Paul Wellstone ... just the latest?

[Stinky The Clown]

In light of a Frank Rich piece in the NYT, I was struck to wonder ...... is Paul Wellstone just the latest? Is he following in the footsteps of others like John, Martin, and Robert?

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Not outside...

The realm of possibility.

[Nite Owl]

2. Certainly isn't.

[sabra]

3. Maybe a few years back, I would have thought no

but since 2000, I have seen the light...

[lenidog]

4. If it was anything other than a small plane then if you had a good case

then I would be apt to believe that something fishy was up. But I have a friend who lost his father, mother, brother, fiancee and almost his own life in a small plane crash. I have an acquaintance who lost his father in another one. So I know personally know that small planes crash all the time.

[Al-CIAda]

19. You need to look at the circumstances and convienient series of

events. It is troubling.

[BrklynLiberal]

5. The list of Bush family antagonists who have lost their lives in small

plane crashes or who have been "suicided" in dingy motel rooms at particularly expedient times, defies the possibility of mere coincidence to anyone with an ounce of rational skepticism.

Edited for clarity.

[undeterred]

6. The people closest to him do not think so.

FWIW.

[JanMichael]

7. I liked him, respected him, but along the lines of MLK or JFK?

No.

I'm sorry but no.

[I Have A Dream]

8. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but doesn't the person...

mean assassinated by making the plane go down? From your response, I think you take it to mean whether he's as good as them. Am I misunderstanding?

[JanMichael]

9. Whoops. Was the Rich piece asserting assassination?

If true then I suppose yes or maybe because I didn't realise that it's a fact that he was assassinated...

I hope to hell the crash was an accident but with the Bush Junta it could've been an intentional take down.

[I Have A Dream]

11. I skimmed through it on-line but didn't see anything specifically...

about it. However, it seemed as though this was what was being discussed in the earlier posts. What do you think? I might be totally wrong.

(On edit: I don't think that anyone's saying that it was a fact that he was assassinated but rather that it's a possibility that needs to be considered.)

[DrDebug]

17. The only thing I could find was this

It is more the likelyhood and timing which is suspicious and because the crash in itself is a mystery as well.

Wellstone Plane Crash Media Survey - Updated
Monday, 4 November 2002, 3:34 pm
Opinion: Rick Ensminger

(...) Summary:

* If the icing conditions were so bad (which they weren't) why would Ulman take his own plane up?
* There was no problem with icing at the altitude they were flying.
* Airport manager Ulman even took his plane up proving that icing was not a problem.
* Even so, the plane had a deicing system that was a "highly respected, highly tested system."

* They had just radioed in that they were coming in for a landing. They were only about 2 to 3 miles miles out. They gave NO indication of any problem. The NTSB has confirmed that several times.
* Traci Chacich said they were only about 2 miles out when they radioed in and turned on the lights. She said, "Clicked up the lights means the pilots turned on the runway lights and would have had the airstrip in sight."
* To activate the airport landing lights, you tune the radio to the right frequency and click the mic button several times in quick succession. The numbers that follow vary a bit from airport to airport, but normally you click the mic three times in quick succession and the lights go on. Click the mic button five times in succession and the lights go up to medium intensity. Click the button seven times and they go up to full intensity.
* Visibility was 2 to 4 miles. They would have had to be within 2 to 4 miles to "have had the airstrip in sight."
* Whatever happened, happened very quickly after they clicked up the runway lights....right after a precise, one-time signal was sent to activate the runway lights. Could that same one-time signal have activated something else?
* The landing gear was down.
* The plane was "forgiving, stable and reliable."
* The engines were "totally reliable."
* You could land it "very, very easily on one engine."
* "Performance on taking off and landing were superb."

* The pilots were experienced veterans in good health and well rested.
* Only one pilot was required to fly the King Air A100 but they had two as an extra precaution for safety.
* Eight people were killed in this King Air A100 plane crash. That is as many as have been killed in the previous 27 years according to the FAA.
* And one other things we know...

