Bill Clinton appointed Ron Brown Commerce Secretary, partly as a reward for Ron Brown’s success as a campaign fund raiser. From day one, allegations surrounded the exact means and methods by which this success was attained. Investigations into Ron Brown’s activities (his son would later plead guilty to money laundering) were nearing the point of indictments, and Ron Brown had publicly stated that he would not go to jail alone, when the airplane carrying Ron Brown and about 30 other people crashed in Bosnia.
It is worth noting that Ron Brown was just one of four Clinton campaign fund raisers to die under questionable circumstances. The others were C. Victor Raiser II, Hershel Friday, and Ed Willey, a total of three plane crashes and one “Fosterization”. Following Brown’s demise, his personal attorney as well as a co-worker at the Department of Commerce, Barbara Wise also died under questionable circumstances. As in the case of yet another “suddenly dead” member of the Clinton administration, Vincent Foster , Ron Brown’s office was ransacked for files by Commerce staff immediately after his death.
In the wake of Brown’s death, even though the investigation into his activities was effectively closed down, allegations continued to surface that Brown had traded seats on trade missions for DNC campaign donations, and had even solicited money from Vietnam! Now infamous security leaks John Huang and Ira Sockowitz were at Ron Brown’s Commerce Department at the times they were leaking classified satellite technology to the Chinese. Brown’s closest associate, Nolanda Hill, admitted on ABC-TV that Brown was using drugs, and that the White House had ordered Brown to meet with “some damn Chinaman”, a reference to John Huang.
The crash itself was the subject of much controversy. Originally claimed to have happened in the Adriatic itself, subsequent news stories slowly but surely moved the wreckage from sea to hilltop.
Russian, French and Croatian TV reported the recovery of the black box recorders. U.S. sources denied it and said that only some instrumentation that looked EXACTLY like the recorders were recovered. The flight recorders on aircraft are designed to be unique in appearance. They cannot be confused for any other item on the aircraft. Despite the name “black box” they are actually bright dayglow orange with black stripes and very clear labels saying what they are. All commercial models of that aircraft come with flight recorders. But the government claims that THIS aircraft, used for VIPs including Hillary only two weeks previously, had no such standard safety systems.
On one thing all the news stories did agree. The claim was put forward repeatedly that the plane crashed in, “The worst storm in a decade”. This was the exact wording used by TIME, Newsweek, and the White House in describing the accident.
However, the Dubrovnik airport weather office told a different story. The official weather report issued at the time of the crash reported light scattered rain, broken clouds at 400 feet, a thin overcast at 2000 feet, and a steady head wind right down the runway just the way pilots like it. The reported visibility was 5 miles. The flight crew acknowledged receiving this weather report (more about that later). The distance from the airport to where the aircraft crashed was less than two miles.
Storms, or to be more precise, the weather systems that produce storms, are easily recognized features. The updrafts that create a hazard for flying will push a column of clouds up to 20,000 feet for a regular storm, and up to 33,000 feet whereupon a “super cycle” sets in and a major storm, complete with lightening, is underway.
It’s safe to say that had such a behemoth weather system been just two miles away from an airport reporting five mile visibility, it would have been seen. No other pilots reported such storms, and no such storm cell formations show up on weather satellite photos of the area at the time of the crash.
In short, no official document from the actual crash area exists to support the claim of “The Worst Storm In A Decade”.
The storm story was a lie, which means some other cause for the crash exists.
While the plane carrying Ron Brown and his party was still 7 miles from the crash site, 1/2 mile in the air and on the normal approach path out over the Adriatic, three radio based links with three separate propagation paths all failed at the same time.
According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, April 8, 1996, the Dubrovnik tower lost voice radio contact with the aircraft at the same time the aircraft vanished from the screens of the approach radar at Split and an AWACS.
Let’s look at the Split radar first.
The Split radar watches the approach to Dubrovnik airport, which is where the Ron Brown aircraft was when it dropped off of the radar screen. Contrary to some silly claims made in the media, the plane was NOT flying in the mountains. It was out over the water, with open space all around. The radar at Split routinely tracks aircraft through that airspace without problem. If it were normal for the Split radar to lose traffic at that point on the approach path, nobody would have mentioned it because it would be normal and expected behavior. There would be nothing unusual about it. That a comment was made about the target dropping off of the Split radar establishes that it was an unusual event.
The Split radar, like all ATC radar, tracks primarily by aircraft transponder. So, when the Split radar lost track of the Ron Brown aircraft, what was actually lost was the transponder return, as the aircraft was still there, on the approach path, although just starting to veer slightly left.
Now let’s look at the AWACS.
The AWACS system is designed to track NON-transpondered targets. Radar “hits” are placed in a computer system that keeps a list and tries to match the returns from the present radar sweep to the returns from the previous sweeps in order to generate meaningful target tracking data for the operators and weapons management systems. Part of that process involves target to target comparisons to make certain that what the computer thinks is target XYZ this sweep is the same target it thought was XYZ last sweep. The total workload on the computer is a power function of the total number of non-transpondered targets being carried in the target list.
If a target has a transponder, the AWACS will track the target using the transponder return, because not only is less computer power needed for a transpondered target, but the workload for sorting out non-transpondered targets is reduced.
How do we know that the AWACS was tracking the Ron Brown plane via transponder? Because the AWACS lost it’s track at the same time that the Split radar lost it’s transponder return. Had the AWACS been tracking the Ron Brown plane via skin-paint, there is no reason for it to lose track of the aircraft at the same time that Split did, while the aircraft was still 7 miles from the crash site.
Had the AWACS not reported losing contact, we could surmise that either the AWACS was tracking on skin paint or the Split radar suffered a momentary failure, but this was not the case.
It is also true that the AWACS could have immediately reacquired the Ron Brown aircraft on skin paint (and it’s not known for a fact that the computers did not add it as a non-transpondered target), but the AWACS was there to watch Bosnia, not the Dubrovnik airport.
The two radar tracks, propagating along two different paths, come together at only one common point where a single failure could make the aircraft vanish from both Split and the AWACS, and that is the radar transponder in the Ron Brown aircraft. A failure of the transponder is the only explanation for the Ron Brown plane vanishing from two different radar screens at the same time, while still 7 miles from the crash site and 1/2 mile above the Adriatic sea.
At the same time that the aircraft vanished from the radars at Split and the AWACS, the Dubrovnik tower reported it lost voice radio contact with the aircraft.
This is a third distinct propagation path from the AWACS and Split. In fact, it’s direct line of sight from the Dubrovnik airport to the location on the approach path where radio contact was lost. There are no intervening geological features to block the radio signal. The Dubrovnik tower continued to communicate with other aircraft in the area, so the radios in the tower were not at fault.
The data reported in the Aviation Week & Space Technology article shows evidence that TWO SPERATE SYSTEMS on board the Ron Brown aircraft failed at the same time. The cockpit radios, and the radar transponder.
The radios and radar transponders come together at only one common point where a single failure could make the aircraft vanish from both Split and the AWACS and also lose voice radio contact with the Dubrovnik tower, and that is if the electrical system failed in mid air, while still 7 miles from the crash site and 1/2 mile above the Adriatic sea, on the approach path.
No other explanation fits the facts reported in Aviation Week & Space Technology.
The electrical power buss cables share the same conduit as the flight control cables, which run from the control yokes in the cockpit to the various flight control surfaces of the aircraft. Any event sufficient to sever the electrical cables would present a real danger to the control cables (especially if the control cables were the real target and the electrical failure a side effect).
There is clear evidence that the control cables had indeed failed at the same time as the electrical system. As was mentioned before, the Aviation Week article reported that the flight crew had acknowledged receiving the weather report, which indicated that clear air was just below them. Having just descended into the overcast the flight crew also knew there was clear air above.
From the loss of the radar transponder and cockpit radio, we know the plane was without electrical power. The flight crew therefore did not have any means to follow any beacons (real or fake). In such circumstances, the flight crew would have every reason to either climb or descend into the clear air they knew was there, and no reason to stay within an overcast without instruments.
There is only one reason to explain why an aircraft without electrical power did not move to clear air and that’s if the control cables failed at the same time as the electrical system did. There is no reason for a pilot to stay in the clouds without instruments. None.
While the claim has been put forward that the plane executed a missed approach and turned to the left, the fact is that nobody at the airport (the one with 5 mile visibility) ever saw the plane anywhere near the runway. Following the loss of electrical power, the plane seems to have veered slightly left of course (or to be more accurate failed to make a slight starboard turn to line up on the Dubrovnik runway) and plowed into the hill.
The first announcement of the crash came not from Dubrovnik, or anywhere else in Bosnia, but from a Pentagon spokesman who requested anonymity (an odd occurrence in a supposed simple airline crash) while announcing that the wreckage was not on land but in the Adriatic.
In a news story carried by UPI on April 3rd 1996, the White House claimed that actual wreckage had been spotted.
WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) — A U.S. Air Force plane carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in the Adriatic Sea near the port city of Dubrovnik on Tuesday, officials said. The White House said wreckage was spotted in the Adriatic Sea near Dubrovnik. The debris apparently came from the plane, which was carrying Brown and an undetermined number of leading U.S. business executives, who were on a trade mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The wreckage in the Adriatic is his,” a Pentagon official told United Press International, speaking on condition of anonymity. “
As a result of these initial stories, rescue forces sent out by French and Croatian forces in the area all headed to the wrong spot. As a result, it was several hours before any known parties arrived at the actual crash site.
When the rescuers arrived, they found one survivor, an Air Force Sergeant named Shelly Kelly, one of two stewardesses assigned to the T-43 (a modified Boeing 737) which had only recently been converted from a navigation training aircraft equipped with all the latest navigation aids to a VIP passenger transport. The rescuers spotted Shelly Kelly moving about the wreckage, several hours after the crash itself. Shelly was placed on a helicopter and evacuated to the hospital, but strangely, was dead on arrival of a broken neck! I strongly suggest that you ask your own doctor just how likely is it that someone who survives a crash by several hours and is seen moving around will suddenly develop a broken neck during a helicopter ride.
Ron Brown, along with the other crash victims, was removed from the hillside and eventually examined by Air Force Col. William Gormley, who declared Brown dead of the crash trauma itself, and ignored the hole seen in Brown’s skull which was observed and commented upon by Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell and Army Lt. Col. David Hause, both of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
Despite clear signs that the hole might have been the result of a gunshot, which would prompt an autopsy, no autopsy was performed. Photos and X-rays were taken, but later, as has been the case in so many other of the deaths surrounding this administration, the X-rays and photos had vanished.
There the matter would have ended except for one thing. Dr. Cogswell, as part of his regular duties, lectures other Armed Forces pathologists on current developments and had made copies of the photos and X-rays to illustrate his talks with them. Apparently, the issue of the hole in Ron Brown’s skull was regularly being discussed by AFIP doctors during educational conferences over the last several months, but as long as the subject stayed inside the “trade”, nobody complained.
This changed when reporter Chris Ruddy learned of the photos and what they showed. Dr. Cogswell provided copies and Ruddy wrote the first of several stories detailing the new allegations, which were soon corroborated by Dr. Hause.
Both Dr. Hause and Dr. Cogswell were immediately subjected to a gag order while Dr. Gormley, who initially insisted that the hole in Ron Brown’s skull did not penetrate to the brain and was therefore not a bullet hole, was allowed free reign to attack, unchallenged and with impunity, the prior statements of Drs. Hause and Cogswell.
This backfired when Dr. Gormley, appearing on NET, was shown the photos and X-rays that showed the hole clearly penetrating all the way into the brain. On TV, Gormley reversed himself and agreed that the hole did penetrate to the brain, excusing his former statements as a lapse of memory (after all the photos and X-rays in the official records were missing).
