scene.
Which means that because the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, declined to declare the crash scene a crime scene, they could only consider accident-compatible alternatives, the plane, the weather, the pilots.
Now the plane I've already explained was this marvelous aircraft, the Rolls-Royce of small planes.
They would eventually conclude the plane was not at fault.
Here's the interior, the instruction panel.
This plane has all kinds of gauges and devices, including, obviously, altimeters for altitude, airspeed indicators, course deviation or deflection indicators, CDIs, to tell you whether or not you're on track.
It has a loud stall warning device.
It's a very sophisticated plane.
It was a late model King Air A-100, and it had an advanced avionics package.
And this package included a Global Positioning Satellite System, a GPS system.
So the NTSB would spend quite a bit of time questioning pilots from Charter Aviation, which at least this craft for this flight, as to whether or not the pilots could have been coming on on a GPS.
Although they concluded it had not, I will offer reasons to believe that in fact actually the answer to that question is yes.
Here's the plane.
Very comfortable aircraft.
Paul Wellstone didn't like to fly, but when he did fly, Richard Connery, who was the pilot, was his pilot of choice.
Connery had a 5,200 hours of experience.
He had an air transport pilot certification, which is the highest civilian rating, and he had passed his FAA flight check only two days before the fatal flight.
That means by the government's own standard, this man was highly qualified to fly this plane.
If you read the NTSB report, you find they go way out of their way to try to cite evidence that this man was not a good pilot.
They cite complaints from fellow pilots that had never been submitted to the administration of the Charter Service.
In other words, stuff that appears to have been made up.
It wasn't in the official record.
On the other hand, you have a pilot who flew with Connery 50 times who said he was the most meticulous and conscientious pilot with which he ever flew.
And I have a friend who went to high school with Connery who said the guy was obsessive-compulsive.
Well, that's just the kind of guy who's going to be completely meticulous and by-the-book and very thorough and very cautious in the way he flies an aircraft.
The co-pilot, Michael Guess, had 650 hours of experience and just a commercial air pilot's license.
The plane actually was not required to have two pilots, but when we reason about what happened in the NTSB scenario, the official story of what happened on this flight, the fact that there were two pilots turns out to be significant.
As far as the weather is concerned, because I was writing about this because almost immediately I was picked up by Coast to Coast, which is this four-hour program every night that draws an audience of 10 million.
They had a guest host from St.
Paul, and the guy asked me to come on the show to talk about Wellstone.
At this time I had published exactly one column.
One column on the death of Paul Wellstone, and I was on coast-to-coast for a four-hour talk about it.
Well, that meant a lot of people heard about it, and of course I continued to write these.
Columns.
Because the deeper I got into it, the more troubled I became.
And one of them was a fellow named Steve Filipovich, who just happens to live here in Duluth, although forever I thought he lived in Eveleth, who happens to be a pilot.
And he sent me a couple of photographs he'd taken.
He said, I was about 10 miles from the Eveleth Airport at the time of Senator Wellstone's demise.
I was inspecting and taking pictures of some real estate in the area.
I was outside for a good 15 to 20 minutes around the time.
I am a pilot and have landed at Eveleth.
I know the possibility of icing when descending.
The temperature on the ground was pleasant, with my estimate of visibility 3 miles, with a 500 to 1000 foot ceiling.
There was no ground wind.
Experienced pilots could handle these conditions very easily.
So this guy is just a few miles from the airport, and within a half an hour of the crash, and you look at these photographs over water, and not only is there no snow or freezing rain, there isn't even any rain.
There isn't even any rain.
I thought it was just a bit much when I would watch Wolf Blitzer that night on CNN talking about how there was all these reports of, you know, snow and freezing rain, and how the NTSB wasn't even flying into the airport, and how much he said that really said it all, that they weren't even flying into the airport, disregarding the obvious consideration that it's a standard practice to close an airport after an accident, because you want to make sure there was nothing about the airport that was contributing to the accident.
So the fact that they flew into Duluth and then drove up there to Avila didn't mean anything about what had caused the crash.
It was simply a standard operating procedure when you're investigating a crash.
But these kinds of reports exaggerate reports about the weather.
Denny Anderson, who's himself a pilot, one of our best anchors, was constantly correcting these reports about how the weather was responsible and explaining that that wasn't the case.
And I have a colleague here who's himself a pilot who was sharing his observations about how the weather was systematically being distorted over and over again.
So the first chapter of our book is about all these exaggerated reports about the weather.
The weather was not a factor and even the NTSB would conclude the weather was not responsible for the crash.
So here's the crash site.
It was a thicket of trees that were kind of pine trees, sort of softer wood trees.
And Costella surmises that the pilots may have had some degree of control over the plane and tried to guide it into a softer kind of landing.
But it came down at a quite a steep incline, about 27 to 30 degrees incline.
The wings were broken off.
The tail was broken off and what's important about the wings being broken off is that the wings are the location for most of the fuel for this plane.
So most of the fuel for the plane was broken off as a plane came in for a landing.
Now you notice here a rather interesting jacket in the background belonging to the FBI.
Rick Wahlberg, the sheriff, former sheriff of St.
Louis County, arrived on the scene about 1.30.
He saw persons from the FBI's Rapid Response Team in St.
Paul that he knew personally when he arrived, and they told him they had been there since noon.
I asked Gary Ullman what time they showed up, and Gary told me that while he'd been very busy taking the phone, he knew they'd been there at least since 1 o'clock.
Paul McCabe, however, the spokesman for the FBI, said the FBI, this rapid response team, had not shown up until 3.30.
So here you've got Paul McCabe saying 3.30.
You've got the sheriff, who showed up at 1.30, saying they were there since noon, learning that from people he knew personally from that response team.
And you've got confirmation from Gary Ullman.
Now, I was not the first to notice that there was something funny going on here.
Christopher Bolin of American Free Press noted that the FBI were Johnny-on-the-spot, rather like how they showed up at that service station immediately after the crash, the impact with the Pentagon.
It's as though these FBI agents had been sitting around wondering and thinking, you know, my God, if some plane crashes in the Pentagon, we're going to have to go and pick up that film mighty fast!
I mean, how plausible is that?
How plausible is that the FBI could have been on the scene by noon?
I did some calculations using very conservative numbers.
In order for the FBI to get from their office to their airport, to fly up to Duluth, to rent cars, to drive up to Avalos, Virginia, to arrive at the airport even by noon, they had to have left St.
Paul at 9.30.
That, of course, happens to be the same time the Senator's plane was taking off.
So it's caused me to speculate that with powers of prediction of this capacity, these guys could be making fabulous money in the market, for example.
That they would know at 9.30 that they had to be in Eveleth, Virginia for the crash of the Senator's plane, which would take place at 10.20.
Gary Oldman never told the FBI that the crash had taken place.
Remember, the crash scene was only located at 11 a.m.
in the morning.
So how in God's name could this rapid response team from the FBI be there at noon?
Think about that.
Here's something else that's very interesting.
This crash site, see there's one of the wings that's broken off.
You can see the tail in the background, right?
Crash site, one of the wings broken off, tail in the background.
This is quite a mess, right?
Look at that!
I mean, do you think looking at this kind of destruction, I mean, essentially the fuselage was reduced to charcoal.
They spent a day and a half trying to find the cockpit voice recorder, and only then concluded that there had been no cockpit voice recorder.
But it was while they were sifting through the debris looking for the cockpit voice recorder that they discovered the bodies.
Think about it.
The most striking feature of the crash was the fire.
There was this intense fire that the fire department could not extinguish.
The fire was not out until 5.56 p.m.
That fire burned for seven and a half hours.
And the fire department was unable to put it out.
Water would not extinguish this fire.
What does the NTSB have to say about the fire?
Two or three words, depending on how you count them.
Post-impact fire.
That's all they say about it.
They don't explain it.
They don't analyze it.
They don't account for it in any way, shape, or form.
They just say there was a post-impact fire.
How can that even be justified?
For example, The bodies, as I've suggested, were basically essentially cremated by this incredibly intense fire.
They were only identified on the basis of dental examinations, but evidently there was enough lung tissue for three of them for the medical examiner to conclude that there was smoke in the lungs of at least three of them.
Well, if there was smoke in the lungs of at least three of them, then either three of them survived the crash, which is not a very likely scenario, or three of them were exposed to smoke before the plane crashed.
It doesn't say anything about the others, and my surmise is that they were just burned to such an extent that there was very little that could be done about them.
But the point is, the fire is the single most striking feature of this crash scene, and the NTSB says absolutely nothing about it except to presume that it was post-impact, which they're utterly incapable of proving, and for which there's an alternative explanation that makes a great deal more sense.
Wildfire Wellstone?
Michael Nieman of Buffalo State College wrote an early piece, Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?, talking about the motivation the Bush administration had to take him out.
It was well known that he was their number one political target in this election.
He was opposing them across the board.
He was a charismatic, outspoken guy.
He was fearless.
Utterly fearless.
Paul Wellstone had more courage in his little finger than W has in his whole body during its whole history.
In his little finger.
They did not like this guy.
I'll tell you how bad it went, how far it went.
In Willmar, Minnesota, a couple of days before the fatal crash, Paul Wellstone confided to veterans, and I've spoken with some of them who have told me they heard this personally from Paul.
That Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States, had told him that if he opposed them on Iraq, that there would be severe ramifications for him and for the state of Minnesota.
And Paul Wellstone was very worried.
He was concerned.
He thought this was a genuine threat.
And yet, when he opposed the administration on Iraq, his poll numbers went up.
He was six or seven points and gaining on Norm Coleman at the time of the crash.
So here the vaunted Bush machine, Was going to lose big time, big time, with a Paul Wellstone victory over its hand-picked candidate, Norm Coleman.
So, someone who's been particularly perceptive, I think, about the motivation, although at the time he had no reason to believe that anything untoward had actually taken place.
He had no proof, but he felt there was a huge motive on the part of the Bush administration to take this man out.
And he published it at the time, which I consider to have been very courageous.
Here is just before the election, you know, they put out, this is quite analogous, when Jack Kennedy came to Dallas, there were posters out for Jack Kennedy wanted for treason, and they gave a profile of Jack Kennedy and these 10 or 12 reasons why Jack Kennedy was guilty of treason.
And it had a black border.
And here's very analogous, rest in peace.
Why?
Because Paul Wellstone was opposing the abolition of the estate tax.
And of course, politically, the administration casts the estate tax as a death tax and claims it really is for the little guy, that the estate tax benefits the little guy.
Every study ever conducted shows this is a massive tax break for the rich, again, and it tends to the accumulation of vast fortunes like the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's in the past, and the reason for having an estate tax is so that you wouldn't have a small number of families of immense wealth distorting the political process.
I mean, money is a huge lever in politics, and the more of it you have, the more political power you can exert.
It's absolutely anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, obviously.
I mean, it's a bad thing to have these small amounts of money accumulating in small families.
So the estate tax is a very good thing.
It's a very good thing that we want to preserve, and Paul Wellstone was opposing it, and therefore they put out an arrest in peace.
And here's another, you know, this is just indicative of the political attitudes at the time.
I mean, many commentators were writing about this.
You can go back and start digging up, you know, about commentators who talk about the political motivation.
Hey, we have a whole chapter on it in American Assassination.
We have a whole chapter on the political motivation for taking Paul Wellstone out.
And what really was at stake was control of the Senate.
At this point, there was 50 Democrats and 49 Republicans.
In fact, the reason it wasn't 50-50 was because Jim Jeffords of Vermont had declared himself to be an independent because he was so distraught with the Bush administration because they wouldn't finance programs that they claimed to be centerpieces of their administration, such as No Child Left Behind.
In fact, the city of Duluth and every other city across this United States is still having to cope with the massive demands that are imposed administratively by the No Child Left Behind and the incredible lack of funding.
So Bush is very good at talking about giving money.
It's like, you know, with New Orleans.
He's good at talking and he's very bad at doing.
I mean, his deeds belie his words.
So here's the plane.
NTSB took a year to investigate the plane.
It went down 25 October.
They didn't release their finding until the week of the observance of the death of John F. Kennedy a year later.
And I think that was quite deliberate so that if they heard any discussion of of assassination in relation to Paul Wellstone, because there'd be so much discussion of assassination in relation to John Kennedy, people wouldn't even think twice and realize that the prospect that Paul Wellstone might have been assassinated was actually the topic under consideration and not JFK.
So what did they conclude?
Well, they concluded that these pilots lost track of their airspeed.
That's what they said.
They said the pilots lost track of their airspeed and allowed the plane to crash.
But notice, you can't just lose track of your airspeed.
If you're losing track of your airspeed, you're also losing track of your altitude.
Obviously, they're related.
There are situations in which you can preserve the same altitude while losing airspeed, but they aren't long-enduring, they're short-term things you can do with a plane.
And the fact is, if they were losing track of their airspeed, they were also losing track of their altitude.
And in addition, they were losing track of their course because they wound up crashing two miles south of the airport.
And as I'm going to explain, they were coming in steadily on a course that was eight degrees off of the course that would have taken them to the airport.
And in addition, there's a loud star warning device.
So I say, well look, let's just talk about a couple of these.
Let's leave this course deviation indicator, the CDI, to the side for a moment.
What's the probability that a pilot, he's carrying a United States Senator and there are eight souls, as the saying has it, aboard.
That he's going to neglect his airspeed.
I mean, this is like the most basic element of flying you're taught, airspeed and altitude.
Suppose one time in a thousand he's going to neglect, or one time in a hundred.
I mean, let's be real conservative.
One time in a hundred he's going to neglect his airspeed.
What's the probability he's also going to neglect his altitude?
Well, suppose we say that's also 1 in 100.
Well, for these both to take place concurrently, that's 1 time in 10,000.
And if you ask, is he going to neglect his course deviation indicator too?
That's another 100.
1 time in a million is a single pilot.
If these only occur 1 time in 100, you're going to neglect all three.
And now we have a second pilot.
So you've got to multiply 1 in a million times 1 in a million.
Now that's a very small number.
And yet that's the basis for the explanation advanced by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Don't even factor in that it was a loud-star warning device.
Now if there's a loud-star warning device, what is the probability that pilots are not only going to, two perfectly competent pilots, one extremely highly qualified, are going to neglect their airspeed, their altitude, their course deviation indicator, and a loud-star warning device?
Let me tell you how bad it gets.
They actually found a simulator down in Florida.
It wasn't exactly a King Air A-100.
It had a weaker engine.
So you got a simulator down in Florida that's got a weaker engine, so it's not even as powerful and therefore doesn't have as much resource as an Air King 100.
They took pilots from Charter Aviation.
They put them in the simulator.
They gave them a similar flight plan.
They had them fly abnormally slowly.
They couldn't bring the plane down.
They could not bring the plane down.
Let me tell you what this means is the NTSB's own evidence contradicts the NTSB's conclusion.
The NTSB's own evidence contradicts the NTSB's conclusion.
They couldn't bring the plane down.
When this was discovered there were experts down in Minnesota and they were being quoted in the Star Trib and other papers saying they don't understand.
A member of the NTSB team that signed the report, Richard Heeling, said they had no idea what caused the crash.
They were just speculating.
Well, I think we can do better.
Here's what we have discovered.
This plane was equipped with this Global Positioning Satellite System.
Now it's very odd that there were no warnings called in because Michael Gass, the co-pilot, had been handling most of the communications, which is exactly what you'd expect if Richard Connery, the senior pilot by quite a large margin, was piloting the plane.
So why was there no, why was there no, of course, you know, calling of distress?
Especially if you, if you were going to crash.
If the plane was somehow, something had gone wrong, you knew you were going to crash, you got a United States Senator, you got eight people aboard altogether.