* Bush had made it his number one priority to get Wellstone out of the Senate, presumably thru the election process.
* Bush himself had come here to stump for Republican Norm Coleman and is coming again.
* "Americans for Job Security", a Republican controlled "tax-exempt" group pumped over one million dollars into ads against Wellstone.
* Wellstone had voted against Bush's Homeland Security.
* He had voted against some of Bush's judicial nominees.
* He pushed stronger environmental programs while Bush pushed the opposite way.
* He pushed hard for genuine measures to counter corporate fraud while Bush pushed for cosmetic ones.
* Wellstone was also the lead voice in the Senate, pushing for the investigation of the missing $350 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is the affair in which Secretary of Interior Gale Norton has twice taken the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about how $350 million disappeared late in the Reagan-Bush administration

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00013.htm

Either way it is very weak

[Cleita]

15. What would they take it down with?

Could they laser it down from the ground? Could they have tampered with the airplane before take off? One way to do this I think would be to punch a small hole in the gas tank. When the pilot checks everything out and gasses up, unless he spots the leak before takeoff, it could be they run out of gas before they have a chance to land. But would instruments tell them or not? Am I goofy with this scenario?

I really think some forensic detective work needs to be done to determine exactly why the airplane went down. Have they combed with with a fine tooth comb? I mean somebody should. These weren't ordinary people.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. Yes, it was about the manner of his death and not the measure of the man

[Pastiche423]

12. He was murdered

[cloudythescribbler]

13. don't forget: Malcolm X, John Lennon, Fred Hampton & many nonfamous

Killing is not an unusual tactic of the power elite, whenever it suits them. Indeed many of those (like the Reuther Brothers, who were very much involved in 'McCarthyism before McCarthy') have their own hands dirty with the muck of the system, like the Mafia. There is always a "reason" for everything, and it doesn't matter what 90+% of the public thinks, because the powerful less than 10% decide what the 'community consensus' is and can be.

Indeed, when I was in Berkeley, there were authentic progressive dropping like flies in the 80s; in fact the County Board where Berkeley and Oakland are situated (Alameda County) has five members on it. It is not gerontocratic at all -- people from their 40s say to their 70s, as you would expect. During a SEVEN year period, from 1984 to 1991, FOUR people on that board bought the farm. Now consider the statististical chances of that. If you fed the relevant known info of each of the members of the board (it would obviously total more than five) during that period, you could probably come up with a good actuarial statistic for the random chances of that happening. That's what insurance companies do. And that number wouldn't be very big, I can guarantee you that. And just as sure there will be professionals at what the media & intelligentsia do(when they're doing what they are "supposed to do"), which is justifying the lying, to cry 'conspiracy theory.

It's hard to speak to the specific case of Paul Wellstone. I don't know enough about the particular circumstances of his death. I know that Andrew Hoffman has publicly expressed suspicions about his fathers' death (you will remember that both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin died untimely deaths in 1989 and 1993 respectively, the latter more clearly suspicious than the former 'apparent suicide' to the best of anyone's knowledge); but again, you have to sweep away the cobwebs of the highminded types who will always cry tin-foil hat and equate such thinking with the Rightwingers saying that the UN is plotting to take over the world. In 1964 Richard Hofstadter tried to claim that the fact that over two thirds of the US public saw a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination was in the same boat with the Illuminati -- and he is considered one of the 'great' historians.

Rejecting so-called conspiracy thinking is a must to be accepted in the mainstream. Facts mean nothing. People like Noam Chomsky who can sound as bad as Todd Gitlin or Richard Hofstadter on this issue still get stigmatized for pointing out how the media functions as a machine. In MANUFACTURING CONSENT, the evidence is stark, but there as in a few other situations, an unlikely particular view of his that no one else would care about if it were a less critical figure in judging the man leads to the notion that he is not worthy of prime time (in the US). That's the US for you. Read Walter Karp INDISPENSABLE ENEMIES (despite some blooper theories about the Vietnam War and FDR's Supreme Court packing scheme) and see a political model that realistically describes the political structure that underlies what goes on.