During the first week of 1998, AFIP convened a panel of its pathologists and issued a report claiming that all of it’s pathologists agreed with the official cause of death, only to have members of that panel break ranks just days later to publicly state that the report was not representative of the actual conclusions of the AFIP panel!
It was during this time that Cyril Wecht entered the picture.
Wecht is considered by many to be the world’s foremost forensics expert with over 40 years experience including gunshots and plane crashes. He is also a Democrat which means that the White House could not quite paint him with their usual broad brush of “it’s a Republican plot”.
Wecht concurs that the hole in the top of Ron Brown’s head is consistent with a gunshot, based on the inward beveling, and the “snowstorm” of highly dense particles seen on the X-rays behind Ron Brown’s left eye. Wecht also pointed out additional lead particles in the photos as well as the cracking one would expect near the entry point of a bullet. As for Dr. Gormley’s comment about there not being an exit wound, one need only look at the relationship of the entrance wound to Ron Brown’s neck to postulate that the bullet is lodged somewhere in his abdomen. Most significantly, according to Wecht, Ron Brown’s other injuries were not that serious, and it was quite possible that Ron Brown survived the actual crash, as had Shelly Kelly.
This opens up the possibility that during those first few hours, when the White House reports of wreckage being found in the Adriatic had everyone looking in the wrong location, a “clean up” crew visited the crashed T-43, to make certain there were no survivors. Somehow, Ms. Kelly was overlooked, which required “special handling” during her helicopter ride to the hospital. (A Dubrovnik airport worker also required “special handling” in the days immediately following the crash).
Evidence that such a “cleanup” crew was there is contained in the following story from Associated Press which confirms that when the rescue crew finally reached the crash site, someone had gotten there ahead of them.
April 4, 1996 Associated Press – Cited under “fair use” 12:07 PM (ET) April 4 [snip] U.S. military officials said searchers arrived at the crash site at 5:50 a.m. Thursday. They joined three Americans who had been lowered in by helicopter earlier …….
The Black Congressional Caucus, led by Maxine Waters, demanded an investigation. Maxine was also a Democrat. Alen Keyes, a former ambassador, is also demanding an investigation. Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to ignore the X-rays and photos and the testimony of those doctors who were actually there in their haste to inform us as to what the first puppy has been named. On the internet, the spooks and hired public relations experts are in a panic, reduced to name calling because they have little else, and insisting that such a crime as is implied by the bullet hole in Ron Brown’s head is simply “unbelievable”.
Ron Brown had become a serious political liability to Bill Clinton in April 1996, as had all those who handled large sums of cash that flowed in and out of the 1992 campaign. They had all helped Bill Clinton come to power. Knowing his secrets, they had become liabilities. They are now all dead.
FACTS:
- There was no “worst storm”.
- There was evidence of onboard electrical failure.
- There are signs that the flight controls ceased working at the same time the electrical system failed.
- Ron Brown had a strange hole in his skull, thought to be a bullet hole. Regardless of whether it is or is not a bullet hole, it should have resulted in an autopsy. None was performed.
- The official copies of the X-rays and photos of Ron Brown vanished.
- The witnesses have been gagged.
- Three days after the crash, a maintainence chief at the Dubrovnik airport, Nilko Jerkuic, supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a rifle only hours before he was to speak with investigators.
Here is what we know for sure about Ron Brown’s last days.
- To protect his son Michael from prison, Ron Brown threatens to expose the White House’s yet unrevealed Asian fund-raising scheme, in which Brown played a major role.
- Just weeks before his death, Brown starts going to church for the first time in his life. He is scared for his life and that of his confidante, Nolanda Hill.
- The Croatian government insists on a Dubrovnik stop an unprecedented 36 hours before Brown’s scheduled landing.
- The Enron executives take their own plane.
- The Air Force calls the pilot’s nearly two-mile deviation into a Croatian hillside “inexplicable.” No aircraft has ever drifted inland before at that airport. The AWACS data suggest sabotage of the ground-based navigation system, a line of inquiry that the Air Force is not allowed to pursue.
- For the first time ever on friendly soil, the White House orders the Air Force to skip the “safety” phase of the investigation and move directly to the “accident” phase. There is to be no consideration other than accident, even though this airport is near the Bosnian border and in a potential hot-fire zone.
- Three days after the crash and two days before his scheduled interview by the Air Force, the Croatian responsible for the airport’s navigation system is found with a bullet hole in his chest.
- A day later, every pathologist who views Brown’s body concludes his head wound, at the very least, looks like a bullet hole. In a decision that reached the White House, there is to be no autopsy. The Brown family is not informed. Nor is there any forensic testing or a search for an exit wound.
- The head x-rays that show a possible “lead snowstorm” are destroyed. Officially, they’re lost.
- The three Armed Forces pathologists and the forensic photographer who blow the whistle on this case have their careers destroyed.
- In silencing these dissidents, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology brass assure the public that Brown died of “multiple blunt force injuries” like the others. The death certificate says otherwise. It notes that Brown died of “blunt force injuries to the head.” He was the only one of the 35 victims to have a reported head wound.
- Franjo Tudjman, who has feared a trip to the Hague as a war criminal, shows up a week after the election at the Walter Reed Army Hospital to have his cancer treated.
- His son, Miroslav, investigates the death of the navigation chief and rules it a suicide.
The evidence strongly suggests that Ron Brown was, in fact, assassinated and covered up. In the most likely scenario, Croatian intelligence agents coerce the navigation chief into sabotaging the airport’s non-directional radio beacon. After the plane crashes, they divert the rescue efforts, go to the crash site and administer a coup de grace to Brown, who may already be dead. Three days later, they murder the airport’s navigation chief lest the Air Force investigators persuade him to talk.
Not one to shy from exploitation of a tragedy, the following day President Clinton was busily profaning the memory of Martin Luther King – who had been killed on April 4, 1968 – by comparing King’s mission to Brown’s. What Clinton did not say was that Brown had gone to Croatia to broker a sweetheart deal between the neo-fascist strongman who ran Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, and Enron Corporation. This was all part of the Clintons’ desperate drive to raise money for their 1996 re-election campaign.
The White House undermined the investigation and exploited the political advantages. The Clintons do not want to know the truth about Ron Brown’s death, and they certainly do not want to share it. In this case, it is impossible to lay the blame on the FBI. That much-maligned agency was not involved. This time, the Clintons use a reluctant Air Force and a nearly mutinous Armed Forces Institute of Pathology to bury Ron Brown as quickly as possible, literally and figuratively. They exploit Brown’s death for political advantage and leave the truth buried with him. Without an autopsy or a serious investigation, that is where it remains to this day.
NR: Peter, what’s your take on the suicide of the Chief Medical Inspector of the airplane that Ron Brown was aboard, which just occurred on April 7th?
PK: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I’m sure that you are aware of the information that is being disseminated by the National Vietnam POW Strike Force?
NR: No.
PK: Well, let me say that the cadavers from the Ron Brown aircraft arrived at Dover AFB, Delaware, and they had traces of the chemical “thermite” on them. This is a chemical in bombs that are used to blow safes and bunker doors.
NR: How do you know this?
PK: That information was passed to me through Joe Jordan of the National Vietnam POW Strike Force, out of Houston, Texas. Joe Jordan is a former National Security Agency (NSA) agent. In addition to that, Shelley Kelly , the flight attendant on the aircraft, walked onto the rescue helicopter with minor cuts and bruises. However, upon arrival at the hospital, it was found that she had bled to death on the way. They found a 3 inch incision over the femoral artery. I accept this information as solid, due to its source. Those listeners who know of Mr.Jordan and his organization understand that he has very reliable sources within the government. Perhaps we could conference Mr. Jordan in.
NR: Joe Jordan is with us. Mr. Jordan, who are you?
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