FBI investigated claim that group threatened de-icing equip when probing crash that killed Wellstone

[kpete]

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

By John Byrne
Monday, October 25th, 2010 -- 1:57 pm

Revealed: FBI investigated claim that group threatened de icing equipment when probing crash that killed Senator WellstoneFBI 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."

MORE:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/revealed-fbi-investigated-threat-senator-wellstones-plane-deadly-crash/

[Up Quark]

1. Hum...well, 'disconnecting' the de-icing equipment is not an easy task,

it would require removing much of the wing and even if that were done it would be impossible to hide the fact they were not working, you can easily see them functioning simply by looking out the window...
shrug

[truedelphi]

2. I obtained about twenty pages from the National Transportation Safety Board

Within a few months of the crash.

One of the most interesting details in that report is the length of time that the small plane burned. it caught fire around 11Am that morning, and burned on until after 5:15 Pm that evening.

Really a long time for a plane with the amount of fuel aboard to be burning.

[Up Quark]

6. Hi, I retrieved the final report some years ago and cannot find that part

could you help me out and tell me where it says that? Thanks

Oh, here is what I have

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2003/AAR0303.pdf

[truedelphi]

9. I think that the report that I had was preliminary.

It contained information similar to much of what you have - but disclosed the fact that the bodies were left in the plane all night (Can you imagine if that had been George W's body in the plane? Would they have left him in the plane while it rained all night?) I seem to remember the seating chart and some graph(s) relating to how the bodies were positioned.

I also see that I am referring to East Coast Time lines, while with Central Time lines being in place, the fire would have raged from the time the plane crashed at approx. 10:22 Am to after 4 Pm.

And it is possible that I got the fire reports from news articles and not the NTSB report.

I am looking in several banker boxes to see if I can find the report. But it is likely It is not readily available. (I have about half a garage full of banker boxes that would involve way too much time for me to spend sifting through for this one item.)

I did notice that this quote from Cheney is still on my current day computer:

Before his death, Sen. Paul Wellstone met with Vice President, Dick Cheney, who threatened him: "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you..."

Wellstone was dead within sixty days of the remark.

[SpiralHawk]

12. Cheney, with Five Military Deferments, is the Compleat Republicon

His threat is truly ugly. With his kind of 'leadership' we can see why the Republicons have devolved to such a low state of being.

[truedelphi]

10. I still cannot find the report itself but here is

The email I received from the man I knewe who was a highly experienced pilot. Here is what he said when he read my notes on the crash, and the NTSB preliminary report. (My notes were phone alls to people in Eveleth, and news clippings from major newspapers regarding the facts fo the crash)


11 November 2002


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You passed along the info about the plane that went down carrying Paul Wellstone. Sorry to take so long to respond. I needed to do a little research.... I am not a pilot. I’ve been hiring pilots and small craft in my work for 30 years. In the time I’ve been in almost every kind of small craft made, from Piper Cubs and Cessna 172s (a bit scary) to Lears, King Airs and jet helicopters.

I’ll keep this short, but some details of this class of plane (Beechcraft A100) are worth noting. They have the best avionics in the business, as good, though smaller, than commercial airliners. They also usually have black boxes because of the “caliber” of customer they carry, i.e., the very rich. The A100 is not only one of the most reliable in the air, they are complicated enough to require extensive checkout before every flight and the maintenance is rigorous, not just for safety reasons but also because they cost as much as a mansion. This is not a plane that goes down in freezing rain.

Which leads to the next part. Visibility and conditions were not an issue in this accident. A pilot cannot fly this plane without an IFR (instrument) rating and thousands of hours of experience. IFR rating means the plane can be landed completely on instruments with no visibility at all—fog, freezing rain, driving snow, etc. Wellstone’s plane had two such pilots, which is unusual in itself. Not to say that weather not does sometimes present unworkable conditions—it does. But that’s where the pilot’s judgment comes in. Along with the 200 or so small craft I have flown in, I also got to know as many pilots, and they are not chance-takers, with the exception of some hotdog rich guys with their own planes (who account for the majority of real accidents)—that kind doesn’t get hired to fly important people anywhere. In fact they can’t fly for hire anyway because they would have to go through some additional rigorous training and most of them don’t.

On every flight I have chartered I have gone with the pilot(s) through the preflight checkout and asked a mess of technical questions. I tell them upfront I want a technical flight with all the explanation they can muster. My respect for both their skills and their good sense couldn’t be any greater. At rock bottom, they want to get home safely as much as I do and they just don’t take risks, especially when so many alternatives are available with IFR, even in remote places like northern Minnesota. They would have redirected right away if the weather looked like too much to handle, and they would have told their passengers that it was the only safe thing to do.

