It's probably just coincidence

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota [Monday] legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”
The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises. And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out.

Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?” Replied Hersh: “Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ..."Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths."

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized."In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people."I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’" But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.) ( “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")

So let's do a little review of 6 questionable deaths over the past 10 years:

1. Missouri's former governor Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash 3 weeks before the 2000 elections for the Senate. He was running against John Ashcroft and was leading in all the poles when his plane went down. When the election was over John Ashcroft still lost to a now deceased Mel Carnahan. His wife wife was appointed to hold the senate seat, but since it was only an appointment she could only hold it for 2 years instead of 4. Bush in an unprecedented act of sympathy for Ashcroft chose him for his Attorney General. ( Laugh Now)

2. Senator Paul Wellstone: Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration. In 2003, in a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party, who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however, polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Norm Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race and moving towards a victory that would have been an embarrassment to the Bush Administration. (Norm Coleman, most recently in the news as the guy Al Franken defeated in the past election. The same guy who has flip flopped on counting votes. . . When the first tally showed he had won the election by the narrowest of margins, he publicly stated that Franken should concede for the good of the country and cease any petition for a recount. Failing to prevent the recount, Coleman has done just the opposite of what he asked Franken to do. Funded by deep pockets in the GOP, Coleman is holding up Franken's confirmation with law suits and appeals. His despicable tactics are transparent and an obvious way to prevent the senate from having another pro Obama vote. )

One of the oddest events that transpired after the death of Wellstone and Coleman's subsequent election victory was that Coleman was placed in charge of the Senate Investigations Committee. That is an extraordinarily sensitive responsibility to be placed upon a freshman senator with no previous experience. My guess would be that it has never happened before, but the reasoning behind it may not be that difficult to fathom: Would anyone be less inclined to pursue the Wellstone death?

The balance in the Senate for years 2002 to 2004 was 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and one independent. If both Wellstone and Carnahan had not been killed, and Wellstone had gone on as projected to win his race, the balance would have been 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and one independent. This would have significantly changed what happened in Congress and in the US, where the presidency and both houses of Congress were Republican controlled over those two years.

3. Ken Lay: Enron CEO Lay, 64, faced the prospect of the rest of his life in prison after his conviction May 25, 2006 of fraud and conspiracy in one of the biggest debacles in American corporate history. Lay was very much tied in with Texas energy companies, Dick Cheney, and the Bushes, was a key player in the demise of Cal. Gov Gray Davis. California's electricity costs had skyrocketed and Gov. Davis begged the Bush Administration for some kind of cap on what Energy companies could charge their customers. He was told "no." . . . That regulation caused the rate hike and that he (Davis) needed more deregulation in order to to fix the problem.
2 years prior in a Beverly hills hotel, Ken Lay met with Gubernatorial prospect Arnold Schwarzenegger along with L.A. mayor Richard Riordan, and Junk Bond King Michael Milken. In May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier and later along with several other energy company executives literally wrote our energy policies. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California. Of course Cheney said there was no cartel and that Gov. Davis' lack of deregulation led to the crisis. Ken Lay while vacationing in Aspen supposedly dies of heart failure, according to Dr. Robert Kurtzman, Mesa County Coroner. (The only person to have reportedly seen Ken Lay's dead body . . .I can find no verification of those officers on the scene.) 2 problems I have with this,
Number 1. The guy was convicted of fraud to the tune of 60 billion and just about to be sentenced to do some serious prison time yet, he's allowed to leave the state to vacation in Aspen Colo.?
Number 2. Where's the body? There was not one photograph of his corpse. Not one. The coroner said he performed the autopsy and the body was cremated. This guy is a billionaire and you want me to believe that he didn't just make a few calls, pay off a few people in authority, and jet out of the country to some tropical paradise with no extradition laws? Yeah right.

4. Dr. Bruce Ivins : After the government spent 4 years wrongly accusing an Army scientist in a costly false trial that ended up being settled out of court for more than $5 million. The FBI turned their attention to a new suspected mastermind. A Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a Red Cross volunteer and amateur juggler who had won the Defense Department’s highest civilian award in 2003, was a dramatic turn in one of the largest criminal investigations in the nation’s history. After learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges, Dr. Ivins, a 62-year-old father of two, took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. He died in a Frederick hospital on Tuesday, leaving behind a grieving family and uncertainty about whether the anthrax mystery had finally been solved.
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."But bentonite was never found in the anthrax, and Greenwald says ABC News didn't acknowledged this until 2007, and only after Greenwald's "badgering them about this issue."
Dr. Ivins and his law team professed his innocence til the day he died and the trial would have entered into the record a lot of testimony that may or may not have cleared his name but, we will never know. That's the beauty of conspiracy theories . . .they can rarely if ever be dis-proven.

5. A small plane, carrying the co-founder of Venezuelan voting machine company Smartmatic,crashed earlier this week shortly after take-off from the Caracas airport, killing two employees of the company, and several others on board and on the ground. The initial reports from a foreign paper indicated that the cause of the crash may have been the unusual failure of both engines on the small plane.

6. Mike Connell, Karl Roves IT Guru , dies in a plane crash days before he was due to testify before a Senate committee on election machine fraud. Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.


Now, let me take off this aluminum foil hat, it's making my head sweat. No police authority, FBI spokesman, or government agency has deemed any of these deaths anything but, mechanical failure, heart failure or suicide. All investigations seem to rule out foul play of any kind, but the timing of each unexpected death it is at the very least . . . curious.

DaG Out