|
Site Map 9/11 WITNESSES MURDERED |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
by kevin604bc [Transcribed from the YouTube video by Tara Carreon, ABOL Librarian]
So many 9/11 witnesses have been mysteriously dying. The thing these witnesses have in common is that their statements give support to the 9/11 truth movement.
Barry Jennings Barry Jennings was the former New York Housing Authority Emergency Coordinator. On 9/11, Barry Jennings reported that he and Michael Hess had been blown back by a big explosion inside Building 7. He later said in an interview that he had heard explosions in Building 7 before either Tower had collapsed. He also reported that he was stepping over bodies, contradicting the official gov't claim that no one died in Building 7. Barry died mysteriously on August 19, 2008 -- two days before the release of the NIST Report's first draft.
Beverly Eckert Beverly Eckert lost her husband on 9/11. She did not believe the official story of 9/11. She was among the families organizing for disclosure around the facts of Sept. 11, including a lawsuit against the Saudi and U.S. Gov't. She was offered money by the U.S. gov't to keep silent. But Beverly did not comply. Eckert died at age 57 in a mysterious commuter airplane crash on February 12, 2009. A week before she died she met with President Barack Obama as an advocate for those affected by 9/11.
Kenneth Johannemann Kenneth was a janitor at the wtc. He reported seeing explosions in the basement and upper floors of the tower. Johannemann reported a massive explosion in the basement of one of the Twin Towers, and rescuing someone who received full body burns from an explosion that took place at the base -- not the top -- of the building. In Sept. 2008, Kenneth died from a gunshot to the head from an apparent suicide. The suicide note makes it appear as if the reason for the suicide was eviction. Johannemann had a large and loving family. One of his cousins had offered him a place.
Michael H. Doran Mr. Doran was a 9/11 victims lawyer who volunteered his services to help the victims of the 9/11 attacks receive compensation. He died on April 28, 2009, when his single engine plane crashed in Ohio. Christopher Landis Former Operations Manager for Safety Service Patrol for the Virginia Department of Transportation.
He gave the makers of "The Pentacon" a film photo collection and nervously answered their questions. He had an unobstructed view of the Pentagon crash site and amazing unseen pictures showing of a coverup. Pictures also showed 9/11 perps in their government vehicles.
About a week after the film makers had obtained the CITGO witnesses testimony on film, Christopher Landis committed suicide. No further info has been released on his death.
Bertha Champagne Bertha was the babysitter for 9/11 perp Marvin Bush's family. Marvin P. Bush, the little-known younger brother of George W. Bush, was a director of Securacom/Stratesec, a Kuwaiti/Saudi-backed company, until June 2000. The company that provided electronic security to the World Trade Center in the days before the attacks and provided security to Dulles International Airport where Flight 77 took off from. On 9/11, Marv Bush was on the Board of HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc., which insured parts of the WTC. October 10, 2003, 62-year-old Bertha Champagne was found crushed to death by her own vehicle in a driveway in front of the Bush family home. What did she know?
Paul Smith Chopper 7 Pilot, Pilot of ABC's 9/11 "International Shot" Chopper, who caught the second plane flying into the tower.
On Oct. 7, 2007, Paul Smith was killed when he was run over by a cab driver who was cut off by a "black car." The black car has not been identified. Cameraman John Del Giorno was on the chopper with Paul Smith on 9/11. John Del Giorno confirms he was the cameraman in News Chopper 7 on 9/11 who took the first footage aired live "allegedly" of United Airlines Flight 175 hitting the second tower. John Del Giorno has refused to talk about what he saw on 9/11 and no longer responds to reporters. Did someone tell him not to talk about what they really witnessed?
Deborah Palfrey Deborah Palfrey ran a prostitution ring that had top 9/11 perps among its clients. A former NSA official noted that some of Palfrey's call girls were being chauffeured by Sherlington Limousines to poker parties attended by former CIA director and co-chair of the Joint 9/11 Intelligence Inquiry, Porter Goss.
One of the reasons cited for Goss's abrupt resignation in May, 2006 was his alleged involvement in a prostitution scandal. On the morning of 9/11, Goss was having breakfast with the head of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmud Ahmed, the man who ordered a wire transfer of $100,000 to alleged lead hijacker Mohammed Atta.
According to former NSA official Wayne Madsen, Palfrey may have also have known that Jack Abramoff, who was also connected to the DC Madam scandal, allowed at least two of the 9/11 hijackers to use one of his casino boats in the days before 9/11.
Deborah Palfrey said, "I have information that would have been of great interest to the 9/11 Commmission." "There's information that they have that would have been very important for the 9/11 Commission to know having to do with intelligence they picked up about 9/11 before it happened." This is a clip from the Alex Jones Show where he interviewed Deborah Palfrey. She didn't say what she was going to expose because she wanted to do that in court.
April 15, 2008
They murdered her.
Major General David Wherley Wherley was the officer who scrambled fighter jets into Washington's skies on the day of 9/11. On June 22, 2009, Major General David Wherley was killed when two commuter trains crashed into each other.
Both trains were ripped open and smashed together in the worst accident in the Metrorail system's 33-year history. Investigators determined that the striking train was under automatic, rather than manual, control.
Salvatore Princiotta Salvatore Princiotta was a first responder firefighter from Ladder 9. These are actual pics of the Ladder 9 fire truck.
You can see the windows have been blown out.
The window gasket is on the outside. What blew out the windows? It didn't blow out just the middle portion of the windows, it blew out the windows all the way back to the frame where it was mounted. On May 23, 2007, Salvatore Princiotta was found murdered. What did he really witness?
David Graham David Graham saw three of the alleged hijackers in Shreveport with a Pakistani businessman prior to 9/11. He came to the FBI with this information and received threats from federal agents. On September 17, 2006, David Graham was found poisoned to death. Graham's death was never investigated. Just a coincidence?
Video made by kevin604bc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4lYkjQ4W5I http://imaginativeworlds.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15074 WHO KNEW TOO MUCH? Kenneth Johannemann (Eyewitness to explosions inside WTC, Saw no airplanes hit but just saw "floors blow up") -- Gunshot to the head, ruled a suicide Beverly Eckert (Wife of 9/11 WTC Victim, Earwitness to WTC Explosion, Refused hush money) -- Airplane crash Prasanna Kalahasthi (Wife of 9/11 "Flight 11 Passenger") -- Suicide by hanging David Graham (Dentist who saw three of the 9/11 Hijackers with Pakistani businessman in Shreveport, Louisiana) -- Murdered (Poisoned with anti-freeze) Paul Smith (Pilot of WABC7's 9/11 "International Shot" Chopper) -- Car accident Michael H. Doran (9/11 Victims Lawyer) -- Airplane crash Bertha Champagne (Longtime babysitter for 911 Perp Marvin Bush's family) -- Crushed by a car Christopher Landis (Former Operations Manager for Safety Service Patrol for the Virginia Department of Transportation, Interviewed by makers of "The Pentacon", Gave makers of "The Pentacon" a photo collection, Involved in the response to the Pentagon attack) -- Suicide John P. O'Neill (FBI Counter-terrorism expert, Obsessed with catching Osama Bin Laden, Suspected Clinton/Bush/FBI complicity in the cover-up and protection of Bin Laden) -- Died in the WTC on 9/11 Deborah Palfrey (Ran an escort service that had 911 Perps on it's list) -- Suicide by hanging David Wherley (US General who ordered fighter jets to scramble on 9/11) -- Train crash Un-named Ticket Agent (Boston Logan Ticket Agent who checked Atta and Alomari) -- Suicide Suzanne Jovin (Yale Student who had a thesis about Osama Bin Laden, Her thesis adviser was an intelligence operative) -- Murdered (Killer unknown) Perry Kucinich (Brother of Congressman who advocated new 9/11 investigation) -- Fell down Salvatore Princiotta (9/11 FDNY Firefighter from Ladder 9) -- Murdered Ezra Harel (Chairman of the Israeli Company That Handled Security For All 9/11 Airports) -- Heart attack Bruce Ivins (Patsy in the 9/11-linked "Anthrax" Case) -- Drug overdose My Silence Cannot Be Bought by Beverly Eckert Published Friday, December 19, 2003 in USA Today:
Mrs. Eckert was killed today in the Buffalo air crash. In spite of the aircraft's three de-icing systems and the fact that neither the aircraft ahead not the aircraft behind of the aircraft which crashed experienced icing, Mainstream Media is programming viewers that ice on the wings led to the crash. New York state plane crash: 'Victim' of flight 3407 was 9/11 widow by The Telegraph.co.uk One of the 50 people killed on flight 3407 before it crashed near Buffalo, New York state, was a widow, Beverly Eckert, whose husband was killed in the 9/11 attacks, according to reports. 12:00PM GMT 13 Feb 2009 Mrs. Eckert was travelling to Clarence, near Buffalo, to celebrate what would have been her husband, Sean Rooney's, 58th birthday. Mrs. Eckert was due to attend the presentation of a scholarship in Mr. Rooney's name at the high school where the two met. The 74 seat Colgan Air flight crashed, killing 50 people, in the suburbs of Buffalo at 10.20pm on Thursday night, just 5 miles from the runway. Clarence is located 20 miles north-east of Buffalo. It was the first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in the U.S. in 2 1/2 years, officials said. Mrs. Eckert's relatives believe she was one of the victims of the fiery plane crash in New York state, the Buffalo News reported. "We know she was on that plane," her sister Sue Bourque told the paper. "And now she's with him." The aircraft, which was operating under Continental Airlines flight number 3407, was carrying 44 passengers, 4 members of crew and an off-duty pilot, when it crashed, minutes before it was due to land at Buffalo Airport. None of those on board survived, and one person on the ground perished. Mr. Rooney, who was 50 when he died, was working in New York's World Trade Centre when terrorists flew two planes into the twin towers. He left a message on his wife's voicemail saying: "There has been an explosion in World Trade One -- that's the other building. "It looks like a plane struck it. "It's on fire at about the 90th floor. And it's, it's -- it's horrible. Bye." Ms. Eckert, Mr. Rooney's high school sweetheart, continued to live in their home in Stamford, Connecticut, after the 2001 terrorists' attacks. She served as co-chair of the Voices of Sept 11 which pushed for better investigation of the attacks and a permanent memorial. The paper said families of the victims had been moved into an airport lounge and offered consolation, but had no confirmation of their loved one's death. "We know they're dead," said one grieving man who declined to give his name. "Why can't they just tell us or take us to ID them." New York state jet crash: Investigators examine role of icy weather By Damien McElroy 11:34AM GMT 13 Feb 2009 U.S. investigators are examining the role played by icy weather in the jet crash that killed 50 people in the upstate New York village of Clarence, near Buffalo Niagara airport. Aviation experts said the aircraft did not report trouble before it suddenly dropped from radar screen. Suspicions initially centred on ice on the wings causing a complete failure of the turbo-prop Q400 plane. The Telegraph has obtained a tape of communications between air traffic control and the flight crew in which the plane suddenly stopped responding to the tower. There was no hint of stress or problems betrayed in the voice of the female first officer when the plane was cleared for landing two minutes before the crash. The 31-minute recording features conversations between the cockpit, air traffic control and other aircraft in the vicinity, following the 74-seat commuter jet's take-off from Newark Airport in New Jersey. A voice in the cockpit of the plane, which was operated under a Continental Airlines flight number, is heard informing authorities that her aircraft was turning on approach to landing, and repeated instructions when told to maintain an altitude of 2300 feet. The air traffic controllers then tried to contact the pilots of the jet for 12 minutes before apparently realising that the plane -- Colgan 3407 -- had gone down. One of the suspected victims was Beverly Eckert, a widow and campaigner for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York. The Bombardier made aircraft crashed just after 10 pm local time. Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said Flight 3407 had 44 passengers and 4 crew members, and an off-duty pilot, adding that she had no information on their status. Witnesses heard the twin turboprop aircraft sputtering before it went down in light snow and fog. Flames silhouetted the shattered home after Continental Connection Flight 3407 plummeted into it around about five miles (eight kilometers) from Buffalo Niagara International Airport. "The whole sky was lit up orange," said Bob Dworak, who lives less than a mile from the crash site. "All the sudden, there was a big bang, and the house shook." The aircraft was flying from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said there is "no indication of any security related event" that brought the plane down. One aviation safety expert David Learmount said that there were no safety concerns with the model. Conditions of freezing drizzle, known as Rime Icing, were the most likely culprit for the crash. "It was cold, snowing and dark but these planes are designed to fly in icy conditions," David Learmount, of Flight International told the Guardian. "However, those conditions can be very fickle and if ice builds up on a plane it can be very difficult. "At this time of year, when a pilot crashes approaching an airport that they will know well, the first thing you look at is the weather." One person died on the ground when the plane "landed on the house" in Clarence Center in a "direct hit," David Bissonette, Clarence Emergency Control director, said at the news conference. The house was destroyed and several others were damaged. Earlier, CNN showed live images of smoke rising from the scene. Light snow was falling as the aircraft approached the airport, CNN said. Local officials were "collecting information." The operator, Colgan has a fleet of 15 Bombardier Dash 8s, along with 3 Hawker Beechcraft 1900D and 38 Saab 340B turboprops, according to the Ascend Online Fleets database. It has about 1,100 employees, according to Ascend. Continental announced a flying agreement with Colgan in February 2007, saying it would use the commuter carrier to ferry passengers to and from Newark. Colgan's planes can use smaller airports than those served by Continental's jet fleet. Scandinavian Airlines decided to permanently stop flying Bombardier Q400 turboprops after a string of crash landings blamed on landing gear malfunctions. The company took the decision the day after an SAS turboprop made by the Canadian company crash-landed with 44 people on board in Denmark when part of its landing gear collapsed. But experts said that the SAS decision was not a warning for the type of disaster that unfolded in New York. "We have a very new, very modern aircraft almost as good as turbo jet. These are challenging conditions for aircraft but they are fairly routine for that area," said Kieran Daly, editor of Flight International. INVESTIGATORS COMB PLANE DEBRIS by Indy.com February 14, 2009 CLARENCE, N.Y. — Crash investigators picked through incinerated wreckage Saturday, gathering evidence to determine what brought down a commuter plane that plunged into a home and exploded. It could take days to recover all human remains from the plot of land where a single-family home stood before Continental Connection Flight 3407 nose-dived into it late Thursday, National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Steve Chealander said. Experts were analyzing data from the black boxes, including statements by crew members about a buildup of ice on the wings and windshield of the plane, Chealander said. But authorities have yet to pin that as the cause of the crash, which occurred during a light snow and mist, killing 49 people on the flight and one man in the home. Ice on wings can cripple an aircraft and has been blamed for several previous plane crashes. Other aircraft in the area Thursday night told air traffic controllers it also experienced icing around the time that Flight 3407 from Newark, N.J., to Buffalo went down. Icing is one of several elements being examined by investigators, who plan to remain in Buffalo for another week before shipping plane parts to locations around the country for study, Chealander said. A full report will likely take a year, he said. “We’re in the very early stages of the investigation,” he said. “The icing and other things are just preliminary focuses.” One aspect of the investigation will focus on the crew, how they were trained and whether they had enough time to rest between flights. Other investigators focused on the weather, the mechanics of the plane and whether the engine, wings and various mechanics of the plane operated as they were designed to. But recovery of the bodies will take priority over the investigation, Chealander said. The remains-recovery effort was being led by Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., and a nationally renowned expert who led the recovery effort after United Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001. The crash site remained off limits Saturday, with police barring reporters and photographers from the neighborhood. Authorities still haven’t released a list of the victims of the nation’s first deadly air crash in 261/27 years, but reminders of the disaster were visible all around the Buffalo area. Flags flew at half-staff outside Buffalo Niagara International Airport and at Clarence Town Hall, the site of a command center set up by police. Family members of the victims were sequestered in a hotel Saturday where they were scheduled to meet with representatives of Continental Airlines. Police turned away reporters. The 74-seat Q400 Bombardier aircraft was operated by Colgan Air, based in Manassas, Va. Colgan’s parent company is Pinnacle Airlines of Memphis, Tenn. Beverly Eckert, Sept. 11 Widow, Died in Fiery Buffalo Flight 3407 Crash by LEE FERRAN Feb. 13, 2009, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer The crash of Continental Express flight 3407 Thursday night has brought tragedy to the friends and family of all 50 victims. But for one family, grief has struck for a second time. Relatives of Beverly Eckert, whose husband died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, say she was aboard the Buffalo, N.Y.-bound flight when it crashed in Clarence Center, N.Y. Eckert was flying to Buffalo to honor what would have been her husband Sean Rooney's 58th birthday. She was scheduled to present a Canisius High School student with a scholarship created in his name. After the 9/11 attacks, Eckert became a passionate voice for all the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and co-founded the Voices for September 11th, an advocacy group for survivors and victims' families. At the White House today President Obama singled out Eckert after expressing condolences for all the victims. "She was an inspiration to me and so many others," Obama said. Last week, Eckert met Obama in the White House with other relatives of the victims of Sept. 11 and the bombing of the USS Cole to discuss the new administration's fight against terror. "The 9/11 community is devastated," Mary Fetchet, founding director of the Voices of September 11, told "Good Morning America." "Her death is reverberating through our community." On the morning of the Sept. 11 airplane crash, Rooney was in the south tower of the World Trade Center. He spent the last minutes of his life talking to Eckert on his cell phone, while trying to find a way out. Eckert's sister Sue Bourque told The Buffalo News that in the midst of the tragedy, there was some consolation. "We know she was on that plane and now she's with him," she said. Rooney and Eckert both attended Canisius High School in Buffalo, where they where high school sweethearts. Though she has not received official confirmation that Eckert was on board the plane, Bourque said she was positive that her sister was on board. A Crusade for Safety to Honor a Memory After 9/11, Eckert became a vocal lobbyist who pressed Congress to "correct the failings" of that infamous day and pushed for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. "She was such an important part of all of our work," said Mary Fetchet, another 9/11 family activist, told The Associated Press. In 2004, she tearfully told ABC News it was a calling that fell to her after her husband died. "I didn't choose this role that came to me," she said. "My husband was killed. I owe my husband, I owe his memory to make something of my life after Sept. 11." Flight Victim Eckert on Voices of Sept. 11 Eckert served as co-chairwoman of Voices of September 11, an advocacy group for the relatives of the victims. Eckert testified before Congress and, along with a small group of Sept. 11 widows, walked the halls of the Capitol repeatedly to draw attention to her cause. During a 2004 testimony before Congress, Eckert recounted an emotional phone call from her husband in his final minutes while he was trapped in the World Trade Center buildings. "When the smoke and flames drew near and Sean knew he was going to die, he remained calm, speaking of his love for me and for his family," she said. "I hope I never see the day when another widow has to walk in my shoes. The time to act is now." That same year the intelligence reform law was passed. For Eckert, it was a long-awaited victory. "I did all of this for Sean's memory, I did it for him," she said then. "There is a euphoria in knowing that we reached the top of the hill. ... I just wanted Sean to come home from work. Maybe now, someone else's Sean will get to come home." The Associated Press contributed to this report. Beverly Eckert, Leader of Families of 9/11 Victims, Dies at 57 by SEWELL CHAN Published: February 14, 2009, The New York Times Beverly Eckert, who became a prominent spokeswoman for the families of 9/11 victims after her husband was killed in the attacks, died Thursday in the plane crash near Buffalo. She was 57 and lived in Stamford, Conn.
Beverly Eckert spoke with reporters in October 2004. Ms. Eckert was aboard Continental Connection Flight 3407 on her way to Buffalo, her hometown, to help celebrate what would have been the 58th birthday of her husband, Sean P. Rooney. On Feb. 6, Ms. Eckert joined other relatives of 9/11 victims and victims of the 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer Cole in a meeting with President Obama to discuss changes in the handling of terrorism suspects. “Beverly lost her husband on 9/11 and became a tireless advocate for those families whose lives were forever changed on that September day,” President Obama said at the White House on Friday morning. “And in keeping with that passionate commitment, she was on her way to Buffalo to mark what would have been her husband’s birthday and launch a scholarship in his memory. So she was an inspiration to me and to so many others, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead.” After the death of her husband, who was a vice president for risk management services at the Aon Corporation, Ms. Eckert was a co-chairwoman of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, a group of victims’ relatives who looked into possible government failures before the attacks. Ms. Eckert supported the work of the 9/11 Commission, and after its recommendations were released, she urged Congress to adopt the findings. Annalisa DiNucci, Ms. Eckert’s next-door neighbor and friend, said Ms. Eckert’s top concerns were transparency in the investigations into the attacks, the improvement of building codes and emergency communications, and her desire to see Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the attacks and is in United States custody, put on trial. Beverly A. Eckert was born May 29, 1951. She met her future husband at a dance at Canisius High School, a Jesuit institution in Buffalo, when they were 16. She received a degree in fine arts from Buffalo State College in 1975. Mr. Rooney lived in Buffalo until 1978, managing restaurants before starting work in the financial services industry and living in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to a 2001 article in The Buffalo News. The couple had recently celebrated turning 50 together with vacations to Vermont, to mark his birthday, and Morocco, to mark hers, when the terror attack occurred. They had been married 21 years. Mr. Rooney was one of 32 Aon employees who were at work on the 98th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. He exchanged voice mail messages and telephone calls with his wife as he tried to make it to safety. He had made his way to the 105th floor in an attempt to reach the roof when he died. Ms. Eckert was also a volunteer at Habitat for Humanity and at the Julia A. Stark Elementary School in Stamford, according to Ms. DiNucci, her neighbor. Five or six years ago, she met a man, Shawn Monks, during a trip to Block Island, R.I., Ms. DiNucci said. Mr. Monks, who was from Garrison, N.Y., lived with Ms. Eckert in Stamford. Besides Mr. Monks, Ms. Eckert is survived by three sisters, Susan Bourque of East Aurora, N.Y.; Karen Eckert of Williamsville, N.Y.; and Margaret Eckert of Springfield, Mass.; a brother, Raymond Eckert, of Amherst, N.Y.; and seven nephews and one niece. Correction: February 18, 2009 Because of an editing error, an obituary on Saturday about Beverly Eckert, an advocate for the families of 9/11 victims who died in Thursday’s plane crash near Buffalo, misattributed the confirmation of her death. It came from friends of Ms. Eckert as well as a presidential statement, not from the National Transportation Safety Board. The obituary, using information from a relative, also misidentified the college from which she graduated and misstated the year she received her degree. Ms. Eckert graduated from Buffalo State College, not the State University of New York at Buffalo, and received her degree in 1975, not 1974. Strange Suicide Of A Flight 11 Passenger's Wife Raises More Doubt As To What Really Happened On The Four 911 Flights by Greg Szymanski 12-3-5 Prasanna Kalahasthi, 25, a USC dental student and married to Pendyala Vamsikrishna, a Flight 11 passenger, killed herself approximately one month after 9/11 in her Los Angeles apartment even though friends say she was 'in good spirits and determined to finish dental school.' A friend of an alleged Flight 11 passenger said he was "shocked and amazed" after learning five weeks after 9/11 his friend's wife committed suicide in her Los Angeles apartment in an apparent act of despair. But others were quick to point out that foul play has never been ruled out, according to several sources close to the suicide investigation. Not only was this 9/11 suicide shocking and difficult to understand, but the alleged victim's husband, Pendyala Vamsikrishna of India, was never even listed on the original Flight 11 manifest, only appearing later as a passenger on a couple of conflicting unofficial lists. Due to the numerous inconsistencies and irregularities on all four 9/11 flight manifests, critics of the official government story contend many of the passengers probably never existed at all or were concocted as the result of carefully constructed aliases, essentially faking their deaths. Further, critics contend if the passenger lists were suspect then so were the planes, calling the 9/11 jetliners 'phantom flights,' paving the way for military drones to be used to attack the WTC and Pentagon. Others who disagree with the official story for the most part buy into the drone theory, but theorize the unlucky passengers actually were killed by being transferred onto a single airliner and then either dumped into the Atlantic or taken to one of the many hidden underground government bases. Of course, both theories have their skeptics, but the irregularity of the passenger lists, the evidence refuting the existence of the flights, eye-witness accounts of seeing a cargo plane without windows slam into the towers and the strange silence among the airline family members makes it imperative to pursue a full scale investigation into the whereabouts and real identities of each and every passenger listed by the government as dead. And the case of Vamsikrishna, a 30 year old engineer from India, and his wife who committed suicide, called unlikely or very strange by those in the Hindu community, is just another example of the many mysteries surrounding the 9/11 passengers and their families. Going back to a month after 9/11, Prasanna Kalahasthi, 25, a USC dental student from India and Vamsikrishna's wife, was found dead in her Catalina St. apartment in Los Angeles on Oct. 19, 2001. Investigators noted there was no suicide note and the only thing found next to her body was a letter from then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani inviting her to an upcoming memorial service at Ground Zero to mourn 9/11 victims. After the apparent suicide, several school friends and even family members said Kalashasthi was, of course, devastated by her loss, being married for only a short time, but was determined to move forward and complete her dental studies. Further, friends pointed out she was devout Hindu who believed in reincarnation, making suicide an even more unlikely choice since a return to earth is inevitable according to Kalashasthi's Hindu beliefs. "I knew Vamsi, that's what we called him at school in India, and I was shocked when he died on 9/11," said school friend Anupendra Sharma in a telephone conversation this week from his home on the east coast. "What was very strange, though, was his wife's suicide. They were only married for a year and she had recently just come to America to go to USC. "Vamsi's parents also are back in India and came to the Unites States for the funerals. I know Vamsi's wife was very upset and there were some accounts of her suicide in the local papers. "Also, I should say I wasn't a personal friend of his but knew of him at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India, where we both went to school in 1992. They did tell me, though, that his loved ones were notified that they found some of Vamsi's remains in the wreckage, but I am not sure of specifics." Although it's unlikely to recover of any remains in a towering inferno like the WTC, the Arctic Beacon has uncovered a strange trail of suspicious evidence emanating from passengers at both the Pentagon and WTC, indicating the FBI may have been busy planting phony evidence at all locations on 9/11. For example, two California ID cards of Flight 77 passenger, Susanne Calley, were miraculously uncovered in the Pentagon wreckage by a first responder, Capt. Jim Ingledue of the Virginia Beach Fire Department two days after 9/11. Although Capt. Ingledue believes the official account of 9/11, he admitted it was "very strange and highly unusual" to find unblemished paper-thin evidence in a meltdown like the Pentagon. And even more miraculously than Calley's ID's a year after 9/11, four unscathed credit cards were returned to the parents of Waleed Iskandar, a suspicious Flight 11 passenger also not on the original passenger list but included a year later on unofficial flight lists. Strangely, in light of the miraculous discoveries, both Iskandar and Calley's loved one's did not question the return or authenticity of the items returned, adding they were in perfect agreement with the government's official version of 9/11. Although Vamsikrishna's parents could not be reached in India to discuss their son's case, Sharma's recollection of his friend isn't the only one commenting about the strange nature of Kalashasthi's suicide. Anuradha Gupta, another friend from India who attended the same technical school, wrote a tribute shortly after the suicide, saying: "On October 20th, a friend called me, overcome with emotion and told me that Prasanna, studying to be a dental student had committed suicide the previous day. When newspaper reports came in, we all were shocked and almost defensive. "We told people that Hindus do not believe in suicide, that they believe in reincarnation and that their journey towards learning and evolution does not end with death, except that sometimes one can't handle despair beyond a point. "We heard that Prasanna, a USC graduate student in the International Student Program for Foreign-Trained Dentists since April 2001 had moved to U.S. only a year back, and was found in her Catalina Street apartment on Friday, October 19th. She was 25 years old. Near her body, they found a letter from New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dated Oct. 12th inviting her to a memorial service scheduled for Oct. 28th to mourn the death of her husband. "And from her friends, I learnt that though she was devastated, she was determined to move on and complete her dental course. However, a few questions haunted her." In the tribute, Gupta also commented that Kalashasthi refused counseling, all of friends saying she was recovering "fine" from the tragedy. "The University Director of Student Counseling Service, Bradford King had referred her to Nadadur S. Kumar, associate director of the Office of International Services," wrote Gupta. "In their regular chats, Kumar reminded Prasanna that counselors, even Indian ones were available to help her. Bradford even offered to walk her across to the counseling center. But it was her choice to not go in for professional counseling, not because of the stigma attached but because she felt she was doing fine, as did everybody else. "Prasanna did reassure her families that L.A. was her home and that she would move on. Her brother was moving into the apartment she and her husband had shared near the USC campus to be with her, and she also had a new, extended family that included her friends, her classmates, and people at the University." The strange suicide and Vamsikrishna's questionable passenger status is just another example of the many oddities coming forward about the passengers on board all four 9/11 flights. In the past, the Arctic Beacon has found most of the families of the doomed flights have remained silent or a few that have returned phone calls agree with the official 9/11 story word for word. This, however, is in stark contrast to the families of victims at Ground Zero who readily come forward, many openly disagreeing vehemently with the official story. For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com Student found hanged in home by SPENCER MORGAN Staff Writer, usc.edu 10/23/01 Suicide: Prasanna Kalahasthi had been living in United States six months when her husband died in WTC attack Shockwaves from the Sept. 11 attacks have claimed another victim, as a grieving widow whose husband was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, died in an apparent suicide near campus Friday afternoon. Prasanna Kalahasthi, a USC graduate student in the International Student Program for Foreign-Trained Dentists, was found in her Catalina Street apartment Friday hanging from the chin-up bar of her home exercise machine. She was 25 years old. "Everything there, everything we saw indicates a suicide," said Department of Public Safety Deputy Chief Bob Taylor. The case is classified as a probable suicide as authorities await the coroner's final report. Los Angeles Police Department and DPS officials examined her body and the apartment for clues. There were no signs of trauma on the body except for to the neck, Taylor said. On a desk in her apartment, officials found a receipt dated Oct. 15 for a length of rope. Near her body, they found a letter from New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dated Oct. 12 inviting her to a memorial service scheduled Oct. 28 to mourn the death of her husband. Kalahasthi's husband, Pendyala "Vamsi" Vamiskrishna, died onboard the first hijacked airliner that careened into the World Trade Center Sept. 11. Vamiskrishna, 30, worked for DTI Technologies and had been on a business trip in Boston for several weeks. Known among co-workers for his impressive work ethic, he spent an extra day in Boston to finish the project that he was working on, missing his planned Monday departure. On Sept. 11, Vamiskrishna boarded American Airlines Flight 11 and called his wife's voicemail to let her know that he was on his way home. That was the last time Kalahasthi heard her husband's voice. Friends and classmates described Kalahasthi as a dedicated student with a pleasant personality. "She loved dentistry and worked very hard," said Neena Mukkamala, a graduate student in dentistry and one of Kalahasthi's closest friends at USC. "Even though school was hard, we had fun. She was a really fun person." Kalahasthi had been at the USC School of Dentistry since April. She and her husband were both from India. They had been married for 2-1/2 years and were planning to start a family in America. The couple received their green cards and Kalahasthi was expecting her work permit to arrive in three months, Mukkamala said. For the past six months, her life seemed to be divided between a demanding schoolwork schedule and spending time with her husband, who she was very close to. By all accounts, she was a content and determined person. Her husband's abrupt death left her devastated. Kalahasthi was one of thousands grieving for their loved ones and suffering from depression after the attacks. The New York State Office of Mental Health reported that 1.5 million people will need psychological aid and the Coalition of Voluntary Mental Health Agencies Inc. put the number at 2.3 million. However, no major increase of suicides have been reported since last month's attacks. Bradford King, director of student counseling services, said four students have gone to the Counseling Center as a direct result of the attacks. He emphasized that people who are suicidal usually positively respond to mental treatment. Student Affairs officials said Kalahasthi was in counseling. "She was a very fun person and very, very strong," Mukkamala said. "We never saw tears in her eyes until the day of Sept. 11." The couple lived in an apartment building five blocks south of campus. "She was extremely depressed after his death," said Ismail Ozis, one of the neighbors in the complex. After Vamiskrishna's death, Kalahasthi's parents visited from India, along with her brother, who had been working in the United States. Kalahasthi's brother had planned to move into the apartment and support her, Ozis said. Their visit seemed to lift her spirits, Ozis said, who was shocked at the apparent suicide. "She was very sad," Mukkamala said. "But I don't think she was angry. She wasn't that type of person." Her tight-knit group of classmates said her presence will be missed. "She was a friend, not just a classmate," said Rajiv Patel, president of the class of 2003 at the International Dentistry Program. "We are a close community here. We will definitely miss her." The mood was somber in the program laboratory Monday. Spirits were low as graduate students toiled away at their individual stations with the drills, molds and other tools of their trade. Kalahasthi's station was empty except for a large piece of paper with a note that read, "Dearest Prasanna, We shall miss you a lot! Love, your friends and teachers." Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved. This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 40 (Tuesday, October 23, 2001), beginning on page 1 and ending on page 11. Suzanne Jovin Updated: Sept. 17, 2009 The New York Times Suzanne Jovin, a popular and ambitious political science major at Yale University, was found stabbed to death in December 1998 on a street in a prosperous New Haven neighborhood. Originally from Göttingen, Germany, Ms. Jovin, 21, spoke four languages and spent much of her free time helping mentally handicapped adults. She belonged to the German club and the Bach Chorus. She tutored children in the New Haven public schools. Her attacker stabbed her 17 times in the back and neck and left her crumpled on a moonlit curb a mile and a half from campus. The widely-publicized killing remains unsolved. The area where she was found, a neighborhood of porticoed homes and ample lawns, was known as a safe off-campus area for students. Detectives said that Ms. Jovin probably knew her killer. A lack of witnesses and an absence of key evidence, including the murder weapon, made the case a frustrating puzzle for a city that at the time had one of the best records in New England for solving homicides. A week into the criminal investigation rumors began to swirl around a Yale lecturer and former residence hall dean who was Ms. Jovin's senior thesis adviser. The police confirmed publicly that the lecturer, James R. Van de Velde, was ''in a pool of suspects.'' The police questioned Mr. Van de Velde twice, right after the killing, and conducted numerous interviews with his former students and off-campus acquaintances. He insisted that he had nothing to do with the death of his student. Yale did not renew Mr. Van de Velde's contract. Nobody else in the suspect pool was identified, and the police did not reveal why Mr. Van de Velde was considered a suspect. Students who were questioned said detectives had pressed them on whether he and Ms. Jovin had had an affair. Mr. Van de Velde said they had not. Mr. Van de Velde, though never charged, remains the only person who was publicly labeled a suspect, and has continued to battle to have that description rescinded. Suzanne Jovin case by Wikipedia Suzanne Nahuela Jovin (January 26, 1977 – December 4, 1998) was a senior at Yale University in New Haven, CT when she was brutally stabbed to death off campus. The city of New Haven and Yale University have offered a combined $150,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Jovin’s killer.[1] The crime remains unsolved. At Yale, Jovin volunteered as a tutor through the Yale Tutoring in Elementary Schools program, sang in both the Freshman Chorus and the Bach Society Orchestra, co-founded the German Club, and worked for three years in the Davenport dining hall.[2] The Murder After dropping off the penultimate draft of her senior essay on the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, at approximately 4:15 p.m. on Friday December 4, 1998, Suzanne Jovin began preparations for a pizza-making party she had organized at the Trinity Lutheran Church on 292 Orange St. for the local chapter of Best Buddies, an international organization that brings together students and mentally disabled adults. By 8:30 p.m., after staying late to help clean up, she was driving another volunteer home in a borrowed university station wagon. At about 8:45 p.m., she returned the car to the Yale-owned lot on the corner of Edgewood Ave and Howe St and proceeded to walk two blocks to her second floor apartment at 258 Park Street, upstairs from a Yale police substation. Sometime prior to 8:50, a few friends passed by Jovin's window and asked her if she wanted to join them at the movies. Jovin said 'no' – that she was planning to do school work that night. At 9:02, she logged onto her Yale e-mail account and told a friend she was going to leave some GRE books for her in her [Jovin’s] lobby. The GRE books belonged to the friend the e-mail was sent to and Jovin said in that e-mail that the GRE materials would be available for the friend to pick up the next morning after she (Jovin) first retrieves them from "someone" who had in turn borrowed them from her. This "someone" has yet to be identified.[3] It remains unknown whether Jovin was planning to or indeed did meet this unnamed person that night. At 9:10 she logged off. It is uncertain if she made or received any calls; calls within Yale's telephone system were not traceable. She wore the same soft, low-cut hiking boots, jeans, and maroon fleece pullover she had worn at the pizza party.[2] Very shortly thereafter, Jovin headed out on foot to the Yale police communications center under the arch at Phelps Gate on Yale’s Old Campus to return the keys to the car she had borrowed. Shortly before reaching her destination, at about 9:22, Jovin encountered classmate Peter Stein who was out for a walk. Stein is quoted by the Yale Daily News as saying "She did not mention plans to go anywhere or do anything else afterward. She just said that she was very, very tired and that she was looking forward to getting a lot of sleep."[4] Stein also said Jovin was not wearing a backpack, was holding one or more sheets of white 8 ½ x 11 inch paper in her right hand, that she was walking at a "normal" pace and did not look nervous or excited, and that their encounter lasted only two to three minutes.[5] Based on the timeline, it is presumed Jovin returned the keys to the borrowed car at about 9:25. She was reportedly last seen alive at between 9:25–9:30 p.m. walking northeast on College Street, but not yet past Elm Street, by another Yale student who was returning from a Yale hockey game. The two did not speak.[2] At 9:55, a passerby dialed 911 to report a woman bleeding at the corner of Edgehill Rd and East Rock Rd, a posh neighborhood 1.9 miles from the Yale campus where Jovin was last seen alive. When police arrived at 9:58, they found Jovin fatally stabbed 17 times in the back of her head and neck and her throat slit. She was lying on her stomach, feet in the road, body on the grassy area between the road and the sidewalk. She was fully clothed and still wearing her watch and earrings, with a crumpled up dollar bill in her pocket; her wallet was later found to be still in her room. Suzanne Jovin was officially pronounced dead at 10:26 at Yale New Haven Hospital.[6] The Evidence Many items and observations have been reported by the police and media as possible evidence over the eleven plus years of the investigation, much of which has either been discredited, deemed hearsay or unreliable, or been explained. The most reliable physical evidence appears to be: 1) DNA found in scrapings taken from under the fingernails of Jovin’s left hand[7] 2) Jovin’s fingerprints and an unknown person’s partial palmprint found on a Fresca bottle in the bushes in front of where her body was found [8] and 3) the tip of an estimated 4–5 inch non-serrated carbon steel blade lodged in her skull [9] The most reliable observation appears to be the sighting by more than one individual of a tan or brown van at the precise location where Jovin’s body was found. The existence of the tan/brown van was not made public by the New Haven Police Department (NHPD) until March 27, 2001, when they wrote: “witnesses have said that as they approached the corner of East Rock and Edgehill Roads, they saw a tan or brown van stopped in the roadway facing east, immediately adjacent to where Suzanne was found.”[10] Although members of the Yale faculty had reported the police were asking privately about the van at the inception of the investigation, no explanation has ever been given why it took more than two years to release the information to the public. Although the New Haven Register reported on November 8, 2001, that the NHPD had impounded a brown van as part of the Jovin investigation, no link has ever been confirmed.[11] There have been no reports of anyone witnessing Jovin enter or exit any vehicle nor has the observed van apparently been found. Despite a lack of any corroborating witness reports, it is generally assumed that Jovin had either forcibly or voluntarily entered a vehicle, as it was virtually impossible for her to have reached the intersection of Edgehill and East Rock Roads by foot in the short span of time that elapsed between when she was last seen alive and when she was found bleeding by witnesses. The existence of the Fresca bottle came to light on April 1, 2001, by Hartford Courant reporter Les Gura [12] The only store in the vicinity of campus that sold Fresca that was still open at the hour Jovin was last seen alive was Krauszer's market on York St. near Elm St. – precisely one block south of Jovin’s apartment. Although Krauszer's maintained a video recording of its customers for security purposes, the police never asked to view their tape and have never reported seeking assistance from store employees or customers about whether they had seen anything unusual that night. The foreign palmprint has yet to be identified. The first mention of the existence of the DNA was on October 26, 2001, following a solicitation by the New Haven police for colleagues, friends and acquaintances of Jovin to come forward and give DNA samples voluntarily [13] No explanation has ever been given as to why it took nearly three years for the fingernail scrapings to be tested for DNA. On September 14, 2009, Jovin's parents wrote to Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell that "potential forensic investigations, made possible by significant advances in technology in the intervening decade, are not being carried out due to shortcomings in the Connecticut Forensic Science Laboratory." Rell's office admitted that the lab also had a backlog of 12,000 DNA samples that needed to be tested.[14] The DNA results from material collected under a fingernail of Jovin's left hand remained unmatched until November 2009. It was determined at that time that the DNA matched that of a trace evidence technician in the Connecticut State Police Forensics Laboratory, and was the result of accidental evidence contamination at the lab.[15] The Investigation Four days after the murder, the name of Jovin’s thesis advisor, James Van de Velde, was leaked to the New Haven Register as the prime suspect in the case. Fifteen months later, criminologist John Pleckaitis, then a sergeant at the New Haven Police Department, admitted to Hartford Courant reporter Les Gura: "From a physical evidence point of view, we had nothing to tie him to the case ... I had nothing to link him to the crime." [16] Famed criminologist Henry Lee’s offer to reconstruct the crime scene was accepted by the police but not carried out.[17] Based on subsequent questioning of the Yale community, and on Van de Velde’s name being released prior to the completion of his police interrogation, it became apparent the NHPD had for undisclosed reasons become convinced that Van de Velde and Jovin must have been having an illicit or unrequited affair – a notion that friends of Jovin, including her boyfriend, considered wholly unlikely.[18] Nevertheless, though not revealing any physical evidence or a motive, the NHPD continued to maintain that their naming of Van de Velde was not presumptuous. Yale, under the guidance of Dean Richard H. Brodhead, then chose to cancel Van de Velde’s spring 1999 classes citing his presence as a “major distraction” for students, damaging his reputation and academic career.[18] In 2000, Van de Velde and colleagues strongly and eventually publicly encouraged Yale to hire their own private investigators to study the case. In December, 2000, under additional pressure from the Jovin family, Yale relented and hired the team of Andrew Rosenzweig, former chief investigator with the New York district attorney's office, and Patrick Harnett, a former commanding officer of the New York Police Department's major crime squad[19] It was at their insistence that the NHPD allowed the state forensics lab to analyze Jovin’s fingernail scrapings for DNA. Neither the resulting DNA nor the Fresca bottle fingerprint were a match to Van de Velde, prompting Harnett to label Van de Velde “Richard Jewell with a Ph.D.,” a reference to an innocent man whose life was ruined by police publicity in 1996.[20] Yale has not made its investigation public, nor explained its secrecy. The NHPD responded by contacting the U.S. Navy, Van de Velde’s primary employer at the time, urging them to reconsider their contract work with him—going so far as to travel to Washington, DC to meet with Navy officials. A thorough review was conducted that resulted in Van de Velde being allowed to keep his job and his security clearance.[21] Sensing the investigation had dead-ended on him, Van de Velde undertook a letter writing campaign urging the Connecticut State cold case unit to take over the case.[22] When the Chief State’s Attorney refused, Van de Velde began pressing the police to undertake additional state-of-the-art forensic tests on the evidence.[23] On September 1, 2006, nearly eight years after the murder, the Jovin investigation was officially classified a cold case and moved to the Connecticut’s Cold Case Unit.[24] However, the case was never added to the Cold Case Unit web site nor was there any mention of the reward being offered—prompting Van de Velde once again to write letters of complaint. On November 29, 2007, Assistant State’s Attorney James Clark admitted that the case had been secretly reassigned back to New Haven in June of that year, this time under the auspices of a handpicked team of four retired detectives. According to Clark: “no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect in the crime.”[25] Litigation On January 12, 2001, Van de Velde sued Quinnipiac University for wrongfully dismissing him from a graduate program he was enrolled in there.[26] Van de Velde agreed to drop the lawsuit on January 26, 2004, in exchange for $80,000.[27] On December 7, 2001, Van de Velde sued the NHPD in federal court in Connecticut claiming they violated his civil rights by naming only him publicly as a suspect while claiming that other suspects existed as well.[28] Van de Velde added Yale as a defendant on April 15, 2003.[29] U.S. District Judge Robert Chatigny dismissed the federal claims with prejudice and the state law claims without prejudice on March 15, 2004.[30] Van de Velde asked Chatigny to reconsider in May 2006, resulting in the judge reinstating both the state and federal claims on December 11, 2007.[31] References 1. 1801 Murder Most Yale by Suzanna Andrews August 1999, Vanity Fair Seven months after the vicious stabbing of Yale senior Suzanne Jovin in a wealthy neighborhood near campus, the entire university knows that her thesis adviser, 39-year-old former dean James Van de Velde, is a suspect. But the police have made no arrest. Will this become the Ivy League version of the JonBenet Ramsey case? The weather in New Haven, Connecticut, was unusually warm the evening of December 4, 1998. Children played in the streets, and people were out walking their dogs. At Yale University, whose vast campus, with its neo-Gothic architecture, sprawls through the center of the city, students were out in shorts and T-shirts, throwing Frisbees on the college’s lawns. The balmy weather made it a perfect night for undergraduates to celebrate the end of fall-semester classes before reading week and final exams. Parties were being thrown in several of Yale’s residential colleges and in off-campus student apartments. At the David S. Ingalls Rink, situated about a mile north of the turrets and bell towers of the main campus, hundreds of Yale students and faculty were out in force to cheer their hockey team on against Princeton. For nearly three hours—from 7:30 until approximately 10:00—they sat in the bleachers of the Eero Saarinen–designed building, under the soaring roof from which the banners of Yale’s hockey rivals and its 12 residential colleges hang. Screaming themselves hoarse, the spectators watched the Princeton Tigers defeat the Yale Bulldogs, 5–2. Less than a mile north of Ingalls Rink, in the wealthy East Rock neighborhood, with its huge mansions and manicured lawns, people were also out enjoying the warm weather. Several of those later interviewed by the police said they saw nothing unusual. LaJeune Oxley, who lives at the corner of Edgehill and East Rock Roads, says she and her husband spent most of that evening in their kitchen listening to Bach. For some reason she had shut the kitchen door. If she hadn’t, Oxley believes, she would have seen or heard something that might have enabled her to help the police or perhaps even to prevent what happened. As it was, Oxley heard only a loud banging on her front door just after 10 p.m. She walked out of her kitchen and saw immediately, through her sitting-room window, the flashing lights of the police cars and the ambulance across the street. “As soon as I opened the door, a police officer said, ‘There’s a lady down,’” Oxley recalls. Terrified that something had happened to her 28-year-old daughter, Daphne, who had not returned from walking the family dog, Oxley ran across the street, where a young woman wearing jeans and boots lay near the curb. Oxley saw right away that it was not her daughter. The woman was Suzanne Jovin, a 21-year-old senior at Yale, who was horribly injured. About 15 minutes later, at 10:26, Jovin was pronounced dead at Yale–New Haven Hospital. She had been murdered savagely, stabbed 17 times in the back and neck. During the past months, Oxley has gone over and over in her mind the details of what she saw that night and of what she afterward learned. She knows that some of her neighbors heard an argument between a man and a woman around 9:45 and, shortly after that, a scream. She knows from the newspapers that no weapon has been recovered. The mystery of how someone was able to stab Suzanne Jovin 17 times in a well-lit neighborhood where people were out walking their dogs and where at least one party was going on is among the many strange aspects of that night. In the months following the murder, the questions have multiplied and become even more troubling.
