Senator Paul Wellstone remembered (1944-2002)

Wellstone Was Bush's Number One Enemy

Wellstone was adamantly against the invasion of Iraq, wanted private investigations into WTC disaster, and pointed out prior knowledge of 9-11. He was also against Homeland Security, and the US Patriot Act. 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 cast his vote for his conscience and against the Iraq measure, the lone Democrat in the 2002 election campaign to do so.

A few weeks later on Oct. 25, well on his way to winning his re-election bid, Wellstone, his wife, Sheila, his daughter, Marcia Markuson, three campaign staffers, and two pilots died in a plane crash in Minnesota.

Murder say some.

Latest government report on Wellstone 'accident' finds its scapegoats, many questions remain

Worldnetdaily - Was Paul Wellstone Assassinated ?

Latest News Articles

28-Nov-2003 - Wellstone plane crash was no accident

18-Nov-2003 - NTSB: Pilot Error Caused Plane Crash

19-Nov-2003 - Disturbing Circumstances around Crash of Wellstone Plane raise questions of conspiracy

01-Nov-2003 - Paul Wellstone showed us how Politics can be done

Background information :

Paul Wellstone was the Senator of Minnesota, and was in the race for the elections as the Democratic candidate, until he got killed in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, together with his wife, daughter, three staff members and the crew of the plane on October 25th, 2002.

Wellstone was known for his outspoken opposition to the Bush administration, and was despised by the Whitehouse. (1)

Let there be no doubt as to the identity of George W. Bush's least favorite Democratic U.S. senator. It's Wellstone, the rabble-rousing Progressive who represents n just Minnesota but what remains of the fighting populist spirit of the Upper Midwest.

As Wellstone prepares to seek a third term next year, it would be reasonable to assume that he might finally be in for some smooth political sailing. But reasonableness doesn't figure into the calculations of the Bush White House, where the president himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and political commissar Karl Rove practice the politics of vengeance.

The Bushies despise Wellstone, who unlike most Senate Democrats has been fighting spirited battles against the new administration's policies on everything from the environment to the tax cuts for the rich to military aid for the "Plan Colombia" drug war boondoggle. Other Democratic senators who face re-election contests in 2002 are, according to polls, more vulnerable than Wellstone. But the Bush camp has been focusing highest-level attention on "Plan Wellstone" - its project to silence progressive opposition.

What does Wellstone say?

"I think the way to oppose George W. Bush is to stand up to him, to speak out when his policies are wrong, to put holds on bad legislation he's promoting. Obviously, that's not the sort of opposition Bush and Cheney approve of. The nice thing is that, even if they can dictate the Republican nominee, the people of Minnesota still get to choose their senator."

Madison Capital Times, April 24th, 2001

Republican strategists say other Senate Democrats are at risk, notably Tim Johnson in South Dakota and Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana. But no incumbent, they say, is more vulnerable than Mr. Wellstone, whose defeat would be especially satisfying to the White House, given his opposition to almost every bit of the Bush agenda on Capitol Hill.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have taken a hand in selecting a candidate they believe can defeat Mr. Wellstone, and they appear to have found a strong candidate in the popular Republican mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman. Mr. Cheney persuaded another Republican candidate to pull out of the race.

New York Times, September 3rd, 2001

Bush and Cheney have personally interfered in selecting the Republican candidate to oppose Wellstone during the 2002 elections as Vice President Cheney requested Tim Pawlenty not to run in favor of Whitehouse candidate Norm Coleman (2).

Tim Pawlenty, majority leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was about to announce a challenge of Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone last spring when Cheney asked him not to run. That left the field clear for former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, a candidate the White House believed had a better chance of winning. Coleman was planning to run for governor before a call from Bush persuaded him to switch races. Now Pawlenty is running for governor.

USA Today, April 28th, 2002

Some newspapers reported on the growing battle between Paul Wellstone and the Whitehouse during the weeks before Wellstone died on October 25th. In the polls, it became clear that Wellstone was by all likely means set to win the Minnesota elections. (3)

After he died however, his successor Walter Mondale lost the elections to Republican Norm Coleman.

Democrat Paul Wellstone has spent 12 years in the Senate defying political orthodoxy as a crusader for liberal causes. The rumpled former college professor has cast difficult votes before, most notably his opposition to welfare reform on the eve of his hard-fought 1996 re-election campaign. But now, locked in one of the tightest Senate races in the nation, Wellstone seems poised to take the biggest gamble of his career by defying George W. Bush on Iraq.

The maverick senator has left himself room to maneuver. Pressed during a Minnesota Public Radio interview Monday about how he will vote on the upcoming Senate resolution, Wellstone said, "My guess is that there will be competing resolutions, and we'll wait to see the final wording." Wellstone made clear that he would support language declaring that Saddam Hussein must cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors or else. But that is a far cry from the open-ended resolution sanctioning unilateral American action that Bush is demanding.

Wellstone is someone who can immediately recite the names of the only two senators (Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening) brave enough to vote against Lyndon Johnson's semi-duplicitous 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. During a conversation in a neighborhood Mexican restaurant before he flew back to Washington on Monday, Wellstone repeatedly signaled that he was prepared, if necessary, to follow the lonely example of those two 1960s doves.

USA Today, September 24th, 2002

With voters' concerns focused on war, terrorism and the economy, Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone may have pulled narrowly ahead of Republican Norm Coleman in his bid for reelection.

The latest Star Tribune Minnesota Poll of 1,048 likely voters surveyed Oct. 11-16 shows 47 percent supporting Wellstone and 41 percent favoring Coleman, a margin at the outer bounds of what could be attributed to sampling. Independence Party nominee Jim Moore has 4 percent backing, the Green Party's Ray Tricomo and others about 1 percent, with 7 percent undecided.

But with a little more than two weeks to go until the Nov. 5 election, Wellstone can't declare victory yet. Voters who stay undecided until late in an election campaign often tend to go with a challenger, and there are enough of them to push Coleman over the top.

Star Tribune, October 20th, 2002

(1)

Bush fears tenacious, popular Wellstone (Madison Capital Times, 24 Apr 2001)

Paul Wellstone Campaigns in Race He Pledged Not to Run (New York Times, 03 Sep 2001)

(2)

Bush isn't on the ballot, but his influence is (USA Today, 28 Apr 2002)

(3)

War looms over Minn. race, but no one can say how (USA Today, 24 Sep 2002)

Wellstone edges into lead in Senate race (Star Tribune, 20 Oct 2002)

Wellstone Crash Timeline

A timeline of selected events beginning with the plane crash that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone:

• Oct. 25, 2002 - King Air A100 carrying Sen. Paul Wellstone, seven others crashes on approach 2½ miles from Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport. Wellstone, who had been traveling to attend a funeral, was less than two weeks away from an election that would have decided whether he served a third term.

• Oct. 30, 2002 - Former Vice President and Senator Walter Mondale replaces Wellstone in race against Republican Norm Coleman.

• Nov. 5, 2002 - Coleman defeats Mondale.

• Dec. 16, 2002 - A National Transportation Safety Board progress report said icing was a possible cause of the crash, but investigators also were considering possible pilot error and inaccurate navigational aids.

• Feb. 21, 2003 - NTSB says Wellstone lead pilot Richard Conry was concerned about possible icing before the flight, but decided to fly after learning the weather had improved. Elsewhere in a lengthy report, the board reported that Conry kept two logbooks, with conflicting accounts of his flying history.

• March 4, 2003 -NTSB says Wellstone plane had clean maintenance history and underwent detailed inspection two months before crash.

• March 5, 2003 - Records released by NTSB show Conry made critical mistakes in two previous flights with the senator that prompted co-pilots to take corrective action.

• April 29, 2003 - NTSB says faulty landing beacon at Eveleth airport was calibrated incorrectly, but not enough to explain the crash.

• Aug. 28, 2003 - Family members of Wellstone and five other passengers reach $25 million settlement with Aviation Charter Inc., the company that operated the flight.

• Nov. 18, 2003 - Investigators for the NTSB blame pilot error for the crash.

Article from the Budgeteer

To the Budgeteer: Wellstone Plane Crash was no Accident

I believe the Wellstone crash was no accident, that the motives appear to have been political, and that the White House may have been involved. I am hardly the only one to suspect foul play. Read the quotes from Christopher Bollyn and Michael Ruppert in my opinion piece (duluthnews.com, archives, one man’s opinion).

I regard the Natinal Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) decision to be a creative solution to an awkward political problem by placing blame upon “pilot error,” when the evidence is against it. The NTSB’s report is contradicted by the results of its own simulations, which were based upon the characteristics of the plane, the weather conditions and pilots with similar background and training. They were simply unwilling to confront the implications of the evidence.

Unless the NTSB is merely guessing, they had the flight data long ago. Although the planes were flown abnormally slowly during some of these simulations, they could not cause them to crash. Moreover, the theory of pilot error cannot account for the cessation of communication, the cell phone anomaly, the FBI’s early arrival or the odd exchange of roles between the NTSB and the FBI, not to mention Ruppert’s extremely disturbing report.

I do not understand what has become of the Republican Party, which once stood for balanced budgets, Constitutional government, a non-interventionist foreign policy and keeping government out of our personal lives. All of these principles have been massively violated by the present administration, which appears to have a fascist mentality very much at odds with traditional American values. When are you going to speak out against these evil ones?

Jim Fetzer

Duluth

The Nation's David Corn. Mother Jones held him up as "the first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. Senate." George Bush offered a more withering assessment: "Who is this chickenshit?" he muttered after being grilled by Wellstone at a reception for new members of Congress.

Black Ops Radio
Show #126
Featured Guest: Jim Fetzer
Topic: Jim Fetzer in the News...

Part One , Part Two , Part Three

Jim Fetzer research update / a retired prosecutor from Duluth has threatened to take legal action against a University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor who espouses the belief that the Bush White House had a hand in Wellstone's demise.

October 2002 News updates

[CBS News]

One of Senate's most liberal (25 Oct)

Waiting on Walter Mondale (26 Oct)

Crash of Wellstone's plane probed (26 Oct)

Wellstone crash cause a mystery (26 Oct)

[Washington Post]

Minnesota may be key to Senate's helm (12 May)

For Wellstone, Iraq vote is risk but not a choice (9 Oct)

Million-Dollar ad blitzes irk democrats (25 Oct)

Wellstone dies in plane crash (25 Oct)

Biography: Sen. Wellstone (25 Oct)