Two last small pieces—ice and freezing rain do not set planes on fire. The fact that they were clocked turning away from the chosen airstrip says that something else waved them off. The NTSB investigators (actual voices on the radio today) went to great lengths to emphasize that a “severe” fire had begun after impact. In fact, that’s about all they had to say, other than describing a crash perimeter that was preposterously small for serious investigation.

There was mention of witnesses who saw the plane on fire on the way down, but they were neither identified nor repeated later in the day. Plain and simple, based on my every experience with dedicated pilots and precision aircraft, planes like the A100 do not catch fire in spotty, wet weather and two experienced pilots are extremely unlikely to agree to fly under conditions they can’t control. They were not suicide bombers. This plane was destroyed intentionally from afar.

http://www.coastalpost.com/03/05/06.htm
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.


"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our media is -- I wouldn't even say corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us anything that the government doesn't want us to know." Gore Vidal

[Up Quark]

11. Any accident involving this or similar plane is of great interest to me, I am chief pilot

for a (gasp) corporation which has 3 of the 100 series and 2 90s plus a dozen other smaller and larger aircraft. (I am a rare 'bird', so to speak, a pilot and a liberal Democrat...there are not many of us)

Your story has some truth but a lot of misinformation as well. Virtually no turboprops of this genre have 'black boxes', they were never required and almost always thought to be unnecessary. Airplanes can and do 'catch fire' for various reasons...anything from an overheated hydraulic pump or a malfunctioning cabin heater to an full-blown engine fire. The ice would not of course be a proximate cause but could lead to a fire because of much higher electrical and hydraulic loads being added to the electrical buses.

As a long time commercial pilot, I tend to discount pilot error as a principal cause of fatal accidents but sadly it really often is. I had to let a high-time pilot go a few years ago because in spite of all his experience, he just did not have the kind of seat-of-the-pants airplane 'feel' and clear judgment I felt were necessary to be a consistently safe pilot...a while after that, he got a job elsewhere and crashed a multi-million jet in Houston on the way to pick up former President GHW Bush.

My careful assessment of the Wellstone accident is, unfortunately, completely in line with the NTSB's finding...inattention to
proper procedures at a critical phase of flight. Nothing I've seen suggests anything different.

By the way, an instrument rating is not a requirement to fly a King Air, nor is even a commercial or higher certificate...it is perfectly legal for a non-instrument rated private pilot to fly one with passengers in VFR conditions as long as it is not for pay.
(Not that I would approve of it but I don't make the rules)

Probably some folks here are prepared to despise me because I work for a large corporation - but it is what I do; I do it well and with pride and make no apologies for it.

[felix_numinous]

3. K & R

[nashville_brook]

4. too bad there was never a formal inquiry.

http://www.alternet.org/story/14399

[Raster]

5. Of course not. That may have raised too many questions.

I believe with every fiber of my being that Senator Paul Wellstone was murdered.

[Up Quark]

7. That story is dated 3 days after the accident so it was a little premature

the NTSB did the formal inquiry...

[truedelphi]

13. Interesting that the head of the NTSB either worked for CIA before or after

Their stint at the NTSB... Perfect place for the government to have someone if they don't want to have the real truth coming out.

[Up Quark]

14. I do not believe for one second that the NTSB is anything but painfully honest and nonpolitical,

I've worked with them dozens of times over the years, if there was ever an impartial government entity, they are it.
Who is the person you're referring to?

[truedelphi]

17. I was speaking of the woman who was the Acting Chair for the NTSB

At the time of the Wellstone Crash, Carol Carmody.

What people fail to understand about our American brand of Secret Police Malfeasance is that it doesn't necessarily
infect 99.1 % of the people at an agency.

In other words, if John Q Schmuck crashed his plane in Fall of 2002, warm bodies from Teams A through A through W would be sent out. The oversight on the case would be from the usual honest and hard working memebres of whoever oversees such investigative matters.

If someone like Wellstone goes down, you better believe that the oversight people on the case are not from those teams but from Black Op teams X, or Y or Z. And they might actually use the same warm bodies normally used, but the direction and leads they would be asked to investigate would be coming from the professional distortion artists.

If this was not the case, if all was as it should be concerning the investigation, then there actually should be a huge section of information relating to the NTSB interviewing the man who reported that his garage door was operating in a magical way on that day.

That indicates EMF or EMP interference. Which of course could be benign. OR NOT.

But the fact that the NTSB did not even mention this in any of its reports, prelim or final, indicates something is possibly askew with its investigation. It takes quite a bit of electronic interference to have a garage door go up and down in an abnormal matter.

This sort of interference is seen sometimes when various antennae show up in a neighborhood for cell phone signals to operate. but then it should occur again and again, maybe several times over a period of weeks, and not just the one time.

BTW re: the downed plane, one electrical engineer has stated: "You don't need anything as elaborate as an EMP generator. Standard issue radio transmitters can screw up a landing."

[Up Quark]

18. Okay, I believe I will bow out of this discussion, I have no patience for

idiotic tinfoil theories. Magical garage door openings aren't in my area of expertise.
Thank you for the reply.

[truedelphi]

25. At the time of Wellstone's plane going down,

I learned about the man whose garage door was going up and down from discussing the crash with the local Eveleth Library librarian.

It took me the cost of a long distance phone call to do that.

Somehow our agencies with their billions of dollars at their disposal missed this fact?

And within two years of the Wellstone crash, the police departments across the USA were being offered devices that could electrically disable speeding cars, to help the police in pursuit of criminals.

If you don't believe that the technology has existed, I don't know what to tell you. Science is science - EMF and EMP does affect machinery operation.

I attended enough electronics classes to know that. I have had friends who are major Physicists. It is not any more tinfoil hat than the notion that bullets exist and are used to kill people.

[Up Quark]

27. I am, in addition to being a professional pilot, an engineer

with dual degrees in aeronautics and electronics...and a fairly well educated physicist, although not a 'major' one.

Could you explain to me how an EMP could cause steel control cables to malfunction? (Not sure about the EMF thing...that's usually an acro for Electromotive Force...which is voltage...)

[truedelphi]

31. If the crash was related to something to do with "steel cables"

that still doesn't explain why there was no communication between the plane and the tower prior to crash. The electrical interference or radio interference is still the best explanation.

No one I know who has carefully followed the W. plane crash even knows what you are talking about by mentioning steel cables. Do you want to detail what you are meaning?

Not even Jim Fetzer knws what you are referring to.

[Up Quark]

32. I'm referring to the steel cables that operate the control surfaces on those airplanes.

I have heard, over the years, some nutty notions about mystery 'rays' that may have interfered with the pilots' ability to operate ailerons, elevators, rudders and flaps, probably proposed by people who think those are 'fly by wire' like some large airliners (Airbus, for example) and would be susceptable to electrical/electronic interference...but the King Air planes and every other one that I know of in that general category and class use steel cables to operate those devices.

The Eveleth airport KEVM does not HAVE a control tower and never did.

You would probably do better to listen to actual pilots rather than conspiracy theorists and other assorted screwballs.

[MinM]

8. From protester to senator, FBI tracked Paul Wellstone

Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and his wife Sheila jog to their campaign bus after casting their ballots in their hometown of Northfield, Minn., Tuesday morning, Nov. 6, 1990. Wellstone defeated Sen. Rudy Boschwitz in the general election. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
http://origin-minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2010/wellstone-files/feature/

[fascisthunter]

15. this is what happens to liberals in America

not because the american people are bad, but because there are enough psychos and sociopaths with wealth and power.

[Up Quark]

16. Well, 20 other Democrats voted against the IWR.

did any of them have 'suspicious' accidents?

shrug

[EFerrari]

19. Yep. We really are just a much bigger Guatemala

even though everything we've been taught has been designed to obscure that fact.

[Lucian]

20. I still believe he was assassinated.

Maybe Norm Coleman or someone associated with him had a hand in it, I don't know, but, to me, what's certain was that it was no accident.

[Up Quark]

21. What is your evidence for it being 'no accident'?

It's a fairly serious charge ... against ... who? If you are certain, you must have some facts to support it, yes?

[Ichingcarpenter]

22. You need to put your question in the 911 forum

We are not allowed to discuss that here.

I think the evidence points to foul play.

[Up Quark]

23. My apoligies, I did not know that discussion was verboten.

What discussion is that, though? How does it relate to 9/11? I confess I am very confused...?

[Lucian]

24. Maybe you should go back and look at the evidence.

I'm not here to tell you. I'm not your google. I formulated my own hypothesis based on the evidence.

[Up Quark]

26. I'll stick with established facts, thanks.

I remember how G.W. Bush formulated his own hypothesis on Iraq based on his evidence...

[Ichingcarpenter]

28. established facts

Enough said.......LOL

[Up Quark]

29. I'm gratified to discover that facts are humorous to you.

I didn't come in here to insult anyone, apparently it doesn't work the other way 'round.

Thank you.

[earth mom]

30. Kick-too late to rec

:kick: