The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

of improving health.

In their view.

Further Reading

Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, 2003

PAUL WELLSTONE

I’m for the little fellers, not the Rockefellers.

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democratic Party

On 25 October 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was killed as his private jet came within two miles of Eveleth–Virginia Municipal Airport. In normal circumstances few would have given the cause of the crash a second thought. But October 2002 was not a normal time, and Wellstone was no normal senator. Paul Wellstone was the first (and maybe the last) sixties radical elected to the US Senate. Wellstone was the only member of the Senate to have voted against George W. Bush’s plans to go to war in Iraq. In October 2002, Wellstone was nearing the end of his re-election campaign to the Senate, and looking like the winner. In a Senate likely to be evenly split, Wellstone was perhaps a one-man obstacle to President Bush’s stated desire to secure passage of the Homeland Security measure.

Wellstone’s death seemed too convenient to be an accident, especially as Dick Cheney, Bush’s enforcer, had reputedly told the Senator: “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 and the state of Minnesota.”

Did “severe ramifications” include murder? No one without a large wallet, the heart of a lion and a good lawyer was going to accuse Cheney of orchestrating an offing, but speculation—including by nervous Democrats on Capitol Hill—that right-wingers and/or the CIA had hit Wellstone was rampant. Two researchers into the case, Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, dug up some odd happenings around the time of the Wellstone downing. Firstly, the FBI arrived at the crash scene at 11.00 a.m., only an hour or so after the ambulances—and in order to do that, the FBI would have needed to leave their St Paul office at 9.30, the same time that Wellstone’s flight was taking off.

Secondly, around the time of the crash cell phones and electronic instruments in the vicinity wildly malfunctioned.

The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), despite queries raised by individual officials, initially determined that icy conditions were responsible for the tragedy. However, other craft were taking off and landing at Eveleth–Virginia just fine that morning. Besides, the Beechcraft King Air A-10 boasted an elaborate de-icing system, which records showed was fully operational.

Obliged to disqualify ice, the NTSB suggested that the main pilot, Richard Conry, was to blame because his approach speed was too slow. But Conry was a massively experienced pilot, who had passed a routine assessment two days before, and the King Air had an alarm to alert pilots about low airspeed. As to why the King Air was heading south instead of west the NTSB magnificently failed to address.

Four Arrows and Fetzer believe the King Air stopped communicating and went off course because an electromagnetic pulse was aimed at the plane, which prevented the electronics from operating. The same pulse also screwed up cell phone calls locally; the interference was described by one man driving within a couple of blocks of the airport as being “between a roar and loud humming voice… oscillating… screeching and humming noise”.

This is maybe the place to make the point that Four Arrows and Fetzer are not your usual conspiracy nuts. They are university professors. In maintaining that Wellstone was assassinated they are in plentiful company; in one poll of Minnesotans 69 per cent of respondents said they had a hunch that a “GOP Conspiracy” (Grand Old Party, a.k.a. the Republicans) had arranged Senator Wellstone’s death.

Wellstone had been the target of an assassination before. In 2000, during a visit to Colombia, a bomb was found along his route from the airport. He was also sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate by a helicopter while sojourning in that Latin American country.

Wellstone is far from being the only American politician from the awkward squad to die in a “mysterious” plane crash: Democratic Governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan was killed during a close Senate race when his small plane crashed in 2000; John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a 1999 plane crash; Commerce Secretary Ron Brown perished in a 1996 “accident” (there is a widely reproduced photograph of Brown with a bullet wound in his head at the post- mortem); and John Tower, Republican, was writing a revealing book about the Iran-Contra affair when he conveniently died in a plane accident in 1991.

According to the website From the Wilderness of twenty-two air crashes involving federal and state officials, 64 per cent were Democrats and 36 per cent Republicans.

So, if you’re scared of flying, make sure you don’t have a dissident Democrat aboard your plane.

Further Reading

Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, 2004

http://www.fromthewilderness.com /free/ww3/110102_wellstone.html

THE WHITE HOUSE PUTSCH

What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories.

So wrote the journalist John L. Spivak in his book A Man in His Time. The conspiracy Spivak was referring to was the attempted 1934 overthrow of the Great Depression presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a clique of bankers and industrialists. Not just any Wall Street financiers and manufacturers either, but big-corporate names, among them DuPont and Morgan Bank. And what did these money-men wish to replace FDR’s Democratic government with? Nothing less than a full-blown fascist dictatorship on the model of Mussolini in Italy.

Time has done little to diminish Spivak’s observation that the putsch against the White House is hardly known to the public. It remains un-footnoted in standard histories of the US of A.

In all probability, the 1934 plot was the second attempted coup d’etat against Roosevelt. In the previous year, there had been an assassination attempt against him from which he had escaped unscathed but Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak had died. The assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, was captured and pronounced to be a lone killer. (Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald.) Scuttlebutt on the street, though, was that he was in the pay of the Mafia or a Wall Street cabal.

Certainly in summer 1933, General Smedley Darlington Butler, war hero and former Marine, was approached by bondsman and fascist-sympathizer Gerald C. MacGuire and offered the opportunity of leading a coup against Roosevelt. The veterans’ association, the American Legion, MacGuire boasted to Butler, was to be transformed into a 500,000-strong army. MacGuire also promised a $3 million war, courtesy of DuPont, General Motors and Morgan Bank. Arms and ammunition were to be supplied by DuPont’s subsidiary, Remington.

Fortunately for American democracy, MacGuire and his fellow conspirators chose the wrong man. And how. Butler, the “fighting Quaker”, was an instinctive anti-authoritarian, a man of integrity and a railer against capitalist greed. As a loyal soldier, he complained that he had: