In the Senate race of 2002, the White House made defeating Wellstone one of their top priorities. Karl Rove hand-picked conservative Republican Norm Coleman to run against him. Despite massive GOP funding and support, Wellstone was increasing his lead over Coleman.
On October 25, 2002, just ten days before he would likely have been re-elected, Wellstone was killed in a mysterious plane crash. He died alongside his wife Sheila, their daughter Marcia, three staff members, and the two pilots, while trying to land at Minnesota’s Eveleth-Virginia airport. 1
One might rightly ask why the Bush administration and/or shadow government would single out a fairly obscure senator from Minnesota for elimination. We must remember that he was killed during the run-up to the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was one of the lone dissenting and questioning voices in the US government, daring to stand up to the adminstration’s grab for power and march toward war in the wake of 9/11.
“This race is going to be a case study of whether you can maintain liberal, progressive positions and win in this country in 2002,” said Wellstone during the campaign. 3
“The man who began burning bridges with the Bush family when he challenged then-President Bush’s Persian Gulf War preparations on their first meeting (“Who is this chickenshit?” Bush Sr. asked) may be the Senate’s boldest foe of the Star Wars national missile defense program and of increased military aid to Colombia.” 3
Clearly, powerful forces wanted to prove that Wellstone’s progressive, populist, dissenting approach was not a politically viable stance. It appears that they saw that they couldn’t buy or influence his race and instead may have decided to use a more decisive technique. While the public face of the incident would be an “tragic accident,” savvy politicians and possible opponents would get a clear message of what can happen when you challenge this administration.
Evidence
NTSB’s Carol Carmody handled the Wellstone case. A former CIA official, she is a damage-control expert who handled the NTSB’s investigation of the suspicious aircraft crash of Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan during his race against Senator John Ashcroft two years earlier.
NTSB is legally mandated to take jurisdiction over a crash scene, but let the FBI take control. Yet in its official report, the NTSB failed to even mention any role played by the FBI.
There was no distress call from the pilots, even though they were going down in a remote, swampy area and immediate assistance might make the difference between life and death.
Others reported odd cell-phone and garage-door phenomena that were taking place about the same time the plane appears to have lost communications and control. This could be consistent with the use of electro-magnetic pulse weapons to down Wellstone’s plane.
The NTSB’s own simulations, which replicated the weather, the flight, and the plane under similar conditions, were unable to bring it down - even when they were conducted at abnormally slow speeds!
One of the members who actually signed the report, Richard Healing, admitted that the NTSB really had no idea what had caused the plane to crash.