It took several hours for the news of Jovin’s murder to filter into the Yale community. The first student to learn that she was dead—Amy Chiou, one of the victim’s freshman-year roommates—was awakened around midnight by a call from the police, who had entered Jovin’s apartment and dialed every number on a list taped near the phone until they reached someone. Most of Jovin’s friends were partying that night; several were at the movies. Her 22-year-old boyfriend, Roman Caudillo, an engineering student, was on his way back to New Haven after spending the evening in New York City. “The police sent a car to get Amy, and they took her to identify Suzanne’s body,” says a friend of Jovin’s. “The police told her Suzanne had ‘expired.’ She had no idea what was going on. She thought Suzanne had gotten into a problem or something. Amy had a friend with her who said, ‘Amy, she’s dead.’” By noon the next day, many had heard the terrible news, and flowers piled up at the gates of Davenport, Suzanne’s residential college. Devastated students sobbed in the courtyard. It seemed like a nightmare happening all over again. In 1991, Christian Prince, a sophomore lacrosse player and fourth-generation Yale man, was shot to death near the president’s house as he was walking home from a party at the Aurelian Society, a secret society akin to the more famous Skull and Bones. Prince’s murder had traumatized the university, which responded by investing more than $2 million in campus security. Over the years, Yale also pumped millions of dollars into the troubled, crime-ridden neighborhoods that surround the spectacular campus. But Christian Prince was the victim of a random killing. Suzanne Jovin, the police believe, was murdered by someone she knew. Jovin was last reported seen around 9:25 near Phelps Gate, the main entrance to Yale on College Street. At 9:58, someone called 911 to report that a woman lay bleeding on the corner of Edgehill and East Rock, nearly two miles away. How had Jovin traveled so far in approximately 30 minutes? The police think that she must have been driven there, and her friends are certain she would never have accepted a ride from a stranger. But whose car had she gotten into? Who could have killed her so brutally and left no clues? And why would anyone have wanted to kill Suzanne Jovin? Brainy, beautiful, and hugely popular, she was considered extraordinary, even among Yale’s overachievers. She spoke four languages, sang in the Bach Society Orchestra, co-founded Yale’s German club, and spent much of her free time doing volunteer work, tutoring inner-city children and running a program for mentally disabled adults. “Suzanne was just an angel,” says Michael Blum, a 1998 Yale graduate who had known Jovin since her freshman year. What no one was prepared for was the shocking news that one of Yale’s own—James Van de Velde, Jovin’s 38-year-old senior-essay adviser—was a suspect in her killing. Van de Velde was a brilliant and well-liked political-science lecturer, who had previously held positions at the Pentagon and the State Department. He was also a 1982 graduate of Yale and a former dean of Yale’s Saybrook College. In the week following the stabbing, Van de Velde vehemently denied any involvement in the crime and twice went in to be questioned by the police without bringing a lawyer. He gave the police permission to search his red Jeep Wrangler and his apartment, which was a half-mile from the crime scene. According to one of his attorneys, Van de Velde also offered to take a blood test and a polygraph—offers, his lawyer says, the police did not act on. As the weeks wore on, Jovin’s murder became more and more mysterious. F.B.I. specialists in profiling the perpetrators of serial murders and unusual, often psychologically based crimes tried to piece together a portrait of the killer. Dr. Henry Lee, Connecticut’s public-safety commissioner and a well-known forensics expert who worked on the Nicole Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey murder investigations, examined the clothes that Jovin was wearing the night she was killed. The New Haven police searched the sewers around the crime scene and enlisted local treasure hunters to comb the neighborhood with metal detectors; hoping to find witnesses, they set up roadblocks and interviewed scores of people—including Yale students and faculty members. In March, at the request of New Haven police chief Melvin Wearing, who acknowledged that the investigators had hit a dead end, Connecticut governor John Rowland offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Jovin’s killer. Still, seven months later no arrest has been made. “This is a profoundly unusual case,” says one observer. “It’s like the JonBenet Ramsey case of New Haven.” In January, police confirmed that Van de Velde was “in a pool of suspects.” Although the police have never said it publicly, today it is a pool in which he seems to be swimming alone. How he could have done it and why, and how he could have covered his tracks so thoroughly, are baffling questions that the police have so far not publicly answered. “It sounds like they have zero evidence, zero, against Jim,” says his attorney Ira Grudberg, who is one of Connecticut’s top criminal lawyers. And yet the police persist. “The situation has been so extraordinarily perplexing,” says Richard Brodhead, the dean of Yale’s undergraduate college. “Someone has been murdered; no one knows who did it months after the fact. Allegations have been put in motion.… There is a confirmation by the police that he is a suspect, but then there is no arrest.” ‘When I think of Suzanne, I mostly remember how much fun she was,” says a woman who was a friend of Jovin’s since their freshman year. “Suzanne laughed a lot.… At Naples [a popular New Haven hangout] she’d go nuts when we got on the dance floor.… We went caroling freshman year and had so much fun, we glommed on to some crazy Christian group, and we ran around singing and somehow ended up drinking schnapps all night.” It is an evening in late April, right before exam week, and three friends of Jovin’s have agreed to meet over dinner at Caffé Adulis, an elegant Eritrean restaurant near the campus, to talk about her. Over elaborate platters of African food, they recall how beautiful Jovin’s singing voice was, how much she loved to go to the theater, how much fun she was to laugh with. “Suzanne was sparkly,” says one friend. “She was so cool,” says another. Tonight Jovin’s friends want to focus on happy memories of her, but they start to cry when one of them brings out pictures of her. The photographs show a beautiful young woman with deep-blue, slightly dreamy eyes and a dazzling smile: Suzanne in an emerald-green dress on the way to “Casino Night” freshman year, Suzanne in Florida sophomore year, and Suzanne at a dinner party just two weeks before she was killed. “She did everything in her own way,” says one friend. “She was different,” says another. Suzanne Nahuela Jovin had not lived in the United States before she arrived at Yale in the fall of 1995. She was born and raised in Göttingen, a beautiful medieval town in the western part of Germany. Her parents, Thomas and Donna Jovin, are American scientists—molecular and cell biologists—who work there at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. The elder of the Jovins’ two daughters, Suzanne grew up living in a 14th-century castle; by the time she was a teenager, she had traveled extensively throughout Europe and spent vacations in Mexico, where her grandparents lived. Suzanne was raised “as [an] American in Germany with all that implies,” her father wrote in one of a series of E-mails to me. She grew up speaking English and German fluently, although German was the language she usually spoke with her sister and closest friend, Rebecca, who is 20. Educated in the rigorous German school system, Suzanne began to study Latin in the fifth grade and French in the seventh. She played the piano and the cello. In high school, at the Theodor-Heuss Gymnasium, she took a double major in biology and chemistry, passing her exams with top marks. In press accounts after her murder, Jovin was described in ways that made her seem very serious, even dull. But she was not that at all. “She was really lively,” says Rebecca Jovin. In high school she sang with several rock bands. “She was full of exciting contradictions,” says her friend David Bach, a Yale graduate who is from Germany. “She was extremely serious academically, but also just a great person to have fun with and hang out with … She was very traditional and stylish and feminine, but then also very rebellious and liberal.” It was always assumed that Jovin would go to college in the United States. Her mother had gotten her Ph.D. from Yale, and Ellen and Diana Jovin, her older half-sisters from her father’s first marriage, with whom she was close, graduated from Harvard. Today, Suzanne’s grief-stricken parents say they deeply regret having encouraged her to go to the university, but Suzanne loved Yale from the moment she arrived. She immediately got involved in volunteer work—something her mother had done when she was at Yale, and had urged her daughter to do. Although she started out intending to major in one of the sciences, she switched to a double major in political science and international studies, friends say, after doing poorly in an advanced course in cell biology. “Suzanne and I both decided to take a graduate-level cell-bio class freshman year,” a friend remembers, laughing. “We were both from Europe and thought we could do it.… Cell bio, that was the only time I saw her not confident.” “I think Suzanne held herself to very high standards partly because her parents were both these brilliant scientists,” says another friend. At the time of her death, Jovin was considering a career in the diplomatic service and was finishing applications to graduate schools in the field—including, her parents say, Tufts, Columbia, and Georgetown. She wasn’t interested in making money. She hadn’t been raised that way, her family says. “She always came down to, you know, helping people and being influential [as] more important,” says Bach. In their early reports of Jovin’s murder, newspapers and television stations used the same photograph of her. It made Jovin appear fragile, a delicate sparrow of a woman. Her friends were taken aback by the picture. “It didn’t look anything like Suzanne really was,” one recalls. To begin with, friends insist that Jovin, who was five feet five inches and weighed 125 pounds, was physically quite strong. She jogged, played squash, skied, and sometimes took step-aerobics classes at Yale’s Payne Whitney gym. Whoever killed her, her friends say, was very strong or, says one, “someone who knew what they were doing.” Nor was Jovin as shy and hesitant as the photograph made her seem. “‘Strong-willed’ isn’t the word,” says a friend. “If you were talking about things Suzanne knew about, she would knock you out if she disagreed.” “She had very strong opinions,” says Rebecca Jovin. “Sometimes she lacked self-confidence, but overall she was the strongest person I ever met.” “She was so not a victim,” says a friend. Jovin, says another friend, “had a very, very strong sense of justice and righteousness.… She could just be furious if she thought somebody she cared about or herself was treated unfairly.… She would make that clear, that she wouldn’t put up with everything.” “We tried to encourage self-confidence in our daughters to the extent of recognizing their worth and capabilities and of exerting their rights while avoiding arrogance. We encouraged them to never feel limited by their sex,” her parents say. “We were very proud of Suzanne and admired her greatly. She suffered no fools and could identify them with ease.… It pains us terribly to imagine that she may have met her fate as a victim of her very positive, but critical, outlook.” On the night she was killed, Jovin spent the early part of the evening at Trinity Lutheran Church, four blocks from the campus, at a pizza-making party she had organized for Best Buddies, an international organization that pairs students with mentally disabled adults. She had worked with the Yale chapter since her freshman year, and ran it by the time she was a senior. She would spend hours on the phone with her “buddy,” Lee, taking him to Yale games with her friends and arranging outings and social events. People later told the police that Jovin seemed tired that evening, but that she appeared to be in a good mood. She left the church sometime before 8:30, after she’d helped clean up, and then used a borrowed university car to drive other volunteers home. She left the car in a parking lot and then walked to her apartment, on the second floor of a two-story, Yale-owned building on Park Street. Sometime between 8:30 and 8:50, a group of friends passed by. “We waved to her and said, ‘We’re going to the movies—do you want to come?’” one of them remembers. “She was at her window and waved back. She couldn’t come—she was planning to work on her senior essay.” At 9:02, she sent an E-mail to a friend, telling her she was leaving some books for her in her apartment lobby. She logged off at 9:10. If she made or received any phone calls from within Yale’s telephone system, they may be untraceable, because the phones function like extensions of Yale’s central-exchange numbers. By 9:15, Jovin had made her way to Old Campus, where she ran into a classmate, Peter Stein, who was out for a walk. She told him she was going to the Yale police communications center at Phelps Gate to turn in the keys to the university car. “She did not mention plans to go anywhere or do anything else afterward,” Stein later told the Yale Daily News. “She just said that she was very, very tired and that she was looking forward to getting a lot of sleep.” “Stein walked off, and when he turned around, Suzanne was gone,” says Blair Golson, who covered the murder for the Yale newspaper. Suzanne was seen again, between 9:25 and 9:30, walking north on College Street. If she was going home, it appeared she was taking a roundabout way. The witness who says she saw her close to 9:30 was a student who had left the Yale-Princeton hockey game early and was walking, alone, to an off-campus party. She passed Jovin, but didn’t think much of it until the next night, when she read about the murder in the Yale newspaper. Nearly hysterical, she called the police at two in the morning. “They told me to write down everything I saw, everything,” she recalls. What she saw was “a Hispanic or black guy in a hooded sweatshirt” going north. Behind him, also walking north, was Jovin, and walking in the same direction several paces behind her was, she says, “a blond man with glasses … a white guy dressed nicely.” Less than a half-hour after this witness saw her, Jovin lay dying 1.7 miles away. According to the police, there was no evidence of a sexual assault. The viciousness of the stabbing suggested that robbery had not been her murderer’s motive. Police believed she was stabbed from behind at the spot where she was found. It appeared she had gotten out of a car, before or after having had an argument with a man. She did not appear to have called for help or to have put up a struggle. “The police said she didn’t scrape her hands. They didn’t think she was running away,” says a woman friend whom detectives questioned. From the outset, it appeared that the police believed that Jovin was murdered by a man, one whose motive was probably jealousy or desire or anger. “Every guy she knew was interviewed by the cops, the cops were all over them,” says the woman friend. “They asked if they’d slept with her.” Her mentoring “buddy” was briefly a suspect, but he was cleared by the police almost immediately, as was Roman Caudillo, her boyfriend since freshman year, who took a leave from Yale after the murder. “Roman really loved Suzanne,” says a friend. “His family adored her. When the murder happened, Roman’s parents were in New York [from Texas] before Suzanne’s family was [able to get here].” In the months since Van de Velde was linked in the press to the killing, his friends—as shocked and disbelieving as Jovin’s—have rallied around him. They have written letters to the local media defending him, they have sat with him when he’s broken down crying from the stress, afraid to go out in public. “You walk down the street and get the feeling everybody’s looking at you and thinks you’re a murderer,” says Ira Grudberg. Van de Velde’s friends say he is the last person they could imagine breaking the law, let alone killing someone. “You know the old TV show Happy Days?” asks Ken Spitzbard, a friend of Van de Velde’s since the second grade. “Jim is Richie Cunningham. Could you conceive of Richie Cunningham doing something violent and horrible?” Van de Velde was president of the student council at Amity Regional High School, in the wealthy New Haven suburb of Woodbridge. He was captain of the soccer team, played on the tennis and baseball teams, and was a member of the National Honor Society. His date to the senior prom was the most beautiful cheerleader at Amity. His pictures in the high-school yearbook are of a stereotypical American golden boy—big, athletic, somewhat shy-looking. The second of James and Lois Van de Velde’s three children, and their only son, Van de Velde grew up in Orange, Connecticut. His mother worked as an administrative assistant at Yale, and his father in the media business, for the local ABC affiliate and also for Showtime. A driven workaholic, he died of lung cancer when his son was in graduate school. The family was staunchly Roman Catholic. “Jim,” says a friend, “really was an altar boy.” Van de Velde majored in political science at Yale. He sang in the university’s well-known Russian chorus his freshman year and twice traveled to Asia on internships. He was a serious student who graduated with honors. After Yale, Van de Velde went to Boston to Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from which, in 1987, he received his Ph.D. in international-security studies. In 1988 he was selected for a prestigious Presidential Management Internship and was assigned to work at the Pentagon and at the State Department, where he stayed for four years, working on U.S.-Soviet disarmament issues. In 1988, Van de Velde also joined the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves, in which he still holds the rank of lieutenant commander, with a “Top Secret” clearance. Trained in intelligence work, he was assigned to Singapore, Brussels, and Panama, where he analyzed the drug trade out of Latin America. In 1993, after Bill Clinton defeated George Bush, Van de Velde, who was a political appointee and a Republican, left the State Department. That fall he was back at Yale as the dean of Saybrook College. Jason Criss, a 1996 graduate, remembers when he first met Van de Velde, the week that all the freshmen were moving in. “I was a sophomore and Jim was the new dean.… The first couple days he looked like he was going yachting: blue blazer, white starched pants, he wore them everywhere. He was very formal and proper.” Like almost all of the former Saybrook students interviewed for this story, Criss remembers Van de Velde “as in some ways … the model dean.” As dean, Van de Velde was supposed to supervise the academic affairs of Saybrook’s 475 students, and by all accounts he took his job very seriously. He ate meals in the dining hall and knew all the students by name. He attended their student-council meetings, gave them dean’s excuses when they were ill, and tried to help them out when they were in trouble. “He actually got involved,” recalls one woman. “We had rats in our room, and he did something about it.” During study breaks, he would invite students to his apartment. “He was a terrific cook,” Criss recalls. “He’d cook us sesame noodles and Asian dumplings.” “He had this aura about him because we’d heard that he worked for the C.I.A.,” another woman recalls. “He said he’d studied handwriting analysis, and he would do it for us in the dining hall,” says another. Michael Ranis, who went to high school and to Yale with Van de Velde, says that his friend really enjoyed being a dean. “He liked the students a lot, the idea of being there for them,” Ranis says. “He was shy and awkward socially, but he really tried. He wanted to do everything right,” says one woman. But some saw Van de Velde as too tightly wound. He was always formal and rarely used contractions in his speech. “He was no-nonsense; he wasn’t really personable,” says another former student. “Freshman year everyone called him Dean Anal. He was by the book, he didn’t make any exceptions.” Van de Velde, who Spitzbard says has never taken illegal drugs and rarely drinks, got the reputation for being extremely strict on the issue of alcohol and drug use at Saybrook. “Dean Van de Velde was the biggest straight arrow at Yale, more straight-arrow than any dean,” says Jason Karlinsky, who graduated in 1997. Students say that by 1995 Van de Velde seemed tired of the job. “I knew he was going to resign two years before he did,” says one woman who was friendly with him when she was at Saybrook. “He never liked being dean. He didn’t know what he really wanted. I think he wanted something in Washington.” As the years went by, he appeared to some students to become more aloof. “He gave the impression of being sort of really inaccessible,” says a woman who graduated from Saybrook this year. “Men had a better rapport with him because he played on some intramural teams. For women it was more difficult; he wasn’t particularly friendly.” After the slaying, the police asked students if Van de Velde had ever had an affair with a student. Whether they liked him or not, all the Saybrook students interviewed for this story say that there was never a hint of anything untoward. “There were no rumors of him having problems with women or relationships with students,” says Criss. Only after she graduated several years ago, says one woman, did Van de Velde even mention women to her. As she told the police when they tracked her down in December after finding her number in his phone records, “He said that it was odd being a young guy as dean, seeing all these freshmen who are so beautiful and that it’s hard not to notice,” the woman recalls. “They wanted to know if I’d had an affair with him,” the woman recalls. “I told them I had not.” Van de Velde took a leave of absence from the dean’s job, early in 1997, to go to Italy on assignment for naval intelligence. He came back that April to complete the semester, and then left Yale to go to Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center as its executive director. In May 1998, nine months into a five-year contract, he resigned and returned to New Haven. Van de Velde, a friend says, had been miserable in California. “There were older professors who came [to work] in shorts. Jim wears suits and ties every day,” she says. “It did not click with anyone. He didn’t have a social life. He wasn’t happy.” Nevertheless, Van de Velde was upset at having to leave. “He’s an overachiever,” says this friend, “and basically he’d been let go.” It was Van de Velde’s “first real setback,” says Ranis. “Most of us go through a lot of them by the time we reach 38; Jim hadn’t.” Van de Velde became depressed, friends say, to the point where he began seeing a therapist and was briefly put on an antidepressant. During the summer he got back in touch with a woman he had dated before he went to California. Exactly what went wrong is not clear, but the results were disastrous. It appears that at some point during the fall of last year the woman, a local television reporter, went to the police and complained that she was being harassed by Van de Velde. “Supposedly she claimed that he was looking in her window, that he was stalking her somehow,” says Ira Grudberg. The police have not confirmed the existence of this complaint, but after Jovin was killed the local press reported that apparently two women who worked for local television stations had spoken to the police about their relationships with Van de Velde. The other woman is believed to be a friend of the first. He sent the second woman flowers anonymously. She learned his identity from the florist and later discovered that he was involved with her friend. “We have asked both the police and through the state’s attorney’s office, ‘If there is a complaint, give us the date,’” says Grudberg. “Maybe he was out of the state. We don’t know. One of the cops claims that he spoke with Jim and told him to keep away, but Jim says that never happened.