One thing to remember. Fred Hampton is a particularly instructive case because what is exceptional about it was not the deliberate killing of an Black Panther leader in Illinois, noted for his famous "you don't fight racism with racism, you fight racism with solidarity", but the OVERTNESS of it. The case in Berkeley I mentioned, (and many others) were all 'natural causes'. As Brecht put it in Mack the Knife, with 'never a trace of blood'. Most of the repression is done where the role of the state is unseen, and often the agency of repression is (as we ALL know is possible) similarly unseen. And there are MANY forms of underground repression, which I don't have time to explain completely here.

In sum, reject all those who reject "conspiracy thinking" out of hand, always make explicit your recognition EVERY TIME an issue comes up that there is much that goes on underground that we don't talk explicitly about SO THAT IT WILL not be addressed effectively, and that IS how America works overall. Then remember that whether your empirical methods are explicit or not, they MUST be BOTH empirical AND comprehensive, both aboveground and underground. But you can't just assume conspiracies in particular instances -- you always have to examine the facts.

I am sorry I have not had the time or means to examine the facts of this case, but I haven't seen any presented here.

[fla nocount]

14. Naw....just a coincidence

Wellstone, Carnahan, JFK Jr. in small plane crashes?.... Oswald was just a really good shot.

Hinckley and Osama-been-Forgotten being sons of Poppy's long time buddys, shit, who could've known? It's magic I tell you....it's in the cards... them damn cards.

[Blue_In_AK]

16. Don't forget Hale Boggs and Nick Begich...

They have never been found.

[torque]

18. The FBI was enroute to the crash scene BEFORE the plane crash.

Coincidence?

Flight records show that the FBI staffers that arrived on the scene that day had departed, enroute, two hours prior to the 10:22 AM crash. They arrived at the crash site just 28 minutes after the crash, despite the fact that the plane had not yet been reported as missing or down.

At the time the FBI arrived, only one person had knowledge of the crash and knew the location of the wreckage. One person besides the FBI that is... and that man had not yet told anyone because he had just found the site himself. And yes, that man did report the wreckage and is on the record as being the first to report it. It's all in the book: American Assassination.

[Selatius]

20. This is why I think people like Dean and others should take care

Dean is not some liberal socialist or anything like that, but from what I can tell, he isn't a friend of big business either.

I feel that people like Kucinich, Sanders, Boxer, et al. are all on a potential hit list if they get too far.

The reason why Martin, John, Robby, and others were killed is that the original plans to keep them in check failed, so they were forced to revert to Plan B: Assasination.

Think about it. The US would have turned out radically different had, for instance, John F. Kennedy not been gunned down. For one thing, he would've had the last advisors out of Vietnam by 1965 avoiding prolonging the civil war there and the countless lives US involvement eventually claimed on all sides.

[Cleita]

23. I agree and also our liberal talk radio hosts like Randi Rhodes

and Al Franken, especially since he does the USO tours in war zones. How easy would it be to get rid of him then.

[Lindacooks]

21. Hey, after what Repukes said about Felt, I think it's likely

Senator Wellstone was assassinated.

[Erika]

22. No, we have no trust the GOP didn't murder him

The GOP will do anything to serve their masters of wealth. Look what the Bushies did to McCain and his family.

[in_cog_ni_to]

24. yes.

he was too powerful a force in Minnesota to just steal his seat (too obvious) so the BFEE had him suicided. Don't you find it simply AMAZING that all of those "progressive Wellstone supporters" just happened to change their mind (at the last minute, mind you) and decided to vote for NORM COLEMAN instead???!!! Just one more Stolen Senate seat.