Customer Reviews

American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone

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The authors of this important book argue that Senator Paul Wellstone's death, 10 days before the 2002 elections, was an assassination, most likely ordered by the Bush administration.

Directly confronting the widespread tendency to reject all "conspiracy theories," the authors point out that "the idea that every theory that implies the existence of conspiracy ought to be rejected out of hand" is no more rational than the idea that every such theory should be accepted. Rather, "each case has to be evaluated on the basis of the evidence that is relevant and available in that case." On that basis, they argue, if we look at ALL the relevant evidence and employ the scientific method of inference to the best explanation, we must conclude that the theory that Wellstone was assassinated is far more probable than the official theory, according to which his airplane crash was an accident.

The evidence includes several facts suggesting that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) colluded with the FBI in a cover-up:

1. FBI agents from Minneapolis arrived at the crash site within 2 hours after the crash, even though the trip from Minnesota to Duluth to the crash site would have taken at least 3 hours--so they must have departed before the plane crashed.
2. When asked for the times at which private flights had arrived in Duluth that morning, the FAA said the records had been destroyed.
3. Considerable disinformation about weather conditions was quickly given to the press.
4. Although regulations called for the investigation to be carried out by the NTSB, not the FBI (because the crash site was not designated a crime scene), the FBI agents were there for 8 hours before the NTSB team arrived.
5. The FBI, even though there illegally, prevented the local "first responders" from taking photographs.
6. Although it was the NTSB's responsibility to determine the cause of the crash and although the FBI's prior presence was illegal, the NTSB leader publicly accepted the FBI's declaration, made before the NTSB's investigation, that there was no evidence of terrorism.
7. When the NTSB team finally carried out its own investigation, it was unable to find either the cockpit recorder, which it assumed the plane had had, or the black box.
8. The NTSB held no public hearings, claiming that it was not a sufficiently "high-profile" case.
9. The NTSB's final report concealed the fact of the FBI's participation.
10. The NTSB investigation was headed by Acting Director Carol Carmody, a Bush appointee who had earlier ruled that there was no foul play in the small airplane crash in 2000 that took the life of Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri, the Democratic candidate for the Senate who was killed 3 weeks before his expected victory (over John Ashcroft).

The evidence also includes some facts strongly suggesting the falsity of the NTSB's official conclusion, which was that the plane crashed because the pilot failed to maintain proper speed, causing the plane to stall.

1. The plane would have stalled only if it slowed to below 70 knots, yet it was equipped with a device that emitted a loud warning at 85 knots.
2. The plane was being flown by two experienced and fully certified pilots, a fact--obfuscated in the NTSB report-that makes this kind of pilot error very unlikely.
3. The NTSB's theory fails to explain why, about two minutes before the crash, all communication was abruptly terminated and the plane began going off course.

The evidence also includes facts suggesting that the plane was instead brought down by an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon:

1. The plane's fuselage burned, although it was separated from the wings, which contained the fuel.
2. The plane's electrical system, which would be affected by an EMP, was in the fuselage, and the fire from the fuselage gave off blue smoke, which is indicative of an electrical fire.
3. An EMP could explain why the plane simultaneously went off course and lost its radio about two minutes before the crash.
4. At the same time, cell phones and garage doors in the area behaved in a way consistent with the occurrence of an EMP.
5. An NTSB spokesman professed ignorance about the existence of EMP weapons that could have brought down the plane, although the existence of such weapons had been known for several years.

An important part of the authors' case is the fact that the Bush administration would have had several motives:

1. Wellstone's defeat would return control of the Senate to the Republicans.
2. Wellstone's death 10 days before the election meant that $700,000 in the Republican campaign chest could be transferred, the very next day, to the (successful) effort to defeat Max Cleland in the Senate race in Georgia.
3. Wellstone was the biggest obstacle in the Senate to several Republican policies, such as those involving Iraq, Colombia, the SEC, tax cuts, and Homeland Security, and he was the strongest voice in Congress calling for a full investigation into 9/11.
4. Two days before his death, Wellstone reported that Cheney had told him: "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you."
5. Wellstone had developed a 7-point lead in the polls over Norm Coleman, the Bush administration's hand-picked candidate.

Finally, with regard to the question whether the Bush administration would commit such a heinous act, the authors argue that an administration that "compounded lie upon lie to . . . send hundreds of thousands of young American men and women into harm's way [in Iraq] is not an administration that would hesitate to kill a single senator."

The authors conclude that the evidence shows beyond reasonable doubt that Wellstone was assassinated. They have, in my view, made a convincing case.

David Ray Griffin, author of "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions & Distortions"

I suggest you read the review below, citing the mother who refused to believe the photographs in front of her eyes. Assassinating Liberal leaders is nearly an American tradition. So easy. Nobody ever questions it or complains about it. In fact every Liberal leader America has seen since WWII has turned up dead at a young age. Imagine.

This book is as comprehensive as it could possibly be in presenting an irrefutable argument for assassination. The evidence is there and it is abundant. Just as it was for the previous assassinations . America's silence on these matters is disgraceful. We owe a debt of gratitude to these authors.

I acquired American Assassination last year, the moment it was first avaliable. Opening it on my way to the busstop my eyes flooded. I loved Paul, that was indeed part of my emotion. But I had just had a dream about Seneca, that he was an old man who had taken a protective position at my front door. The preface of this book opens with a quote from the ancient. "The one who derives advantage from a crime is the one most likely to have committed it." I was grateful, a tremendous relief unlocking tears not only of grief, but terrible frustration. Someone was going to help us citizens who doubted the official line about what caused, and what did not cause, the plane to crash.

Having lived in Argentina at the beginning of the Dirty War, I was not able to grow up trusting implicitly what "the government" says. Having read my Argentine friends' names in the lists of the disappeared, I was not naive. After over 30 years of having sickening hunches verified in fact, I knew that my sickness over the death of Paul and Sheila and the others was nothing to apologize for. Still, it is a comfort to others and essential for the truth to learn the facts. Some time after the crash I became acquainted with articles written by Jim Fetzer. He was methodically recording his own investigation into the crash and also into the government's investigation. My gut feelings aligned with his findings. I have communicated with him - to get a closer feel for his character - which like Paul's is strong, full of energy and humanity.

Like the above quote, many of Seneca's sayings seem so obvious one might wonder why anyone ever bothered to preserve them. Contemporaries may not have had a method, or maturity, in their thinking that allowed clear perceptions regarding the human drama. This book has been and will be criticized, for one reason, because it is a preposterous idea to some that people would assassinate a US Senator, and not just people, but the people who would derive advantage. Those people.

My sister at my wedding made a catastrophe of the wedding photos, putting bunny-ear fingers over the groom's head just before the shutter flashed. The photos show that she was betraying my trust - the maid of honor trashing such a ceremony. It is amazing to me how my mother will not accept this fact even though she has seen and believes the photographs. She simply cannot believe it. There is no room in her mind for it. The facts slip through a membrane in her reality and disappear.

That will happen with this book - some will read and believe but then it will slip away and although it seems true, there is no room in their reality for it. For others, like me, it will clothe the gut sensations in facts, bind us together, and if not bring forth justice will adjust the lines of history toward truth.

I am Four Arrows, the lead author of this book.(See also my newest text from the Univesity of Texas, "Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America).
I recently read Abruzzese's review and find it to be fairly on target, in spite of its negativity. I'm at least happy he recommended that people read it "as a starting point," for this is all we intended it to be. We express state that the questions, inconsistencies and logic of our arguments should be sufficient for a more in-depth investigation.
As for the book being too short, our motive for writing this book was to get it published before the 2004 presidential elections in hopes that it would at least offer a prima facia case sufficient to raise the kind of questions that MIGHT dissuade people to vote for Bush. We only had a few short months to turn the "new evidence" that sparked our writing the book to get in published in time. Perhaps such hopes were unwarranted in spite of rigged elections and an relatively apathetic, hegemonized public, but it was our long-shot hope nonetheless.
In our book we have some substantial "evidence" from interviews and analysis, but mostly we simply show enough inconsistencies and provide enough motive to make a good enough case to stimulate further investigation, which we ALMOST got from Senator Barbara Boxer, who has a copy of the book.
I agree that some of the language about JFK comparisons and "scientific rigor" were unnecessary, but three people being involved with the content, such things, as unfortunate as they might have been to our message, might be persuasive for other readers. In any case, the bottom line is there needs to be further investigations and on this Abruzzese agrees.
In our new book from Elsevier, "The Hidden History of 9/11," I think this reviewer would find more "evidence" but still realize that it as well is a call for more investigation.
For example, how can "we" continue to ignore all of the testimony relating to bombs going off in the WTC or to the physics of falling buildings?
At any rate, it is past time to allow a fear of being a "conspiracy theorist" keep us from discussing the probability that our corporation, military and government institutions have reached a point where assassinations, false flag operations and rigged elections must be taken seriously as a fact of life.
Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs

The thought that two major investigative Bureaucracies of one's own government would conspire together to obfuscate the facts of a fatal plane crash and prevent the public from knowing of the murder of a US Senator is so foreign and so outrageous to most citizens that they cannot even consider the possibility that this could occur. That these two US Gov't agencies could and would knowingly feed the major media untrue sound-bites to be fed to and consumed by the public as facts is tacitly unbelievable for most average Americans who know nothing of covert operations and "wetwork". The public consumption of these false sound-bite as facts builds a wall of psychological denial for these average citizens which is extremely difficult to abridge. Professors Four Feathers and Fetzer remove these bricks of denial one at a time by their presentation of definitive, easy to verify facts until this wall of denial dissolves into a pile of dust. Brick #1> bad weather; Brick #2 > crash caused by pilot error; Brick #3 > bad, tired, careless, criminal pilot, etc., etc. Drs. Four Feathers and Fetzer remove these bricks one at a time until the media wall that it was "an accident" just isn't there any more. All that remains is evidence which demands and supports the only other remaining alternate conclusion which is "the crash WAS NOT an accident". And not being an accident means that it was MURDER! This book proves two things to me, both proven by impeccable logic and easily verifiable facts: Senator Wellstone and the other passengers were murdered; and the fbi and ntsb knowingly conspired to obfuscate and coverup the facts of the crash site and their own tainted roles in the investigation, all the while being knowingly or unknowing aided by a media willing to regurgitate their "official sound-bites" with no critical investigative reporting or even simple questions. The good doctors do not claim to know who ordered or enacted the hit, although it is obvious that they view the situation as suggestive of who might have done it (eg republican power brokers). I can't go there without additional who-done-it evidence. A lot of folks had much to gain by Senator Wellstone's death (and his wife's death too). The words from Ike's last speech in office where he cautioned about the undue influence of the "industrial military complex" eg "shadow gov't" came to mind while I was reading the book. The book has a few what I would call extraneous "liberal based" remarks which I ignored, being that I am a conservative republican and voted accordingly in this election. But the bottom line is this, no reasonable person can read this book carefully and still believe Senator Wellstone's death was an accident. Distasteful and horrible as this raw truth may be, that is what is left when you are finished reading and understanding Drs. Four Feather's and Fetzer's book. Like it or not (and I don't like it) this is the way it is. You better get yourself a copy of this book asap while you can. Any book this good which reveals covert ops of the "shadow gov't" is likely to quickly disappear into a black hole never to be heard of or seen again, like Bradley Ayer's excellent book, the War That Never Was (a treatise on jmwave, the secret war against castro in the 60's--try to find this one in any library!). Hat's off to these two Professors for a great job of investigative reporting and perfect logic.

"American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone" expands the report filed by the NTSB with the information received from eyewitnesses, U.S. government log files, local government reports and interviews with people related to those who died in the crash. Using this information and deductive reasoning/logic to sort through the gathered evidence, the authors display their conclusion: Wellstone, his family and friends, and the pilots were killed through sabotage. Conspiracy theories generally don't hold my interest too long unless there's proof, but I found this book to be well-written and strong in the use of logic. The book was extremely interesting to me, as I had suspected that the Senator's death by plane crash (another plane crash death) to be very peculiar, to a very suspicious degree. Read the book with an open mind, and see what kind of death you believe this to be.

The authors draw from a vast amount of researched documentation and using a scientific model refute the official findings with extraordinary depth and clarity. Relying also upon first person accounts and interviews with people who give a different perspective than the mainstream mush; the authors establish that more likely than not Wellstone was murdered. The enemies of Wellstone were many, some of whom were hardly mentioned.

America has its share of facist wannabes who in this case, write negative reviews of this and other similar books (often without even reading them) in order to debunk any progressive thought that may arise within the general public. Exposure to a variety of thought is anathema to these people. While these would-be brownshirts are being hoodwinked by the corporate propagandists that they follow without question, those same corporate interests are busy conducting a slaughter of civilians in Iraq in order to secure access to the world's supply of oil, as well as murdering an inspirational progressive politician like Paul Wellstone.

Unllike many of the "reviewers" of this book, I've actually read it, and what is offered here seems entirely plausible.
Having lived through the previous assassinations of both Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X., among others, the apparent fact that wealthy, right-wing, corporate interests in this country sometimes kill their perceived enemies comes as no surprise to me. Unfortunately, it does happen here. Read the book for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

When Paul Wellstone's plane went down I immediately smelled a rat. I reviewed the many plane crashes after Watergate and in Panama and I know the spooks prefer 'accidenting' their victems with plane crashes. This may seem like extreme language but you only have to wade ankle deep into the 9-11 Commission Report to see a blatant cover-up. [...[

This book raises many questions about the initial press reports and the susequent NTSB 'investigation'. Many recall the press and official reports seemed to focus on the pilot(s) being unreliable, indebted, inexperienced and otherwise likely to veer off course and smash a plane into a swamp. With diligent and lucid reporting these authors methodically go through the last hours of the ill fated plane, the timely appearance of the FBI at the crash site (a little too timely readers will learn) and the odd link between the plane pilot, the area FBI agents and accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

Interesting mention is made of other questionable MTSB air crash investigations.

In the case of Paul Wellstone one has to ask why the press did such a lousey job? Why didn't they ask all the questions the public was asking? We all know who profitted immensely from his death and we know the death of his family meant no spouse could run on the ticket in his stead like in the case of the Mel Carnahan of Missouri (whose wife beat John Ashcroft for the senate seat).

For additional information the book cites some good websites with more details on similar assassinations.

I hope the second edition of this book will include an index for quicker referral.

I read this book primarily because I wanted to be able to dismiss in my own mind any questions about the death of this amazing man. Growing up in an era when so many of the rich and famous had died in light planes, I was predisposed to accept it as an unforseeable tradgedy. I also felt compelled to listen with an open mind to other possibilities.

Before I read this book, I was unaware of the number of light plane crashes involving key House and Senate members, paticularly those up for reelection. You would think that such an event would merit a close examination by a trusted apolitical agency, particularly when the death is of a potential Presidential candidate such as Senator Wellstone. The author details several fatal crashes that tipped the balance (or prevented a change in) the House or Senate.

I've long been aware that the FAA has often been subject to political staff changes when key investigations arise. It is an agency easily manipulated by swift changes in top level appointments (see Egal Krough overnight appointment by Nixon after the questionable death of Dorothy Hunt). This may be due to PR concerns, not cover-ups, but it is a potential problem in high profile cases. Many questions are raised here about the lackluster NTSB investigation, and the almost immediate FBI presence of large numbers of agents...The FBI does not have dozens of agents prowling farm country waiting for plane crashes. Where did they come from? The authors demonstrate that the official investigations are obvious rubber stamps that leave troubling questions that were clearly ignored.

If someone told you that one of these pilots had been a fight trainer for a 9/11 hijacker, you would not believe it...but the book clearly documents this as a fact, which can easily be confirmed by anyone. The details of the crash, officially always attributed to snow, are far more complex, as many reliable sources, includibg the tower, connsidered it a negligible factor.

The authors postulate EMP interference with the aircraft, which is something I was only vaguely aware of, but it is a difficult charge to prove. I was most puzzled at the odd connection between a 9/11 hijacker and the co-pilot...a very strange connection that I've never seen mentioned in mainstream media, yet is very well documented here. The connection may be simply a coincidence, but deserves mention if only to dispel suspicion.

Overall, this book made me aware that there ARE questions about this event that Senator Wellstone's legacy requires be answered. Don't dismiss this book as some crackpot conspiracy tome, as I almost did. If ANY of the facts related here are true, then they must be resolved and put to rest, otherwise the tide of distrust in our government wiill continue to rise.