… Jim was never arrested. He was never questioned.” Van de Velde “flat out denies” that he stalked his former girlfriend, says Grudberg, but the attorney also believes that whatever this woman told the police has become a central element in their suspicions about Van de Velde. “I think they are convinced that he is a weird guy,” he says. “I think she understandably got upset,” says a friend of Van de Velde’s, who believes he really cared about this woman. “He would phone her, run into her on the street. He wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer.” (David Grudberg, Ira’s son and law partner, who went to high school and college with Van de Velde, objects to this account. Van de Velde, he says, only ran into this woman, and phoned her once. Grudberg denies that Van de Velde was pursuing her.) “The thing with Jim is this circumstantial evidence coinciding with his personal life,” says the friend. “Here he is, not letting go of a woman, and then people wonder: Was it the same with Suzanne?” Jovin was accepted into Van de Velde’s seminar Strategy and Policy in the Conduct of War, in September 1998. She was among the 169 students who had applied for the 40 places in that course and Van de Velde’s other seminar, The Art of Diplomacy. During his time as dean of Saybrook, Van de Velde had also taught in the political-science department, and he developed a reputation as one of the best lecturers at Yale. His teaching style was riveting and creative. To demonstrate how force changes the balance of power in international relations, he once pulled out a fake handgun in the middle of a class simulated negotiation. He organized “diplomatic receptions” for his students and gave each of them the assignment of answering a question about someone else in their class without letting that person realize that he or she was being pumped for information. He took them on field trips, including one to a nearby naval base to tour a nuclear submarine, and, says one student, “we got to touch a cruise missile.” Jovin, friends say, began the semester like many students, enthralled with Van de Velde. Indeed, she was impressed enough that she decided to do her senior essay with him as her adviser—actually, she had taken the unusual step of writing two senior essays, the other in international studies. She chose a subject in Van de Velde’s area of expertise: the international terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have masterminded the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Van de Velde appeared equally taken with Jovin. “I think he liked Suzanne’s enthusiasm. It was flattering that a student would be so deeply involved in his topic,” says a student who was in the class. At some point in the semester, however, Jovin’s enthusiasm seemed to falter. She didn’t go on either of the two field trips. “She thought they were a waste of her time,” says a friend of hers. She also had reservations about a project on terrorism. The project, which was optional but which the class had voted to pursue, involved using the Internet to show how easy it would be for a terrorist to get information to create a weapon of mass destruction. “We decided to plan to use chemicals in a plane that we’d fly over the Super Bowl in Miami,” says one student. “We figured everything out except how much water to put in the chemical to make it fall from the plane—no one would give us the proportions for that.” According to Jovin’s parents, the chemical in question was the warfare agent sarin. “Suzanne expressed to a fellow student that we, her parents, might have that information,” the Jovins say, “but that we would be opposed to the project on moral and ethical grounds and that she therefore would not proceed further.” Faced with students’ objections, Van de Velde stopped the project. He does not recall any complaints from Jovin. The initial speculation by the police was that Van de Velde and Jovin were having an affair that went horribly wrong. Although they pursued that theory aggressively in the first weeks after the murder, they seem to have found no evidence of a romantic relationship. Jovin was happy with Roman Caudillo, her friends and parents say, insisting that she never so much as hinted to anyone that she was involved with Van de Velde. For his part, Van de Velde seemed to be in search of a relationship, not in the throes of one. “He really wanted to meet someone,” says a friend. If the police found no evidence of a romance, they did, however, learn something else. By November, it appears, the professional relationship between Van de Velde and Jovin had broken down almost completely. Although Van de Velde had written her a glowing recommendation for graduate school in late October, Jovin began to feel that he had no time for her. According to a friend of Jovin’s, she had tried repeatedly to meet with Van de Velde about her senior essay and had felt that she was rebuffed. In the weeks before she died, says this friend, “she complained bitterly about a bunch of things in that class, and especially his lack of support for her project. He had shown no interest in her work.” For a college-thesis adviser basically to check out on a student trying to get feedback on her senior essay would be unusual in any case. But for Van de Velde—a devoted teacher noted for his availability, who would take his students to lunch to help them with their work, and who answered their E-mails within minutes—it would have been downright bizarre. During November, it appears that Jovin was trying to pin down a time to meet with Van de Velde. “They never did get together [then],” says Ira Grudberg. “They couldn’t get the dates right and so forth.” According to David Grudberg, Van de Velde was unaware that Jovin was concerned. “He invited all his students to meet with him, especially those writing senior essays under his direction,” he says. “If she had complaints about the way he was advising her on her thesis, she never expressed them to him.” By Thanksgiving, Jovin had become upset; her essay was due on December 8. “Suzanne indicated to us during the Thanksgiving break—we were together in California—how deeply she resented the lack of mentoring by this senior thesis advisor,” her parents recall. Although Van de Velde denies having received it, Jovin’s parents say she had handed in a draft on November 17. She left a second draft with Van de Velde right before the Thanksgiving holiday. Jovin told friends that Van de Velde canceled a meeting on Monday, November 30, because he hadn’t read the paper yet, although he says no meeting was scheduled. At a meeting the next day, December 1, he still hadn’t read it. “He’d gotten tied up over Thanksgiving and hadn’t done it,” says Ira Grudberg. “He was very apologetic, and he could see she was upset. That very day and night he made a lengthy review of it and met again with her on December 2, at which time he discussed it with her. She was much, much happier.” According to her parents and a close friend, however, Jovin was far from happy after that meeting. “The last time I talked to Suzanne was … on that evening, very late in the evening,” the friend says. “She was still furious … and she was very insecure about what would happen.” Jovin was concerned, her parents say, that the second reader of her essay would not be happy with it. Her parents say she spoke to a member of the Yale administration about the problem “in a highly emotional, tearful session,” but did not make a formal complaint. “She thought she could handle the situation,” her parents say. “I tried to calm her down on Wednesday evening,” says the same friend. “She was still upset.… Furious is how she was. That’s the way to describe how she was in those last couple of days with him.” Sometime on the afternoon of December 4—Van de Velde believes it was either between 4 and 4:30, or around 1—Jovin stopped by Van de Velde’s office on Prospect Street to drop off a new draft. She attached a cordial, handwritten note outlining her changes and thanking him. “Feel free to e-mail me over the weekend if you have questions or run into any major problems,” she wrote, and signed it “Suzanne.” Van de Velde spent most of the evening of Friday, December 4, at his office, Ira Grudberg says. A friend, who stopped by around six p.m. to ask him to go to a movie, says he was planning to work all evening. According to Grudberg, Van de Velde went over Jovin’s revisions that evening and was going to give her his comments the following morning. He took a short break at one point and walked up the street to Ingalls Rink, to watch part of the hockey game, then returned to his office, and then went home, which is where he was, alone, says Grudberg, at the time of the killing. Grudberg says that he and his son David have spent the past seven months trying to understand why the police consider Van de Velde their chief suspect. As much as they have been able to, they have followed the police’s tracks, swooping in behind them to interview people who were questioned, hoping to get some insight into what the police believe to be the case against their client. “There was a witness who saw a car hightailing out from that area who spoke with the police,” says Ira Grudberg. “He described it as a small red car, and [the police] asked him 14 times if it was a big, red Wrangler.… And they showed him pictures of Jim, and he said that’s absolutely not who was driving the car.” Grudberg says he’s stumped. “Among other things, talking about a motive. Word got back to us supposedly from some people that [talked to the police] that Suzanne was going to make a complaint about the way he was handling her paper and therefore he killed her,” says Grudberg. “It’s just kind of strange. If, for some reason, she climbs in a car with him downtown, why drive a half-mile past his house and kill her on a corner? It doesn’t make sense.” The police, says Ira Grudberg, first questioned Van de Velde on the Monday after the slaying. The session was brief, he says, and there was no suggestion that Van de Velde was a suspect. For some reason, however, by the next night the police appeared to have become persuaded that Van de Velde was guilty. They interrogated him for four hours, “accusing him of the murder,” says Grudberg. Choosing not to call a lawyer, Van de Velde offered them the keys to his car—which they searched—and his apartment, and also offered to let them do blood and polygraph tests on him. Grudberg says that the police did not perform these tests, and although the police had told the New Haven Register that they had searched the apartment, Grudberg says they did not. The next day, Van de Velde showed up in the Grudbergs’ office. He did not speak to the police again. “I think that everything Jim did that weekend,” says Michael Ranis, “the police think is suspicious—that he put himself out there, that he was exposed.” Whatever he may have felt about Jovin before her death, Van de Velde seemed stricken by it. He showed up at Davenport College on Saturday, December 5, when Yale’s president, its dean, the chaplains, the psychiatrist, and the chief of its police force met with Jovin’s college-mates to discuss the killing. That weekend he also appeared on the local television news being interviewed about what an extraordinary person Jovin had been. On Monday morning he showed up in class with “red and puffy eyes,” one student remembers, and placed a bouquet of three dozen white carnations at Jovin’s seat. That day, Van de Velde spoke to the New Haven Register, in which he said again how wonderful Jovin was. Ranis says that Van de Velde went on television only because the station called him. He had been working on a master’s degree in broadcast journalism at nearby Quinnipiac College and had had an internship at the station. “Where I come out on this is: How can being straight make you a suspect?” Ranis says. “The police probably aren’t used to having someone sit there for four hours answering questions without a lawyer. That is unusual. But that’s how Jim is. He’s so honest.” On the morning of December 9, the New Haven Register ran a banner headline: “Yale Teacher Grilled in Killing.” The story did not name Van de Velde, but its details were so specific that many people knew it was about him. On his way to the dentist that morning, Van de Velde was waylaid by local television reporters. “They put a microphone in front of him on the street and said, basically, ‘Did you see the Register this morning? They did everything but name you.’ And Jim said it sure seemed that way, but ‘I’m innocent,’” Ranis says. The fallout from that interview was damaging for Van de Velde. Many people who saw the news that night say it made him look guilty. He seemed tired and looked down at the ground when he spoke. His words—“I never hurt her”—struck people as odd. There was, and still is, much discussion of whether the press at that moment, without breaking any rules, nevertheless went too far, crossing the line of fairness. But what the police do know is that one person who watched the news that night phoned them, stunned at what she saw. The woman who had seen Jovin walking on College Street at around 9:25 on the night of the stabbing saw Van de Velde on television and started shaking. “I got chills,” she says. “I didn’t know Van de Velde. I go home and turn on the news and I see him. This guy, talking to reporters, he was blond, with glasses. I could not believe what I saw. I went back to my notes and saw the description I wrote, that I saw a blond man with glasses.” The man she claims she saw walking behind Jovin near Phelps Gate the night of the murder so closely resembled Van de Velde’s image on television that she believes it was he. If this is a crucial element of the police case against Van de Velde—a tentative identification that could be highly biased by the television-news context in which it was made—it is obviously not enough for an arrest. In response to the claims of this witness, David Grudberg says flatly, “It was not Jim.” ‘I miss everything about Suzanne,” says Rebecca Jovin, who was in the middle of her freshman year at college when her sister was killed. “When she left for college … I cried for weeks on end. I feel the same way now, but now I know the separation is permanent,” she says. “I often think about the way in which Suzanne died and the questions that will never be answered, and that really traumatizes me. I cannot deal with that at all, I just have to let it pass when it comes to my mind.” Suzanne Jovin’s family has said little publicly about the investigation into her death. Indeed, her parents spoke to Vanity Fair with deep reluctance and then only to clarify aspects of their daughter’s life that they thought were important to understand. “For us, there remains a void in our life that can never be filled,” Thomas and Donna Jovin say. The Jovins have not mentioned Van de Velde’s name in public, but an anguished letter from Donna Jovin that was published in Connecticut newspapers on April 14 seemed to many to be directed at Van de Velde’s mother. “I personally appeal in this open letter to the mother of [Suzanne’s] killer, assuming that she resides in the greater New Haven area,” she wrote. “As a moral and rational human being you will not be able to live with yourself if you withhold knowledge or suspicion of your son’s complicity. Come forward to the police, talk to them. Demand that your son tell the truth.” Lois Van de Velde, says a friend, saw the letter, but “she didn’t read the whole thing. She is trying to keep on with her life. This has been awful for her.” Ever since Yale canceled Van de Velde’s courses for the spring term last January—claiming that it would be a distraction to students to have a murder suspect in the classroom—he has had little to do other than focus on the horror of being the chief suspect in a savage killing he insists he didn’t commit. His friends, who believe he is innocent, say that Van de Velde is beyond desperate. “At this point, Jim has got to be formally absolved, or else his life will forever be under this cloud,” say Ken Spitzbard. Says James Thomas, dean of admissions at Yale Law School, “This guy has been ruined. Suppose it turns out some vagabond did it? Jim can never get back what he lost.” “To get a search warrant or an arrest warrant an officer must present relevant facts under oath before a judge. That has not been done,” says David Grudberg. “To brand someone ‘a suspect’ all you have to do is pick up the phone and call the local newspaper. There is something very wrong with that when the potential consequence is the destruction of someone’s life.” “I know how hard you have worked on the story about Suzanne. You have no idea how much I wish I could speak with you,” Van de Velde wrote me in an E-mail in late May. “My best wishes for your success. We very much hope that your story will advance the investigation and ultimately help bring peace to Suzanne’s parents, the Yale community, my family and all those horrified at Suzanne’s tragic death.” By graduation day, May 24, the police posters of Jovin that had been tacked to the trees of Old Campus had long since been torn by the wind or ripped down. All of the pride and pomp and glory of Yale’s 298-year history was on display that day as the 1,361 members of Jovin’s class paraded in their black caps and gowns across the New Haven Green through Phelps Gate and into Old Campus. Looking exhausted and somewhat hung over, they stopped and posed for their proud parents, who were standing with cameras on the sidelines. As degrees were conferred, a loud roar filled the Old Campus courtyard as Jovin’s classmates rose from their seats and cheered. Suzanne Jovin was on many people’s minds that day. In the smaller ceremony at Davenport after the main commencement, Yale conferred a degree on Jovin. She graduated cum laude with distinction in both her majors. Her classmates had placed a slab of black stone as a memorial to her in Davenport’s smaller courtyard. Nestled in a flower bed under a linden and a dogwood, it reads: Suzanne N. Jovin The candle that students had placed on the stone had been extinguished by the rain that poured down on graduation day, a torrent that also drenched the bouquets of flowers and a lone rose. Still, says a friend, “it was as though Suzanne was there.” In the months since the murder, says one woman who graduated that day, “a lot of us would wake up in the morning saying, Today maybe we’ll find out that so-and-so killed Suzanne. And then we realized that we might not know before we leave Yale. Now we might never know.” Suzanna Andrews is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. David Kelly (weapons expert) by Wikipedia David Christopher Kelly, CMG (14 May 1944 – 17 July 2003) was a British scientist and expert on biological warfare, employed by the British Ministry of Defence, and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003 when an unauthorised discussion he had off the record with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan—about the British government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—was cited by the journalist and led to a major controversy. Kelly's name became known to the media as Gilligan's source, and he was called to appear on 15 July before the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee, which was investigating the issues Gilligan had reported. Kelly was questioned aggressively about his actions. He was found dead two days later.[2] Tony Blair's government set up the Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death. This determined that Kelly had committed suicide, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem examination giving the cause of death as "haemorrhage due to incised wounds of the left wrist" in combination with "coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis". Lord Hutton also decided that evidence related to the death, including the post-mortem report and photographs of the body, should remain classified for 70 years.[3] In October 2010, Hutton explained that he had done so to protect the wife and daughters of Kelly from the distress of further media reports about the death. "My request was not a concealment of evidence because every matter of relevance had been examined or was available for examination during the public inquiry. There was no secrecy surrounding the postmortem report because it had always been available for examination and questioning by counsel representing the interested parties during the inquiry."[4] In 2009 a group of British doctors who had not had access to the evidence—including Michael Powers, a physician, barrister, and former coroner challenged Hutton's verdict, offering their opinion based on published reports that the cause of death was untenable; they argued that the artery is small and difficult to access, and severing it would not have triggered sufficient blood loss to cause death.[3] This opinion was challenged by several forensic pathologists, who told The Guardian that the combination of Kelly's heart disease and the overdose would have meant a smaller loss of blood could have killed him than would be needed to kill a healthier person.[1] In August 2010 the former leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, called for a full inquest,[1] and Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General for England and Wales, confirmed that he was considering re-opening it.[5] In October 2010, the postmortem—including the pathologist's 14-page report and the six-page toxicology report—was made public, confirming the conclusion of the Hutton report.[4] Powers continues to maintain that questions remain about the amount of blood found at the scene and the number of pills taken. Biography Kelly was born in Rhondda, Wales. He graduated from the University of Leeds with a BSc, and subsequently obtained an MSc at the University of Birmingham. In 1971, he received his doctorate in microbiology from Linacre College, Oxford. In 1984, he joined the civil service, working at what is now Dstl Porton Down, as head of the Defence Microbiology Division. He moved from there to work as an ad hoc advisor to the MoD and the Foreign Office. In 1989, Kelly was involved in investigations into the Soviet violations of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and was a key member of the inspection team visiting the former USSR on several occasions between 1991 and 1994. His experience with biological weapons at Porton Down led to his selection as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq following the end of the Gulf War. Kelly's work as a member of the UNSCOM team led him to visit Iraq thirty-seven times and his success in uncovering Iraq's biological weapons programme led to Rolf Ekéus nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.[6] He was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1996. Although he was never a member of the intelligence services, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) regularly sought out his opinion on Iraq and other issues. David Kelly became a member of the Bahá'í Faith around 1999. He was introduced to this faith by Mai Pederson, a US military linguist and intelligence operative.[7][8] WMD dossier Kelly's career specialisation led to confusion about his actual job, as he was frequently seconded to other departments. His job description included liaising with the media and he regularly acted as a confidential source, although rarely going on the record or appearing on-camera. In 2002, he was working for the Defence Intelligence Staff at the time of the compilation of a dossier by the Joint Intelligence Committee on the weapons of mass destruction possessed by Iraq. The government had commissioned the dossier as an element of the preparation for what later became the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although he was not responsible for writing any part of the dossier, Kelly's experience of weapons inspections led to him being asked to proofread sections of the draft dossier on the history of inspections. Kelly was unhappy with some of the claims in the draft, particularly a claim, originating from August 2002, that Iraq was capable of firing battlefield biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them (known as "the 45-minute claim"). Kelly's colleagues queried the inclusion of the claim but their superiors were satisfied when they took it up with MI6 through the Joint Intelligence Committee. Kelly believed it was most likely that Iraq had retained some biological weapons after the end of inspections.[9] After the end of the ground war, he was invited to join the inspection team attempting to find any trace of weapons of mass destruction programmes, and was apparently enthusiastic about resuming his work there. He made two attempted trips to Iraq. The first was on 19 May 2003, when he was prevented from entering Iraq from Kuwait because he did not have the proper documentation. The second trip was from 5 June 2003 to 11 June 2003, when Kelly went to view and photograph two alleged mobile weapons laboratories as a part of a third inspection team. Kelly was unhappy with the description of the trailers and spoke off the record to The Observer, which, on 15 June 2003, quoted "a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq." The expert said:
It was confirmed in the Hutton Inquiry that Kelly was the source of this quote.[11] Contact with Andrew Gilligan On 22 May 2003, at the Charing Cross Hotel in London, Kelly met Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist who had spent some time writing about the war in Baghdad. Kelly was anxious to learn what had happened in Iraq, while Gilligan, who had discussed a very early draft of the dossier with Kelly, wished to ask him about it in light of the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. They agreed to talk on an unattributable basis, which allowed the BBC to report what was said, but not to identify the source. Kelly told Gilligan of his concerns over the 45-minute claim and allegedly ascribed its inclusion in the dossier to Alastair Campbell, the director of communications for Prime Minister Tony Blair. Gilligan broadcast his report on 29 May 2003 on the Today programme, in which he said that the 45-minute claim had been placed in the dossier by the government, even though it knew the claim was dubious. In a subsequent article in The Mail on Sunday newspaper, Gilligan directly identified Alastair Campbell as the person responsible. The story caused a political storm, with the government denying any involvement in the intelligence content of the dossier. The government pressed the BBC to reveal the name of the source because it knew that any source who was not a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee would not have known who had a role in the preparation of the dossier. As the political fight ensued, Kelly knew he had talked to the journalist involved but felt that he had not said exactly what was reported. He also told his friend and work colleague Olivia Bosch that his meeting with Andrew Gilligan had been "unauthorised" and therefore outside his terms of employment. On 30 June 2003, he wrote to his line manager at the Ministry of Defence to report his contact with Gilligan, though he added "I am convinced that I am not his primary source of information." Kelly was interviewed twice by his employers, who concluded that they could not be sure he was Gilligan's only source. Eventually they took the decision to publicly acknowledge the fact that an employee had come forward who might be the source. The announcement contained sufficient clues for alert journalists to guess Kelly's identity and the Ministry of Defence confirmed the name when it was put to them. This was not an everyday procedure (it usually refuses to comment on such matters), and it was alleged by some critics of the government that the Ministry of Defence was implementing a government decision to reveal Kelly's name as part of a strategy to discredit Gilligan. Andrew Rawnsley has claimed that Blair on 8 July sanctioned a strategy designed to reveal Kelly's identity;[12] Lord Hutton found that the decision was only to confirm that a civil servant had come forward, without giving a name, because there was uncertainty that Kelly was in fact Gilligan's source.[13] Kelly was extremely disturbed that the media had identified his role in the matter and arranged with a family friend to leave his home and visit Cornwall with his wife. He was asked to appear as a witness before two committees of the House of Commons that were investigating the situation in Iraq, and was further upset by the news that one of the appearances would be in public. He had been given a formal warning by the Ministry of Defence for an unauthorised meeting with a journalist, and had been made to understand that they might take more action if it turned out he had been lying to them. Appearance before House of Commons committees When he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 15 July 2003,[14] Kelly appeared to be under severe stress, which was probably increased by the televising of the proceedings. He spoke with a voice so soft that the air-conditioning equipment had to be turned off, even though it was one of the hottest days of the year.[15] His evidence to the committee was that he had not said the things Gilligan had reported his source as saying, and members of the committee came to the conclusion that he had not been the source.[16] Some of the questioning was very precise. The Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay, in particular, used a forceful tone in his cross-examination. For example, when asked to simply list the journalists that he met, Kelly declined to answer and requested that such a list be sought from the MoD, which triggered a response: "...This is the high court of Parliament and I want you to tell the Committee who you met... You are under an obligation to reply".[17] The Chairman of the Committee (Donald Anderson) underscored the validity of MacKinlay's question telling Kelly: "It is a proper question... If you have met journalists there is nothing sinister in itself about meeting journalists, save in an unauthorised way."[17] Mackinlay offered his opinion that Kelly had been used by Gilligan telling Kelly: "I reckon you are chaff; you have been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall-guy? You have been set up, have you not?"[18] Kelly was deeply upset by his treatment before the Committee and privately described MacKinlay as an 'utter bastard.'[19] During the hearing, he was closely questioned about several quotes given to Susan Watts, another BBC journalist working on Newsnight, who had reported a similar story. It later emerged that Gilligan had himself told members of the committee that Watts' source was also Kelly. Kelly denied any knowledge of the quotes, and must have realised that he would have serious problems if the Ministry of Defence believed he had been the source of them. On the following day, (16 July 2003), Kelly gave evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee. He told them that he liaised with Operation Rockingham within the Defence Intelligence Staff. Death On the morning of 17 July 2003, Kelly was working as usual at home in Oxfordshire. Media coverage of his public appearance two days before had led many of his friends to send him supportive e-mails, to which he was responding. One of the e-mails he sent that day was to New York Times journalist Judith Miller,[20] who had used Kelly as a source in a book on bioterrorism, and to whom Kelly had mentioned "many dark actors playing games."[21][22] He also received an e-mail from his superiors at the Ministry of Defence asking for more details of his contacts with journalists. At about 15:00, Kelly told his wife that he was going for a walk, as he did every day. He appears to have gone directly to an area of woodlands known as Harrowdown Hill about a mile away from his home, where he ingested up to 29 tablets of painkillers, co-proxamol, an analgesic drug and to have then cut his left wrist with a knife he had owned since his youth.[23] His wife reported him missing shortly after midnight that night, and he was found early the next morning.[24] Questioned on a flight to Hong Kong that day, Blair denied that anyone had been authorised to leak Kelly's identity.[25] Hutton Inquiry The government immediately announced that Lord Hutton would lead the judicial Hutton Inquiry into the events leading up to the death. The BBC shortly afterwards confirmed that Kelly had indeed been the single source for Andrew Gilligan's report. The inquiry took priority over an inquest, which would normally be required into a suspicious death.[26] The Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, considered the issue again in March 2004. After reviewing evidence not presented to the Hutton Inquiry, Gardiner decided there was no need for further investigation. This conclusion did not satisfy those who had raised doubts, but there has been no alternative official explanation for Kelly's death. The Hutton Inquiry reported on 28 January 2004 that Kelly had committed suicide. Lord Hutton wrote:
Hutton concluded that the Ministry of Defence was obliged to make Kelly's identity known once he came forward as a potential source, and had not acted in a duplicitous manner. Hutton criticised the MoD for not having alerted Kelly to the fact that his name had become known to the press. During the inquiry, a British ambassador called David Broucher reported a conversation with Kelly at a Geneva meeting in February 2003. Broucher related that Kelly said he had assured his Iraqi sources that there would be no war if they co-operated, and that a war would put him in an "ambiguous" moral position.[11] Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, "I will probably be found dead in the woods." Broucher then quoted from an email he had sent just after Kelly's death: "I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines." According to an entry in one of Kelly’s diaries, discovered afterwards by his daughter Rachel at his home, this meeting did not take place in February 2003, but in February 2002. According to Kelly’s half-sister, Sarah Pape, the day after his daughter Ellen’s wedding on Saturday 22 February 2003, he flew out to New York. Pape told the inquiry, "he certainly did not mention he was going to be flying almost straight back to visit Geneva."[27] Fatality of ulnar artery cuts Although suicide was officially accepted as the cause of death, some medical experts have raised doubts, suggesting that the evidence does not back this up. The most detailed objection was provided in a letter from three medical doctors published in The Guardian,[28] reinforced by support from two other senior physicians in a later letter to the newspaper.[29] These doctors argued that the autopsy finding of a transected ulnar artery could not have caused a degree of blood loss that would kill someone, particularly when outside in the cold (where vasoconstriction would cause slow blood loss). Further, this conflicted with the minimal amount of blood found at the scene. They also contended that the amount of co-proxamol found was only about a third of what would normally be fatal. Dr Rouse, a British epidemiologist wrote to the British Medical Journal offering his opinion that the act of committing suicide by severing wrist arteries is an extremely rare occurrence in a 59-year-old man with no previous psychiatric history.[30] Nobody else died from that cause during the year. In December 2010 The Times reported that Dr Kelly had a rare abnormality in the arteries supplying his heart; the information had been disclosed by the head of the Academic Unit of Pathology at Sheffield University Medical School, Professor Paul Ince. Ince noted that the postmortem had found severe narrowing of the blood vessels, and said that heart disease was likely to have been a factor in Dr Kelly's death as the cut to the wrist artery would not itself have been fatal. Vice-President of the British Cardiovascular Society Ian Simpson said that Kelly's artery anomaly could have contributed to the scientist's death.[31] Dave Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt, the two paramedics who were called to the scene of Kelly's death, have since gone public with their opinion that there was not enough blood at the location to justify the belief that he had died from blood loss. Bartlett and Hunt told The Guardian that they had seen a small amount of blood on plants near Kelly's body and a patch of blood the size of a coin on his trousers. They said they would expect to find several pints of blood at the scene of a suicide involving an arterial cut.[32][33] Two forensic pathologists, Chris Milroy of Sheffield University and Guy Rutty of Leicester University, dismissed the paramedics' claims, saying it is hard to judge blood loss from the scene of a death, as some blood may have seeped into the ground. Milroy also told The Guardian that Kelly's heart condition may have made it hard for him to sustain any significant degree of blood loss.[34] On 15 October 2007, it was discovered, through a Freedom of Information request, that the knife had no fingerprints on it.[35] Doubts about the suicide verdict, and alternate theories for Kelly's death The BBC broadcast a programme on Kelly on 25 February 2007 as part of the series The Conspiracy Files;[36] the network commissioned an opinion poll to establish the views of the public on his death. 22.7% of those surveyed thought Kelly had not killed himself, 38.8% of people believed he had, and 38.5% said they did not know.[37] On 19 May 2006 Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, who had previously investigated the Hinduja affair, which led to the resignation of government minister Peter Mandelson, announced that he had been investigating "unanswered questions" from the official inquiry into Kelly's death.[38] He later announced that he had uncovered evidence to show that Kelly did not die from natural causes.[39] In July 2006, Baker claimed that his hard drive had been wiped remotely.[40] Baker's book The Strange Death of David Kelly was serialised in the Daily Mail before publication in November 2007. Family members of Kelly expressed their displeasure at the forthcoming publication, the husband of Kelly's sister Sarah saying, "It is just raking over old bones ... I can't speak for the whole family, but I've read it all [Baker's theories], every word, and I don't believe it."[41] In his book Baker argued that Kelly did not commit suicide and examined the many unanswered questions he says surround the incident.[42] On 5 December 2009 six doctors began legal action to demand a formal inquest into the death,[43] saying there was "insufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt he killed himself." In January 2010, it was disclosed that Lord Hutton had requested that all files relating to his postmortem remain secret for 70 years.[44] In the summer of 2010, Attorney General Dominic Grieve was said to consider an inquiry to review the suicide finding.[45] and Justice Secretary Ken Clarke considered a request from campaigning doctors to release medical files relating to Kelly's death.[46] In June 2010, The
Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday said they had found
evidence of an alleged cover-up to hide a murder plot by
persons unknown, for reasons unknown.[47] Richard
Spertzel, a UN weapons inspector, said Kelly was on a "hitlist"
in the final years of his life. The former head of the
UN Biological Section, who worked closely with Kelly in
Iraq in the 1990s, wrote to Attorney General Grieve
about "mysterious circumstances" surrounding Kelly's
death.[48] In July 2010 a former KGB agent Boris
Karpichkov said he was told Kelly had been
"exterminated" and his death made to look like
suicide.[49] Confirmation of Hutton's finding of suicide In October 2010, the postmortem that Hutton had requested to be sealed for 70 years to protect the Kelly family was made public by the new government. The report confirmed all the findings in the Hutton Report and undermined the other theories about Kelly's death that had been advanced in previous years. The original postmortem report by Dr Nicholas Hunt matched those in Hutton's original report. Hunt's report stated: "It is my opinion that the main factor involved in bringing about the death of David Kelly is the bleeding from the incised wounds to his left wrist. Had this not occurred he may well not have died at this time. Furthermore, on the balance of probabilities, it is likely that the ingestion of an excess number of co-proxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would both have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than would have otherwise been the case. Therefore I give as the cause of death: 1a. Haemorrhage; 1b. Incised wounds to the left wrist; 2. Co-proxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis."[4][54][55] Among prominent doctors who had raised doubts based just on published reports of the death, one physician, Dr Michael Powers QC, has not accepted the published postmortem and toxicology report and is continuing to maintain that questions remain about the amount of blood found at the scene and the number of pills taken. Notes 1. Dodd, Vikram,
and Sample, Ian. "David Kelly: forensic experts say
Hutton inquiry scientifically sound", The Guardian, 16
August 2010. More on Kelly... True or False? American Free Press, 8-10-3
A Career In Microbiology Can Be Harmful
To Your Health © 2002, From the Wilderness Publications [ED. NOTE: As FTW has begun to investigate serious discussions by legitimate scientists and academics on the possible necessity of reducing the world's population by more than four billion people, no stranger set of circumstances since Sept. 11 adds credibility to this possibility than the suspicious deaths of what may be as many as 14 world-class microbiologists. Following on the heels of our two-part series on the coming world oil crisis, this story by Michael Davidson, a graduate of the Syracuse University School of Journalism, is one which takes on a unique significance. In our original story we incorrectly reported the original date of disappearance of Don Wiley and two other microbiologists. These errors have been corrected and we have updated the story to include new deaths that have occurred since we published an earlier version on Feb. 14. The newest connections to DynCorp, Hadron and PROMIS software are leads an amateur would not miss. How else would any microbiologists threatening an ultra secret government biological weapons program be identified than by secretly scanning their databases to see what they were working on? -- MCR] In the six weeks prior to Nov. 12, two additional foreign microbiologists were reported dead. Some believe there were as many as five more microbiologists killed during the period, bringing the total as high as 14. These two to seven additional deaths, however, are not the focus of this story. This same period also saw the deaths of three persons involved in medical research or public health.
OOPS! According to several press reports, including a Dec. 5 article by Barry Chamish and one on Jan. 13 by Jim Rarey (both available at www.rense.com), the plane is believed by many in Israel to have had as many as five passengers who were microbiologists. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, and home to over 50 research facilities and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people. At the time of the Black Sea crash, Israeli journalists had been sounding the alarm that two Israeli microbiologists had been recently murdered, allegedly by terrorists. On Nov. 24 a Crossair flight from Berlin to Zurich crashed on its landing approach. Of the 33 persons on board, 24 were killed, including the head of the hematology department at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, as well as directors of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and Hebrew University School of Medicine. They were the only Israelis on the flight. The names of those killed, as reported in a subsequent Israeli news story but not matched to their job titles, were Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor and Yaacov Matzner. Besides all being microbiologists, six of the seven scientists who died within weeks of each other died from "unnatural" causes. And four of the seven were doing virtually identical research -- research that has global, political and financial significance. QUE PASA? The public relations office at the University of Miami Medical School said only that Benito Que was a cell biologist, involved in oncology research in the hematology department. This research relies heavily on DNA sequencing studies. The circumstances of his death raise more questions than they answer. Que had left his job at a research laboratory at the University of Miami Medical School, apparently heading for his Ford Explorer parked on NW 10th Avenue. The Miami Herald, referring to the death as an "incident," reported he had no wallet on him, and quoted Miami police as saying his death may have been the result of a mugging. Police made this statement while at the same time saying there was a lack of visible trauma to Que's body. There is firm belief among Que's friends and family that the PhD was attacked by four men, at least one of whom had a baseball bat. Que's death has now been officially ruled "natural," caused by cardiac arrest. Both the Dade County medical examiner and the Miami Police would not comment on the case, saying only that it is closed. A MEMPHIS MYSTERY Don C. Wiley of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent microbiologists in the world. He had won many of the field's most prestigious awards, including the 1995 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work that could make anti-viral vaccines a reality. He was heavily involved in research on DNA sequencing. Wiley was last seen around midnight on Nov. 15, leaving the St. Jude's Children's Research Advisory dinner held at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. Associates attending the dinner said he showed no signs of intoxication, and no one has admitted to drinking with him. His rented Mitsubishi Galant was found about four hours later, abandoned on a bridge across the Mississippi River, headed towards Arkansas. Keys were in the ignition, the gas tank full, and the hazard flashers had not been turned on. Wiley's body was found on Dec. 20, snagged on a tree along the Mississippi River in Vidalia, La., 300 miles south of Memphis. Until his body was found, Dr. Wiley's death was handled as a missing person case, and police did no forensic examinations. Early reports about Wiley's disappearance made no mention of paint marks on his car or a missing hubcap, which turned up in subsequent reports. The type of accident needed to knock off the hubcaps (actually a complete wheel cover) used on recent model Galants would have caused noticeable damage to the sheet metal on either side of the wheel, and probably the wheel itself. No damage to the car s body or wheel has been reported. Wiley's car was found about a five-minute drive from the hotel where he was last seen. There is a four-hour period in his evening that cannot be accounted for. There is also no explanation as to why he would have been headed into Arkansas late at night. Wiley was staying at his father's home in Memphis. The Hernando de Soto Bridge carries Interstate 40 out of Memphis, across the Mississippi River into Arkansas. The traffic on the bridge was reduced to a single lane in each direction. This would have caused westbound traffic out of Memphis to slow down and travel in one lane. Anything in the other two closed lanes would have been plainly obvious to every passing person. There are no known witnesses to Wiley stopping his car on the bridge. On Jan. 14, almost two months after his disappearance, Shelby County Medical Examiner O.C. Smith announced that his department had ruled Wiley s death to be "accidental;" the result of massive injuries suffered in a fall from the Hernando de Soto Bridge. Smith said there were paint marks on Wiley's rental car similar to the paint used on construction signs on the bridge, and that the car's right front hubcap was missing. There has been no report as to which construction signs Wiley hit. There is also no explanation as to why this evidence did not move the Memphis police to consider possibilities other than a "missing person." Smith theorizes that Wiley pulled over to the outermost lane of the bridge (that lane being closed at the time) to inspect the damage to his car. Smith's subsequent explanation for the fall requires several other things to have occurred simultaneously:
These conditions would have put Wiley's center of gravity above the rail, and the seizure would have caused him to lose his balance as the truck created the bounce and blast of wind, thus causing him to fall off the bridge. SCIENCE IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD? Robert M. Schwartz was a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, and the Executive Director of Research and Development at Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology. He was extremely well respected in biophysics, and regarded as an authority on DNA sequencing. Co-workers became concerned when he didn't show up at his office on Dec. 10. He was later found dead at his home. Loudoun County Sheriff's officials said Schwartz was stabbed on Dec. 8 with a sword, and had an "X" cut into the back of his neck. Schwartz's daughter Clara, 19, and three others have been charged in the case. The four are said to have a fascination with fantasy worlds, witchcraft, and the occult. Kyle Hulbert, 18, who allegedly committed the murder, has a history of mental illness, and is reported by the Washington Post to have killed Schwartz to prevent the murder of Clara. At the request of Clara Schwartz's attorneys, on Feb. 13 Judge Pamela Grizzle ordered all new evidence introduced about her role in the case to be sealed. She also issued a temporary gag order covering the entire case on police, prosecutors and defense attorneys. BREATHE DEEPLY, AND CARRY A BIG STICK Set Van Nguyen was found dead on Dec. 11 at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's animal diseases facility in Geelong, Australia. He had worked there 15 years. According to an article on www.rense.com by Ian Gurney, in Jan. 2001 the magazine Nature published information that two scientists at this facility, using genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing, had created an incredibly virulent form of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox. The researchers were extremely concerned that if similar manipulation could be done to smallpox, a terrifying weapon could be unleashed. According to Victoria Police, Nguyen died after entering a refrigerated storage facility. "He did not know the room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Unable to breathe, Mr. Nguyen collapsed and died," is the official report. Nitrogen is not a "deadly" gas, and is a part of air. An extreme over-abundance of nitrogen in one's immediate atmosphere would cause shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and fatigue -- conditions a biologist would certainly recognize. Additionally, a leak sufficient to fill the room with nitrogen would set off alerts, and would be so massive as to cause a complete loss of cooling, causing the temperature to rise, which would also set off alerts these systems are routinely equipped with. A RUSSIAN, BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND OLD CORPSES In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik defected from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Great Britain while on a trip to Paris. He had been the top scientist in the FSU's bioweapons program, which is heavily dependent upon DNA sequencing. Pasechnik's death was reported in the New York Times as having occurred on Nov. 23. The Times obituary indicated that the announcement of Pasechnik's death was made in the United States by Dr. Christopher Davis of Virginia, who stated that the cause of death was a stroke. Davis was the member of British intelligence who de-briefed Dr. Pasechnik at the time of his defection. Davis says he left the intelligence service in 1996, but when asked why a former member of British intelligence would be the person announcing the death of Pasechnik to the US media, he replied that it had come about during a conversation with a reporter he had had a long relationship with. The reporter Davis named is not the author of the Times' obituary, and Davis declined to say which branch of British intelligence he served in. No reports of Pasechnik's death appeared in Britain for more than a month, until Dec. 29, when his obituary appeared in the London Telegraph, which did not include a date of death. Pasechnik spent the 10 years after his defection working at the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research at the UK Department of Health, Salisbury. On Feb. 20, 2000, it was announced that, along with partner Caisey Harlingten, Pasechnik had formed a company called Regma Biotechnologies Ltd. Regma describes itself as "a new drug company working to provide powerful alternatives to antibiotics." Like three other microbiologists detailed in this article, Pasechnik was heavily involved in DNA sequencing research. During the anthrax panic of this past fall, Pasechnik offered his services to the British government to help in any way possible. Despite Regma having a public relations department that has released many items to the press over the past two years, the company has not announced the death of one of its two founders. FEBRUARY, BLOODY FEBRUARY On Feb. 9 the news publication Pravda.ru reported that Victor Korshunov had been killed. At the time, Korshunov was head of the microbiology sub-facility at the Russian State Medical University. He was found dead in the entrance to his home with a cranial injury. Pravda reports that Korshunov had probably invented either a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself. On Feb. 12 a newspaper in Norwich, England reported the previous day's death of Ian Langford, a senior researcher at the University of East Anglia. The story went on to say that police "were not treating the death as suspicious." The next day, Britain's The Times reported that Langford was found wedged under a chair "at his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home." The February 12 story, from the Eastern Daily Press, reports that clerks at a store near Langford's home claim he came in on a daily basis to buy "a big bottle of vodka." Two of the store's staff also claim Langford had come into the store a few days earlier wearing "just a jumper and a pair of shoes." None of the store's staff would give their name. It is hard to understand how a man can reach the highest levels of achievement in a scientific field while drinking "a big bottle of vodka" on a daily basis, and strolling around his hometown nearly nude. A Feb. 14 follow-up story from the Eastern Daily Press says police believe Langford died after suffering "one or more falls." They say this would account for his head injuries and large amount of blood found at the death scene. THE HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE -- ANOTHER LINK? There is another intriguing connection between three of the five American scientists that have died. Wiley, Schwartz, and Benito Que worked for medical research facilities that received grants from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). HHMI funds a tremendous number of research programs at schools, hospitals and research facilities, and has long been alleged to be conducting "black ops" biomedical research for intelligence organizations, including the CIA. Long-time biowarfare investigator Patricia Doyle, Ph.D. reports that there is a history of people connected to HHMI being murdered. In 1994, Jose Trias met with a friend in Houston, Texas and was planning to go public with his personal knowledge of HHMI "front door" grants being diverted to "back door" black ops bioresearch. The next day, Trias and his wife were found dead in their Chevy Chase, Md. home. Chevy Chase is where HHMI is headquartered. Police described the killings as a professional hit. Tsunao Saitoh, who formerly worked at an HHMI-funded lab at Columbia University, was shot to death on May 7, 1996 while sitting in his car outside his home in La Jolla, Calif. Police also described this as a professional hit. BEYOND THE BIZARRE Early-October saw reports that British scientists were planning to exhume the bodies of 10 London victims of the 1918 type-A flu epidemic known as the Spanish Flu. An October 7 report In The Independent, UK said that victims of the Spanish Flu had been victims of "the world's most deadly virus." British scientists, according to the story, hope to uncover the genetic makeup of the virus, making it easier to combat. Professor John Oxford of London's Queen Mary's School of Medicine, the British government's flu adviser, acknowledges that the exhumations and subsequent studies will have to be done with extreme caution so the virus is not unleashed to cause another epidemic. The uncovering of a pathogen's genetic structure is the exact work Pasechnik was doing at Regma. Pasechnik died six weeks after the planned exhumations were announced. The need to exhume the bodies assumes no Type-A flu virus sample exists in any lab anywhere in the world. A piece on MSNBC that aired September 6 makes the British exhumation plans seem odd. The story refers to an article that was to be published the following day in the weekly magazine Science, reporting the 1918 flu virus had recently been RNA sequenced. Researchers had traced down and obtained virus samples from archived lung tissue of WWI soldiers, and from an Inuit woman who had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost. HELP WANTED, SPIES, AND A LINK TO PROMIS Almost immediately at the outset of the anthrax scare, the Bush administration contracted with Bayer Pharmaceuticals for millions of doses of Cipro, an antibiotic to treat anthrax. This was done despite many in the medical community stating that there were several cheaper, better alternatives to Cipro, which has never been shown to be effective against inhaled anthrax. The Center for Disease Control's (CDC) own website states a preference for the antibiotic doxycycline over Cipro for inhalation anthrax. CDC expresses concerns that widespread Cipro use could cause other bacteria to become immune to antibiotics. It was announced Jan. 21 that the director of the CDC, Jeffrey Koplan, is resigning effective March 31. Six days earlier it was announced that Surgeon General David Satcher is also resigning. And there is currently no director for the National Institutes of Health -- NIH is being run by an acting director. The recent resignations leave the three most significant medical positions in the federal government simultaneously vacant. After three months of conflicting reports it is now official that the anthrax that has killed several Americans since October 5 is from US military sources connected to CIA research. The FBI has stated that only 10 people could have had access, yet at the same time they are reporting astounding security breaches at the biowarfare facility at Fort Detrick, Md. -- breaches such as unauthorized nighttime experiments and lab specimens gone missing. The militarized anthrax used by the US was developed by William C. Patrick III, who holds five classified patents on the process. He has worked at both Fort Detrick, and the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Patrick is now a private biowarfare consultant to the military and CIA. Patrick developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. No other country has been able to get concentrations above 500 billion per gram. The anthrax that was sent around the eastern US last fall was concentrated at one trillion spores per gram, according to a Jan. 31 report by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists. In recent years Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov. Now known by the Americanized "Ken Alibek", he defected to the US in 1992. Before defecting, Alibek was the no. 2 man in the FSU's biowarfare program. His boss was Vladimir Pasechnik. Currently, Ken Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc. Hadron describes itself as a company specializing in the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community. As chief scientist at Hadron, Alibek gave extensive testimony to the House Armed Services Committee about biological weapons on Oct. 20, 1999, and again on May 23, 2000. Hadron announced on Dec. 20 that as of that date, the company had received $12 million in funding for medical biodefense research from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH. Hadron said it was working in the field of non-specific immunity. In the 1980s Hadron was founded and headed by Dr. Earl Brian, a medical doctor and crony of Ronald Reagan and an associate of former Attorney General Edwin Meese. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges. Both Hadron and Brian have been closely associated in court documents and numerous credible reports, confirmed since Sept. 11, with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the INSLAW Corporation. PROMIS is a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases. The software has reportedly been mated in recent years with artificial intelligence. PROMIS has long been known to have been modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data. Given this unique capability, and Hadron s prior connections to PROMIS, it is a possibility that the software, by tapping into databases used by each of the victims, could have identified any lines of research that threatened to compromise a larger, and as yet unidentified, more sinister covert operation. A PATTERN? The DNA sequencing work by several of the microbiologists discussed earlier is aimed at developing drugs that will fight pathogens based on the pathogen's genetic profile. The work is also aimed at eventually developing drugs that will work in cooperation with a person's genetic makeup. Theoretically, a drug could be developed for one specific person. That being the case, it's obvious that one could go down the ladder, and a drug could be developed to effectively treat a much broader class of people sharing a genetic marker. The entire process can also be turned around to develop a pathogen that will affect a broad class of people sharing a genetic marker. A broad class of people sharing a genetic marker could be a group such as a race, or people with brown eyes. SMALLPOX An Oct. 17 story in USA Today reported that the US government wanted to order 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. Apparently, that wish has been granted. On Nov. 28 a British vaccine maker, Acambis, announced that it had received a $428 million contract to provide 155 million doses of smallpox vaccine to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This was Acambis' second contract. The company is already in the process of producing 54 million doses. The US government has 15.4 million doses stockpiled, and HHS plans to dilute them five to one. The two contracts and the dilution program will bring the total HHS stockpile to 286 million doses. Smallpox was officially declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1977, after treating the last known case in Merca, Somalia. MEHPA -- MEDICAL FASCISM A meeting of the Center for Law and the Public Health (CLPH) was convened on Oct. 5. This group is run jointly by Georgetown University Law School and Johns Hopkins Medical School, and was founded under the auspices of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). CLPH was formed one month prior to the 2000 Presidential election. The purpose of the October meeting was to draft legislation to respond to the then current bioterrorism threat. After working only 18 days, on Nov. 23 CLPH released a 40-page document called the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA). This was a "model" law that HHS is suggesting be enacted by the 50 states to handle future public health emergencies such as bioterrorism. A revised version was released on Dec. 21 containing more specific definitions of "public health emergency" as it pertains to bioterrorism and biologic agents, and includes language for those states that want to use the act for chemical, nuclear or natural disasters. According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), after declaring a "public health emergency", and without consulting with public health authorities, law enforcement, the legislature or courts, a state governor using MEHPA, or anyone he/she decides to empower, can among many things:
When the federal government wanted the states to enact the 55 mph speed limit, they coerced the states using the threat of withholding federal monies. The same tactic will likely be used with MEHPA. As of this writing the law has been passed in Kentucky. According to AAPS, it has been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, California, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. It is expected to be introduced shortly in Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Wisconsin. MEHPA is being evaluated by the executive branches in North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington, DC. The research the
microbiologists were doing could have developed methods
of treating diseases like anthrax and smallpox without
conventional antibiotics or vaccines. Pharmaceutical
contracts to deal with these diseases will total
hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. If
epidemics could be treated in non-traditional ways,
MEHPA might not be necessary. Considering the
government's actions nullifying many civil liberties
since last September, MEHPA seems to be a law looking
for an excuse to be enacted. Maybe the microbiologists
