14
9
7
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.
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 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.
The Death of Cpl. Pat Tillman
There are typical signs that something is wrong in the case of deaths that have political ramifications. These include obfuscation about the cause of the event, especially by creating a false “first impression”, which tends to stick in the minds of most Americans. In the Wellstone case, it was that the cause had been the weather. In the case of Pat Tillman, it was that he had been killed in a fire-fight in Afghanistan. Although I shall not discuss it with the same degree of detail, the Tillman death appears to bear the signs that this, too, was an assassination. An article on Tillman in Wikipedia, exclusively based upon public sources, provides ample indications of the blatancy with which political killings can take place and then be covered up, especially by assassins who were themselves members of the military. (To insure its availability, I have archived it here under “Assassination”.)
An NFL star who enlisted in the Army in May 2002, he apparently became disenchanted with the conduct of the war. He not only did not support President Bush for reelection, but encouraged others to vote for John Kerry. According to his mother, a friend of his had arranged for him to meet with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus from MIT and one of our nation’s most respected public intellectuals, who, no doubt, could have launched him into prominent orbit as an outspoken opponent of the war. In my opinion, the prospect of having a macho, NFL-complement to Cindy Sheehan—one who might inspire the nation to reconsider our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan—would have been a powerful incentive for removing him from the public arena in the minds of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove. The use of these special operations military serving as an 'assassination ring' in this situation may very well have been irresistible.
According to Wikipedia’s entry about him, Tillman was redeployed to Afghanistan and, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. The Army initially claimed that he and his unit were hit by an ambush on a road outside a village not far from the Pakistan border. The Army Special Operations Command initially claimed that there was an exchange with hostile forces, but an investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense concluded that his death was due to friendly fire “aggravated by the intensity of the firefight”. Another, more thorough investigation, concluded that hostile forces had not been involved in the firefight and that two allied groups fired on each other in confusion after a nearby explosive device was detonated. But it also makes these points:
* No evidence of enemy fire at the scene has ever been produced;
* The lieutenant general who withheld details of Tillman's death from his parents for months told investigators "he had a bad memory, and could not recall details of his actions" on more than 70 occasions;
* According to The Washington Post, on May 4, 2005, the Army’s own investigators were aware that Tillman had been killed by being shot three times in the head;
* Senior Army commanders, including Gen. John Abizaid, knew of this fact within days of the shooting but nevertheless approved him for the Siver Star, the Purple Heart, and a posthumous promotion;
* Army doctors told the investigators that these wounds suggested murder and urged them to launch a criminal investigation, which would not be pursued; and
* Army attorneys congratulated each other in emails for impeding criminal investigation as they concluded that Tillman's death was the result of friendly fire, and that only administrative, or non-criminal, punishment was indicated.
Evidence and Likelihoods