You would know that since you're crashing in a remote area, a wooded area, a marshy area, that the life and death of those aboard the plane may depend on the rapidity with which the first responders arrived at the scene.
So it'd be indispensable to send out a distress warning, yet no distress warning came.
Why?
We have a theory about this.
Here's the actual flight path according to the government.
Because somewhere around here, it went off a civilian radar, the plane went off a civilian radar, so that the rest of the flight path is a reconstruction based on military radar only.
Okay?
So I'm going to make my argument based upon The United States government, the NTSB's own reconstruction of the crash.
They're coming in here on a 268 Azimuth when they should be on a 276, okay?
They should be on a 276 and they're on a 268.
And look, they're flying very constantly on that 268.
I think they thought they were on track.
I think they weren't getting a reading from the course deviation indicator.
If they were two miles south of the airport as they were, that course deviation indicator should have been way to the right.
It should have shown they were way off track.
And yet they didn't send in a distress call.
What could possibly account for that?
We really didn't have a good answer for this, assuming that this reconstruction of the flight is accurate.
Until a few months ago when I was contacted by the owner of a charter company with pilots who fly into Waukegan Airport.
And they had a pilot who had a very odd experience.
He was flying into Waukegan.
He was flying east.
Not west, but east.
And his co-pilot's GPS light, GPS degrade light came on.
They had never, neither of them had ever seen a GPS degrade light ever come on before.
The GPS degrade light came on, then the GPS degrade light went off.
Then the GPS degrade light came on again.
When they broke out of the clouds, they found they were well south of their destination.
I not only talked to the owner, I talked to their senior pilot, and I talked to the pilot.
And the pilot has sent me a letter and documents to substantiate his experience.
He has never known of anyone who has ever had an odd experience with a GPS.
But in this case, when they came out of the clouds, even though their CDI, their Course Deflection Indicator, showed that they were on track, they were not.
And I want to suggest to you, he pulled up to the airport in Waukegan on 25 October at 1022.
And because of the coincidence that he was pulling up the airport as the crash was taking place in Minnesota,
he thought there might be importance to his information.
What he is telling us appears to be the mirror image of what was going on with the Wellstone crash.
Because they were both going, albeit one going east, one going west, they were going in opposite directions, yet they're both winding up south of the airport.
Which suggests, although no one has ever heard of this happening before, that the GPS data was being manipulated.
To what purpose?
I submit the GPS data was being manipulated to get them into the kill zone.
I'll tell you, when they took, when the motorcade route, I didn't emphasize this before, but when that motorcade route was changed for the Kennedy motorcade on the 18th, four days before, and John Connolly played a key role in changing the motorcade route.
Apparently faking a phone call, claiming he was talking to somebody at the White House who was agreeing with him about changing the route when he was really talking into a dial tone.
I'm convinced that would happen.
They brought Jack Kennedy, the target, to the assassins.
They brought Jack Kennedy into the Kelzone.
What I'm suggesting is something likewise was going on here with Paul Wellstone.
See these guys?
The CDI was showing them to be on course.
I'm convinced, because there was no distress call going on, that the CDI and the Wellstone plane showed them to be on course.
Now what was the purpose?
It was to get them here where they could use a high-tech weapon, a directed energy weapon.
What do these directed energy weapons do?
They take all the computerized components out of an aircraft.
They would take out the communications equipment.
They would take out the navigational aids.
They would take out the stall warning device.
What else would they do?
They can overwhelm the electrical system.
These planes have solenoids or electrical switches that affect the pitch of the propellers.
And if those switches are activated, it can cause the propellers to turn to idle, which means that basically you have no forward thrust.
There were nine indications that those props were actually below idle.
When they sent the props off for an independent analysis, the independent team came back and reported that they had been on idle.
That means that the plane had no forward thrust at the time it crashed.
Here's something else.
If it's a sufficiently strong electromagnetic force, it can take out the pilots.
It can render them unconscious, incapable of voluntary muscle control, or even dead.
It's like being inside of a microwave oven.
Here's something that first led me to suspect that this possibility might be what was taking place here.
A local lobbyist for the city who deals with Minnesota, but on behalf of the city of Duluth, John Ongaro, contacted me to tell me he had a very strange cell phone experience in the vicinity of the airport.
It was, when a cell call came in, it was a loud whirling and warbling, wailing and warbling sound, oscillating.
Something you'd never heard before.
Very loud.
And I told him, yeah, I thought it might be connected.
Could he check with me, you know, tell me what time the call came in?
He checked, the call came in at 10-18.
So I've had discussions with Costello.
I don't have a PhD in electromagnetism, but he does.
And Costello tells me that because it's got a periodicity to it, this wailing, warbling, it appeared to be from a man-made or artificial source, especially considering that there are no known sources of electromagnetic energy in the Eveleth, Virginia area.
He also explained to me that a cell phone is a receiver, okay?
It merely receives energy in the vicinity.
His happened to be an analog phone, and I think that may have contributed to it having, say, a broader range of receptivity than if it had been digital.
Apparently...
I mean, this is, you know, a part of our reconstruction.
Apparently, an electromagnetic weapon had been turned on, and because Anguero had this call coming in, it activated his cell phone so that it was capable of picking up the electromagnetic energy in the vicinity from these devices having been activated.
And he was south of the airport, the crash took place south of the airport.
Interestingly, a local physician has had several patients who told him that their garage doors opened spontaneously that day.
More significant than that is that when Costello poured through all of these NTSB 2300 pages, he discovered there's a meteorological report about the weather that was reporting a very odd phenomenon.
Namely, at the level of icing in the atmosphere, there was a huge melted area.
Well, that huge melted area, you know, of icing in the general vicinity of the crash would be a most improbable event, even from this intense fire, which burned from seven hours, because the heat from fire dissipates so very rapidly.
It just dissipates very rapidly.
I mean, look, the firemen were right there, and they're talking about how it was too intense, they couldn't get the bodies out, but they were within a couple of yards, right?
They were capable of staying within a couple of yards.
It wasn't this fire that would have caused this melted area in the ice pattern in the atmosphere, but it could well have been the effect of an electromagnetic weapon.
Plus, notice this, not only would it take away the power and leave the pilots hamstrung in terms of landing their aircraft, but it could very well have caused a fire in the plane.
And it turns out that electrical fires tend to burn blue-white.
So now you've actually got a cause and explanation for this intense fire, except I think it requires one additional element.
I do believe that the intensity of an electrical source for a fire could have ignited the metal skin of the plane.
But whether it would have been sufficient to keep it burning for seven hours is another question.
I have been struck by the idea that the only kind of substance I know that would burn with that kind of intensity and not be something that could be extinguished with water is white phosphorus.
I learned about white phosphorus in the Marine Corps because we had white phosphorus artillery shells.
They're now banned under the Geneva Conventions.
Nevertheless, they were used by the American military in Fallujah.
Now, in the history of warfare, Fallujah is going to go down on a par with Guernica, which was memorialized by a great painting by Picasso that some of you may know.
I'm telling you, this was an atrocity of a huge magnitude.
I believe, and you know, if you want to ask, is anything I've said all evening on the category of speculation?
This sentence now I'm going to utter is my speculation, but it's on the order of an educated guess.
I suspect that plane was painted with a thin coat of white phosphorus.
I'm just telling you this is the best I can do in conjecturing an explanation for the intensity of this fire that burns for seven hours.
I suspect That you could blend white phosphorus into a paint coating of the plane that would lead to the demolition of the plane on the order of what we found in this case.
So what we have here is a prospective explanation that accounts for the bluish white smoke It accounts for the fire.
It accounts for the intensity of the fire.
It accounts for the loss of control of the plane.
It accounts for the failure to send a distress warning.
It accounts for why, even though they may perfectly well have known that they were losing altitude and airspeed in the end, And their stall warning device may have gone off, that there was nothing they can do about it.
I mean, consider the two hypotheses.
One is these guys were perfectly in control of the plane, there was nothing wrong with the plane, and they just ignored their airspeed, their altitude, their course deviation indicator, and their stall warning device and let it crash.
Even a member of the own NTSB team can't accept that, and says this is no explanation, this is mere speculation.
We are offering a hypothesis for which we have amassed considerable evidence that this may have involved the use of a high-tech weapon, the existence of which is largely unknown to the American people.
So this is a brilliant plan.
Manipulate the GPS data, which we have seen going on in this mirror image case on the same day, at the same time, in the Waukegan landing, to get the plane into the kill zone, and then we'll use an electromagnetic weapon to take it out.
Now, some may be struck by the coincidence that the company that owns Beechcraft is Raytheon, formerly Hughes Aircraft.
And that Raytheon actually holds patents for a lot of these high-tech directed energy weapons.
So if anyone wondered whether that kind of information would be available, for example, to the Department of Defense, by way of the military-industrial complex, without any doubt Raytheon would have been in the position to provide, for example, the Secretary of Defense with information about how to take out that plane using a high-tech weapon, the existence of which is unknown to most Americans.
And look at the remnants.
Here's another feature I forgot to mention in talking about the role of the FBI and their rapid appearance on the scene.
The FBI cordoned off the area.
They wouldn't even let the Associated Press photographer take photographs for only 15 minutes, which is very odd.
You'd think the more photographs the better, because then you can more easily have information to reconstruct what happened.
The FBI concluded that day that there had been no indications of terrorist involvement.
And I say, well look!
Look at this crash scene.
Look at that.
You've got a pile of debris.
How could you know there are no indications of terrorist involvement?
You don't even know, from looking at this debris, what's the cause of the crash.
Remember, it's taken the NTSB a whole year to figure out the cause of the crash.
How could the FBI possibly know that there were no signs of terrorist involvement if they had no idea of the cause of the crash?
They couldn't know, for example, if it had been a small bomb, a gas canister.
They couldn't even know if it had been an adult abortion fanatic who just happened to be firing shots and scored a lucky hit when the plane flew over.
How could they possibly know?
And the next day, Carol Carmody, who was the head of the NTSB team when they finally showed up after the FBI had been on the scene for eight hours, a reversal of roles, since there's supposed to be no investigation by any agency other than the NTSB until there's an NTSB official on the scene, reiterated what she had been told by the FBI, that there were no indications of terrorist involvement.
And you want to know what else is stunning about this?
There actually was a connection between the co-pilot and a terrorist when Michael Guess had been working at the Pan Am Flight Academy in Egan, Minnesota.
He had left the software for piloting a Boeing 747 on a computer and that software had wound up on the laptop of Zacharias Massawi.
Zacharias Massawi was supposed to have been the twentieth of the hijackers involved in 9-11.
So not only is the FBI reporting there's no indication of terrorist involvement when they can't even know the cause of the crash, not only are they claiming something they can't possibly know, but there actually was a connection to a terrorist.
I say, how ridiculous is that?
Now, Carol Carmody is a rather interesting piece of work because Carol Carmody Also was in charge of the investigation of the death of Mel Carnahan in Missouri a couple of years earlier when he was running against John Ashcroft.
John Ashcroft wanted to return to the Senate.
Mel Carnahan, three weeks before the election, went down in a small plane crash that also has some suspicious circumstances.
For example, A radar fanatic has got in touch with me.
This guy picks up weird radar patterns wherever they occur.
The day of the Carnahan crash, there was a red circle from electromagnetic energy surrounding the vicinity of the crash.
This leads me to speculate, and you can judge for yourself whether this speculation is wild or not wild, that possibly something like a similar technique, albeit using a different weapon of this general sort, may have been used on Mel Carnahan.
But the people of Missouri preferred to vote for a dead man to returning John Ashcroft to the Senate.
And the governor of Missouri appointed his wife in his place.
Thus, some of us have speculated that the Wellstone crash could be viewed as a refinement of what happened to Mel Carnahan.
Because they reduced the period of time between the crash and the election from three weeks to ten days.
And they made sure that his wife was taken out with him so she couldn't stand in for him.
And I'm sorry to tell you that this is an incredibly plausible scenario, given what we know about the motives and Machiavellian character of this administration.
They had a problem, and they wanted to get rid of the problem.
And I'll tell you, Paul Wellstone wasn't just one Democrat, he was a sensational and inspiring human being.
So what else do we know?
Others have arrived at similar opinions, by the way.
Michael Rupert, the same fellow from the wilderness, who published our study, has reported that
he was contacted by somebody on the inside, somebody who's done wet work, who's been involved
in assassinations in the past and who's been a reliable source, who told him that this
had been a deliberate hit, who said that there was a group of reinvigorated old white guys
who were in charge and there were no one to screw around with, and you could bet there
will be other strategic accidents of this kind taking place.
Rupert said he also was told confidentially by a number of members of Congress that
it was just too suspicious, too convenient, the timing was too remarkable, and I know
there's at least one prominent liberal politician in an adjacent state who no longer flies
because he considers the risks to be just too great.
It's a good thing I have a good voice.
And I say to you, Paul Wellstone was a great American.
He was, in my opinion, one of a kind.
He was irreplaceable.
And in my judgment, all of the evidence suggests that he was a massive thorn in the side of the Bush administration.
Let me conclude by making the following observation.
I believe in this case a very small number of persons would have had any knowledge of what was going on.
It is my conjecture that this is the kind of decision that would be made by the troika that actually runs the White House, as I've already observed.
Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove.
But the intermediaries would need to be very few.
They'd need information about the plane.
They could have learned that Wellstone was going to be on that flight by a simple mechanism as a director of Charter Aviation picking up the phone and calling Dick Cheney.
And then obtaining the information they needed from Raytheon and having a small team out there at the scene.
So they bring the plane into the kill zone and they use the electromagnetic device that most Americans don't even know exists.
How are they ever going to think about it?
It's having been employed in this case and they take them out.
A van was observed leaving this area at high speed.
I've been trying to do what I can to nail this down.
I'm not the only one who's been looking at this, but there's more than one reason to believe that the scenario I'm describing is right.
At the very least, there can be no doubt about the following point.
This scenario actually explains what happened to Paul Wellstone.
The scenario advanced by the NTSB does not.
Therefore, there can be no question about whether or not Their hypothesis, the accident hypothesis, is preferable to the assassination hypothesis.
It is not.
The only question that remains is whether there's sufficient evidence supporting the assassination hypothesis to justify its being accepted.
There's no question but what the official account deserves rejection.
And I suggest to you when you have one hypothesis that it can explain the evidence and another that cannot, You really don't have a choice because one explanation is reasonable and the other is not.
But I'm willing to say in this case that we could have a responsible disagreement over whether the evidence is sufficient to warrant acceptance.
I happen to believe that it is, but I'm certainly willing to acknowledge that we could have an honest disagreement about whether it has gone that final step.
Without any doubt, however, the assassination hypothesis is preferable to the accident hypothesis on the multiple grounds that I have enumerated, and for that reason I think we lost a A brave, courageous, noble human being who is doing a lot of good for the world.
And I certainly regret it and want the parties who are responsible to be punished for it.
Thank you.
I'm Brandon and I'm a student at UMD.
Yes.
And I was a little bit confused about your link between Raytheon.
I think it's incorrect to say that Raytheon built the aircraft.
Raytheon purchased Beechcraft in the 1980s.
This aircraft was built before Raytheon purchased Beechcraft.
Oh yeah.
I'd like to say that most aerospace companies do have government contracts.
They kind of go hand in hand.
Yeah.
So I don't understand the logic.
First of all, it's incorrect to say that Raytheon built this aircraft.
Beechcraft built this aircraft.
Well, who builds it today?
Well, now it's owned by Raytheon.
Who owns it?
Well, I'm talking about today.
I'm talking about today.
I'm talking about the time when this happened.
Raytheon is the military industrial entity that has the intimate knowledge of the aircraft or could get it at its fingertips because it owns the company that builds it, okay?
So you are splitting hair just a bit finely in terms of the point I was making.
Raytheon has the knowledge and information to any level of specificity about the King Air A-100.
Raytheon also manufactures and has the patents on numerous electromagnetic weapons.
So Raytheon would be the perfect entity to consult if you wanted to find out what type of weapon would be required to take out this plane.
That was my point.
Okay, fair enough, but also all, I mean pretty much all aerospace companies have government association.
I mean Boeing, before Boeing owned McDonnell Douglas, there was a McDonnell, Lockheed Martin, are you, Airbus doesn't have any U.S.
government contracts, but so are you saying that virtually everyone should be concerned about flying on a commercial aircraft?
Well, if you're a prominent politician who has pissed off the Bush administration, You might want to think twice about it.
I'm saying, look, they've got a foolproof mechanism for taking out political opponents.
You bring them down in an air crash, the NTSB investigates, they can't even investigate it as a possible crime scene unless they have the permission of the Attorney General.
If the Attorney General is complicit or compliant, you've got a foolproof method because he simply declines to allow it to be investigated as a crime scene.
Which means that the NTSB never even considered the full range of possible hypotheses, which means it wasn't any kind of a scientific inquiry.
Because for a scientific inquiry, you have to consider all the possible modes, you know, possible explanations, which include the unpleasant ones as well as the pleasant ones.
And in this case, that means they include, you know, small bombs, gas canisters, and EM weapons.
Now, I've already pointed out to you that there's at least one prominent politician Who I shall not name, but who everyone would know the name if I mention it, who is no longer flying precisely because he doesn't want to go down and suffer the same feat that Paul Wellstone suffered.
And I'm telling you, I don't know that there's any politician on Capitol Hill who hasn't had the thought that Wellstone was taken out.
Hey, look, the Pioneer Press did a survey right after the crash and asked whether, you know, its audience, whether this had been done by, whether it was an accident caused by the weather, whether it was an act of God, or, and included among the alternatives, selected by 66% of the respondents, GOP conspiracy.
66% picked GOP conspiracy.
And I'm here to tell you, It looks to me, based upon my research of this case, that they were right.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.
Well, that whole thing got very, it was very interesting what happened, you know, in the aftermath here, because you can read discussion about it, that this ought to have generated a surge of sympathy for Democrats, even across the nation.
Some initially were thinking that.
But what happened was, you know, that this memorial service was,
was, which had predictable features.
Who, who would doubt that this close to the end of a campaign,
that spokespersons during the memorial for Paul Wellstone would not indulge in some rhetoric
that would have the character of rallying the troops to vote for Paul Wellstone?
Such that I was watching, for example, when this was going on, or immediately after.
Peggy Noonan, for example, who was the lead speechwriter for Ronald Reagan,
was on MSNBC and, and just saying, oh, how disgusting it was that the Democrats, you know,
betrayed the, the, the memory of Paul Wellstone by, by having this, this,
turning it into a pep rally.
Well, anyone could predict you'd get some of this kind of rhetoric coming out of that memorial service.
And it was no disservice to Paul Wellstone.
Talking about getting back on that bus and carrying this campaign to a successful conclusion is exactly what you'd
hear.
But the Republican spin machine, and this is a very typical illustration of its efficacy, had an orchestrated plan.
They were all plugging this idea that the Democrats had besmirched the reputation of Paul Wellstone.
And why did they have to do that?
They knew this could be an event that would inspire Democrats all over the country.
Therefore, they had to find some way to tarnish it.
I'm just talking about the way in which hardball politics is played by Bush and Rove and the others.
Karl Rove is plenty smart enough to know they've got to do something to try to besmirch the attitude.
And then ironically, here in Minnesota, although I personally happen to esteem him, Jesse Ventura chose the occasion of the debate between Walter Mondale and Norm Coleman to announce his appointment of Dean Barkley to be the successor to Wellstone.
And Jesse just did that out of some kind of peak.
I mean, the guy I know the guy.
He's had me on his show when he was governor.
He had me on his TV program when he was on MSNBC.
He even invited me back to Harvard to give a lecture on JFK when he was visiting Harvard as a fellow.
So I know Jesse.
He's a good guy, but he's thin-skinned.
And he just allowed his personal peak over some perceived Neglect or abuse to allow him to interfere with the election was all wrong all wrong that Jesse did that But a lot of those who had been sympathetic to Jesse were affected by his attitude And I think that affected the vote, but I also believe and this is something I haven't looked into here But it wouldn't surprise me at all that we may have been the victims of these electronic voting machines I'm telling you there's nothing more pernicious more dangerous more subversive to democracy than having voting machines and
That can be manipulated at whim when they're all controlled by the members of one party.
These are all controlled by the GOP, Republican benefactors before the election.
Those who ran the machines in Ohio were telling, they explained they were going to deliver the state for Bush.
And Stalin observed that it doesn't matter who casts the boats, what matters is who counts them.
And I'm afraid that's a lesson that these guys have learned.
Another question if you want?
Well, I'd just like to comment about the NTSB.
You've kind of made them out to be the bad guys in some way, but I'd like to say they are a reputable agency, and when you look at what the information they have to go on, they don't have a flight data recorder, they don't have a cockpit voice recorder.
They came on the scene, obviously, after the accident, after most of the aircraft had been burned away.
In many respects, they don't have the luxury Of making these statements like you do.
And I don't think it's fair to say that they're part of some grand conspiracy.
Oh, you know, the NTSB.
Look, Harold Carmody is a former official with the CIA.
You may not know that.
What you ought to do is go out and read our book, because we talk about a lot of cases investigated by the NTSB.
I'm telling you, the NTSB, like the FBI, is used to cover up cases.
I say that categorically.
I have no doubt about it.
There's just no question, there isn't any question about it.
Look, I appreciate you're a young man, and I appreciate your idealism, you know, and I wish I still shared it, but when it comes to the NTSB, I've seen too many cases where what they were doing was covering up and not revealing, concealing rather than revealing.
And I recommend you read our book, as we talk about quite a few cases.
Well, and also you say it's highly implausible that two experienced pilots like this would make these same mistakes.
I'd like you to read the, well if you have time to read the NTSB report on the Northwest Airlink aircraft that crashed in Hibbing.
Same situation, you have two experienced pilots flying an advanced aircraft and they flew the aircraft into the ground.
It's not improbable.
Listen to me, these guys were not playing Canasta.
There was no reason for them to be distracted.
They were flying into an airport they'd flown into many times before.
Other pilots who've flown into Eveleth, Virginia, say it's practically impossible to have an accident flying into that airport.
It was a simple flight.
Something went wrong.
The NTSB explained none of it.
None of it.
It is so improbable.
I don't understand why you're not impressed by my using the simple value of 1 in 100 for neglecting your airspeed, and then 1 in 100 for neglecting your altitude, and 1 in 100 for neglecting your CDI.
That's one in a million right there, and you got two pilots that are going to commit an incident that only occurs one time in a million?
There is no explanation from the NTSB.
I won't give you an inch on this.
Not an inch.
And the fact that, you know, I've seen other planes fall out of the sky, and it's very interesting how they're going to occur, like the day before I'm speaking at the National Press Club about this case.
I'm just very troubled.
This is an unscrupulous administration.
Anyone who thinks that there's anything they wouldn't resort to... They have lied to send hundreds of thousands of young American men and women to Iraq, where they're coming back, if they aren't coming back in body bags, they're coming back with parts of their bodies missing.
It's terrible.
And they won't even allow it to be covered.
It's a disgrace.
This is a... Look, I appreciate your idealism, and I'm glad for the question.
I simply think we have different attitudes here.
There's one part of the airplane saga that sticks in my craws.
How do you propose that this phosphorus substance was painted on the plane?
This was a leased plane, is that correct?
Well, it's an air charter, a charter aviation plane.
I don't think that would have been much of a problem.
I mean, it would probably be virtually translucent.
I mean, you could do, you know, you dilute the white phosphorus with some kind of lacquer.
I mean, I'm being somewhat speculative here, as I've acknowledged.
I said this one part.
How do you account for this plane burning with this intensity that the fire department could not even put it out with water?
That's very suggestive to me.
White phosphorus cannot be put out with water.
If you get phosphorus on you, it will burn right through your body.
You can't put it out.
It's a devastating weapon.
And if, all I said was this, if the plane had been coated with a light coat of white phosphorous, that could certainly account for the intensity and duration of the fire, which led to, you know, this situation where, I mean, let me see if I can go back to the best indications of how extensive it was.
Look at that!
Look at that!
That goddamn thing has just reduced to charcoal, man!
There are eight human beings in there!
Now what caused that?
The NTSB says, zilch.
Now I'll tell you, when the government says, zilch, they're covering something up.
It's because they either don't know what to say or what they would say or could say.
If they were to say it, it would be so revealing and so devastating, it's better not to say it at all.
There has to be an explanation for this.
I offer you an explanation.
Do I know that the plane was coated with white phosphorus?
Absolutely not!
I don't know that!
Would it explain it, however, if it had been?
Yes, it would.
And do we know about white phosphorus?
Yes, we do.
And are we using it in ways that are illegal and inhumane?
Yes, we are.
And would it account for the fire?
Yes, actually, it would.
So, that's all I say about it.
But I guarantee you that's a whole lot more than the NTSB has to say about it.
Which is, of course, nothing.
I'm trying to explain what happened here, and I dare say the probability of what I'm offering is overwhelmingly greater than the probability of what they're offering, which is approximately zero.
Please.
Yeah, come on up.
Come on up.
Here's a... Okay.
Oh, that's a great question.
I think it does have a slight, I think it has a slight garlicky odor, but I'd have to check on that.
It's very interesting, because I'm going to ask, did any of the first responders notice anything that was, you know, interesting about the smell?
I like that, okay?
I will, I will try to pursue that.
I like that.
That's good.
Excellent.
Because what you want to do with, you know, in a, in a, in a form of scientific reasoning is figure out all the consequences, what must be true if some hypothesis is true.
That was a good question.
I am convinced that Paul Wellstone, would have been completely supportive of the efforts of Christopher Boland and Michael Neiman and Michael Rupert and Don Foreros Jacobs and John P. Costella and Jim Fetzer to figure out what happened to him.
Paul Wellstone would have stood with us in wanting to know the truth.
He would have been unflinching and he would have been relentless And he would have persevered it as long and hard as he possibly could.
And by God, that's what I'm going to do as long as I'm here to do it.
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