were in the way of some peoples' or business' agendas. Reasons to suspect DynCorp of criminal behavior are not hard to find. Investigative reporter Kelly O Meara of Insight Magazine, in a story dated February 4, disclosed a massive US military investigation of how DynCorp employees in Bosnia had engaged in a widespread sex slave ring, trading children as young as eight and videotaping forced sexual encounters. She reviewed government documents and interviewed Army investigators looking into the activities which had spread throughout DynCorp s contract operations to service helicopters and warehouse supplies for the US military. Videos and other evidence of the crimes are in the Army s possession. And in a February 23rd story, veteran journalist Al Giordano of www.narconews.com reported that a class action suit had been filed in Washington, D.C. by more than 10,000 Ecuadorian farmers and a labor union against DynCorp for its rampant spraying of herbicides which have destroyed food crops, weakened the ecosystem and caused more than 1,100 documented cases of illness. DynCorp s current Chairman, Paul Lombardi responded to the suit by sending intimidating letters in an unsuccessful attempt to force the plaintiffs to withdraw. DynCorp has also been directly linked to the development and use of PROMIS software by its founder Bill Hamilton of Inslaw. DynCorp s former Chairman, current board member and the lead investor in Capricorn Holdings, is Herbert Pug Winokur. Winokur was, until recently, Chairman of the Enron Finance Committee. He claimed ignorance as to the fraudulent financial activities of Enron s board even though he was charged with their oversight. Scientists' Deaths Are Under the Microscope by Alanna Mitchell, Simon Cooper and Carolyn Abraham Published on Saturday, May 4, 2002 in the Toronto Globe & Mail It's a tale only the best conspiracy theorist could dream up. Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism. Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond. The first three died in the space of just over a week in November. Benito Que, 52, was an expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical School. Police originally suspected that he had been beaten on Nov. 12 in a carjacking in the medical school's parking lot. Strangely enough, though, his body showed no signs of a beating. Doctors then began to suspect a stroke. Just four days after Dr. Que fell unconscious came the mysterious disappearance of Don Wiley, 57, one of the foremost microbiologists in the United States. Dr. Wiley, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University, was an expert on how the immune system responds to viral attacks such as the classic doomsday plagues of HIV, ebola and influenza. He had just bought tickets to take his son to Graceland the following day. Police found his rental car on a bridge outside Memphis, Tenn. His body was later found in the Mississippi River. Forensic experts said he may have had a dizzy spell and have fallen off the bridge. Just five days after that, the world-class microbiologist and high-profile Russian defector Valdimir Pasechnik, 64, fell dead. The pathologist who did the autopsy, and who also happened to be associated with Britain's spy agency, concluded he died of a stroke. Dr. Pasechnik, who defected to the United Kingdom in 1989, played a huge role in Russian biowarfare and helped to figure out how to modify cruise missiles to deliver the agents of mass biological destruction. The next two deaths came four days apart in December. Robert Schwartz, 57, was stabbed and slashed with what police believe was a sword in his farmhouse in Leesberg, Va. His daughter, who identifies herself as a pagan high priestess, and several of her fellow pagans have been charged. Dr. Schwartz was an expert in DNA sequencing and pathogenic micro-organisms, who worked at the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, Va. Four days later, Nguyen Van Set, 44, died at work in Geelong, Australia, in a laboratory accident. He entered an airlocked storage lab and died from exposure to nitrogen. Other scientists at the animal diseases facility of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization had just come to fame for discovering a virulent strain of mousepox, which could be modified to affect smallpox. Then in February, the Russian microbiologist Victor Korshunov, 56, an expert in intestinal bacteria of children around the world, was bashed over the head near his home in Moscow. Five days later the British microbiologist Ian Langford, 40, was found dead in his home near Norwich, England, naked from the waist down and wedged under a chair. He was an expert in environmental risks and disease. Two weeks later, two prominent microbiologists died in San Francisco. Tanya Holzmayer, 46, a Russian who moved to the U.S. in 1989, focused on the part of the human molecular structure that could be affected best by medicine. She was killed by fellow microbiologist Guyang (Matthew) Huang, 38, who shot her seven times when she opened the door to a pizza delivery. Then he shot himself. The final two deaths came one day after the other in March. David Wynn-Williams, 55, a respected astrobiologist with the British Antarctic Survey, who studied the habits of microbes that might survive in outer space, died in a freak road accident near his home in Cambridge, England. He was hit by a car while he was jogging. The following day, Steven Mostow, 63, known as Dr. Flu for his expertise in treating influenza, and a noted expert in bioterrorism, died when the airplane he was piloting crashed near Denver. So what does any of it mean? "Statistically, what are the chances?" wondered a prominent North American microbiologist reached last night at an international meeting of infectious-disease specialists in Chicago. Janet Shoemaker, director of public and scientific affairs of the American Society for Microbiology in Washington, D.C., pointed out yesterday that there are about 20,000 academic researchers in microbiology in the U.S. Still, not all of these are of the elevated calibre of those recently deceased. She had a chilling, final thought. When microbiologists die in a lab, there's a way of taking note of the deaths and adding them up. When they die in freakish accidents outside the lab, nobody keeps track. Suspicious deaths The sudden and suspicious deaths of 11 of the world's leading microbiologists. Who they were: 1. Nov. 12, 2001: Benito Que was said to have been beaten in a Miami parking lot and died later. 2. Nov. 16, 2001: Don C. Wiley went missing. Was found Dec. 20. Investigators said he got dizzy on a Memphis bridge and fell to his death in a river. 3. Nov. 21, 2001: Vladimir Pasechnik, former high-level Russian microbiologist who defected in 1989 to the U.K. apparently died from a stroke. 4. Dec. 10, 2001: Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death in Leesberg, Va. Three Satanists have been arrested. 5. Dec. 14, 2001: Nguyen Van Set died in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia. 6. Feb. 9, 2002: Victor Korshunov had his head bashed in near his home in Moscow. 7. Feb. 14, 2002: Ian Langford was found partially naked and wedged under a chair in Norwich, England. 8. 9. Feb. 28, 2002: San Francisco resident Tanya Holzmayer was killed by a microbiologist colleague, Guyang Huang, who shot her as she took delivery of a pizza and then apparently shot himself. 10. March 24, 2002: David Wynn-Williams died in a road accident near his home in Cambridge, England. 11. March 25, 2002: Steven Mostow of the Colorado Health Sciences Centre, killed in a plane he was flying near Denver. © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. Vladimir Pasechnik by Wikipedia Vladimir Pasechnik (12 October, 1937 Stalingrad, USSR — 21 November 2001, Wiltshire, England) was a senior Soviet biologist and bioweaponeer who defected to the UK in 1989, alerting Western intelligence to the vast scope of Moscow's clandestine biological warfare (BW) program, known as Biopreparat. His revelations that the program was ten times larger than previously suspected were confirmed in 1992 with the defection to the United States of Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, the No. 2 scientist for the program. Biography A native of Stalingrad, many members of Pasechnik’s family, including his parents, perished in the Nazi siege of that city during the World War II. Pasechnik studied at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, where he was one of the institute's brightest stars, graduating at the top of his class. Pasechnik initially specialized in the study of polymers for biological uses at the Institute of High Molecular Compounds in Leningrad. The intent was to develop new antibiotics and other treatments. In 1974, at the age of 37, Pasechnik was invited by a general from the Soviet Ministry of Defence to start his own biotechnology institute in Leningrad and he was given “an unlimited budget” to buy equipment in the West and recruit the best staff available. The laboratory he created was in reality part of the countrywide Biopreparat program. Known as the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations, it was to work on a strain of plague. The laboratory actually began operating in 1981, and over the next two years Pasechnik realized that, far from running a civilian research operation dedicated to vaccine development, as he had been promised, he had become part of a vast network of laboratories and factories involved in a massive BW program. According to Pasechnik, the Institute, which had a staff of about 400, did research on modifying cruise missiles to spread the plague. The weapons system was to operate by flying low to avoid early-warning systems and use robot craft to spray clouds of aerosolized pathogens over unsuspecting enemies. The team succeeded in producing an aerosolized version of the plague microbe that could survive outside a lab. This version of the organism was genetically-engineered to be resistant to antibiotics. In the mid-1980s, Pasechnik became increasingly dissatisfied. ("I couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing," he would tell his British handlers.) He began to plan a defection in 1988, but had never been permitted to travel abroad. His chance came in the summer of 1989, when in recognition of past performance he was allowed to travel to Toulouse to sign the contracts of a pending deal with a French maker of chemical laboratory equipment. Rather than signing, he reported to the British Embassy in Paris. Once revealed, the Soviet government insisted that Pasechnik’s research had been intended to defend against acts of biological warfare by an enemy and that the program had been stopped. In early 1993, the
British government permitted Pasechnik to speak
publicly. The next year, writer James Adams told
Pasechnik’s story in a book, The New Spies. Pasechnik
lived in Wiltshire and worked at the UK Department of
Health's centre for applied microbiological research at
Porton Down, before forming Regma Biotechnologies, which
is involved in research into tuberculosis and other drug
resistant infections. Vladimir Pasechnik 12:01AM GMT 29 Nov 2001 The Telegraph, telegraph.co.uk VLADIMIR PASECHNIK, who has died aged 64, was a Soviet micro-biologist whose defection to Britain in 1989 disclosed the fact that Moscow's germ warfare programme was 10 times greater than previously feared. Western intelligence agencies had known for many years that the Soviet Union maintained an offensive biological warfare programme in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, to which it was a signatory. In April 1979, a major outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) caused the deaths of a number of Soviet citizens from pulmonary anthrax. The Soviets tried to hush things up, but details leaked out to the West in 1980 when the German magazine Bild Zeitung carried a story about the accident. Moscow described allegations that the epidemic was a biological warfare experiment gone wrong as "slanderous propaganda" and insisted the outbreak had been caused by contaminated food. But Western intelligence agencies had little direct information before Pasechnik's defection. He had been in charge of a laboratory called the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). This was part of Biopreparat, a huge network of 18, nominally civilian, research laboratories employing more than 25,000 people involved in developing biological weapons such as anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever and smallpox. Pasechnik's own laboratory had been working on Yersiniapestis, a strain of the plague virus, and he maintained that he had no idea that his work violated the 1972 treaty. He claimed that he had simply become "disgusted" with the biological weapons programme and by the Soviet government's continuing denials, at a time of glasnost, that such a programme existed: "I couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing," he told his British handlers. From Pasechnik's evidence, the British government concluded that the Soviet Union had developed a genetically-engineered strain of plague that was resistant to antibiotics. In consequence, Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush put pressure on President Mikhail Gorbachev to open up Russia's germ warfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. When the inspectors toured four of the sites in 1991, they were met with denials and evasions. Production tanks which had obviously been intended for making enormous quantities of something were clean and sterile; laboratories had been stripped of equipment. In 1992, however, Pasechnik's story was confirmed by Ken Alibek, a second defector from the Biopreparat programme, who claimed that development of new strains of genetically-engineered superweapons was continuing. As a result, formal negotiations were opened with the Russian government. Vladimir Pasechnik was born on October 12 1937 in Stalingrad (formerly Volgograd). Many members of his family, including his parents, perished in the siege of the city during the Second World War. He studied at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, where he was one of the institute's brightest stars, and graduated at the top of his class. Afterwards, he became a research scientist at the Institute of Higher Molecular Compounds in Leningrad, specialising in the development of antibiotics. In 1974 a general from the Soviet Ministry of Defence, which controlled the budget for scientific research, offered Pasechnik the chance to set up his own biotechnology laboratory. The offer included an unlimited budget for Western equipment and the ability to recruit the USSR's best scientists. The laboratory began operating in 1981, and over the next two years Pasechnik realised that, far from running a civilian research operation dedicated to vaccine development, as he had been promised, he had become part of a vast network of laboratories and factories involved in a huge biological warfare programme. By his own account, Pasechnik became increasingly distressed by what he was being asked to do. He began planning his defection in the mid-1980s, but it was only in 1989 that he obtained permission to travel abroad. In recognition of his achievements, he was allowed to travel to Toulouse to sign a contract with a French maker of chemical laboratory equipment, but when he reached France he called the British Embassy in Paris. After his defection Pasechnik moved to Wiltshire and worked at the Department of Health's centre for applied microbiological research at Porton Down, before forming Regma Biotechnologies, which is involved in research into TB and other drug resistant infections. Vladimir Pasechnik is survived by his wife, Natasha, a daughter and two sons. V. Pasechnik, 64, Is Dead; Germ Expert Who Defected By WOLFGANG SAXON Published: November 23, 2001, The New York Times Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a senior Soviet biologist whose defection in 1989 alerted Western intelligence to the scope of Moscow's clandestine efforts to adapt germs and viruses for military use, died on Wednesday in Wiltshire, England. He was 64 and lived in a nearby village. The cause was a stroke, said Dr. Christopher J. Davis of Great Falls, Va., formerly in British intelligence. It was Dr. Pasechnik who provided a first glimpse of Biopreparat, a network of secret laboratories, each focused on a deadly agent. His revelations were confirmed in 1992 with the defection to the United States of Dr. Ken Alibek, the No. 2 scientist for the program. The picture that emerged was of a system of centers scattered chiefly around European Russia. There, a small army of scientists and technicians were developing potential biological weapons like anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever and smallpox. Dr. Pasechnik was in charge of one known as the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad. Once in England, he told interviewers that he had no inkling that his work violated the 1972 treaty under which the United States and the Soviet Union were to halt such activities. Dead Scientists By Gordon Thomas Nov. 21, 2003 MI6 are spearheading a global investigation into the mysterious death of a top microbiologist, Vladimir Pasechnik with close links to Porton Down, Britain’s ultra secret bio-defence establishment. Four other high-ranking scientists who had close ties to him have also died mysteriously in the past four months. Like Pasechnik, all worked in the doomsday world of bio-chemical weapons. Colleagues of Pasechnik had confirmed that in Russia he had been working on “bio-weapons which could wipe out a third of the world’s population.” After he defected to Britain in 1989, Pasechnik told his MI6 debriefing officer, Christopher Davis, -- now retired and living in Virginia in the US -- that went to Porton Down and had been trying to produce defences against the bio-chemical weapons he had been producing in Russia. When he first came to England, Pasechnik was given a job at the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research, run by the Department of Health in Salisbury. In February 2000, he founded a company called Regman Biotechnologies Ltd, based in the town. Its articles of association described the privately-owned company as “a new drug company working to provide powerful alternatives to antibiotics.” That did not stop him continuing his secrets to Porton Down. It is those visits and the sudden death of the 64-year-old Pasechnik that have led to the secret investigation into his death -- and the deaths of others in the United States and Australia. All were closely associated with the kind of highly-specialised work Pasechnik was doing at Porton Down. So secret was his work that few knew of his visits to the facility -- and its most restricted labs where other scientists are working to find bio-defences against the threat to Britain of nerve agents. Intelligence sources have told me that Pasechnik often visited Porton Down at a weekend or late in the evening. To do so he had signed the Official Secrets Act forbidding him to speak to anybody about what he was doing. But those intelligence sources have confirmed he was working in the labs with some of the most lethal nerve agents known to man. He was a leading specialist in the field of DNA sequencing -- sophisticated research which is a vital element in developing biological weapons -- and defences against them. On November 2,
shortly after he had again visited Porton Down,
Pasechnik was found dead in his village home outside
Salisbury. “There are a number
of nerve agents that can mimic a stroke and leave no
traces,” said Dr. Leonard Horowitz, a US specialist in
the field of toxic poisons. Only a handful of colleagues attended his funeral. The secret of the work Pasechnik had been doing at Porton Down died with him. After he defected to Britain, Pasechnik told Christopher Davis that he had been approached by China to work for them. Instead MI6 helped him defect from Paris -- where he was attending a science conference. He brought to Britain highly secret documents which showed how advanced the Russians were in bio-chemical weapons. The documents also contained evidence of China’s effort to become the world leader in the field. MI6, the CIA, and
the intelligence services of Canada, Australia and
Europe are combining all their resources to establish if
China has sent killer squads from its own secret service
(CSIS) to murder all those scientists it had approached
-- and who had declined to work for China. Defence Analyst, David Jensen, said: “It would be logical for China to want Pasechnik on board. When he refused it would be equally logical to eliminate him. That’s how China handles competition. Kills it off.” By the time Pasechnik was dead, other scientists had met sudden deaths. * Dr. Benito Que was a cell biologist working on how infectious diseases, like the HIV virus, could be genetically engineered into a bio-warfare program. He worked in a restricted Lab in the Miami Medical School, Miami, Florida. He was a careful, meticulous man, who ran his life with a clockwork precision. For some reason he left his lab early on the afternoon of November 12, 2001. As he reached his car four men with baseball bats clubbed him to death. They were never traced. Dr. Que had met Vladimir Pasechnik on several occasions at bio-medical conferences. * Dr. Don C. Wiley, 46, was one of America’s foremost molecular biologist researchers into infectious diseases – all with a capability to be used as biological weapons. He was found dead in a rental car in Memphis, Tennessee. His research at America’s prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which has contracts with the US bio-defense program, had included working with Ebola, Marburg Virus, Q Fever. All these are germs that Chinese scientists are known to be working on. In the past he had shared some of his research with Vladimir Pasechnik. Wiley’s body was found on December 21, 2001. He appeared to have driven 300 miles to park his rental car on a Mississippi River bridge. Local police chief, Walter Crews, at Memphis, said he was exploring several theories – including murder. To date he had arrested no one. * Dr. Robert M. Schwartz, 53, a distinguished bio-physicist who had worked closely with Pasechnik on DNA sequencing, was found murdered at his remote farmhouse near Deesburg, Virginia, on December 12, 2001. The local sheriff said, “it appears he was stabbed. The only evidence of theft was that the victim’s papers had been disturbed. We do not know what is missing.” * Dr. Set Van Nguyen, 44, worked as a microbiologist at Australia’s Animal Health Laboratory at Geelong. He had been part of the team which had created a new variant of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox. Mousepox could become an unstoppable killer once unleashed. * Like the others Van Nguyen had kept abreast of the research Pasechnik was doing at Porton Down. On December 13, 2001, he was found dead in an air-lock chamber that gave access to the biological samples he worked with. Deadly liquid nitrogen had seemingly, accidentally, leaked from a bottle of liquid nitrogen in the chamber. MI6, and the other intelligence services are also looking into the backgrounds of five microbiologists who died on October 4, 2001. They were passengers on a commercial flight from Tel Aviv to Novosbirsk in Siberia. The aircraft of Air Sibit was “accidentally shot down” by a Ukrainian surface to air missile. The subsequent investigations found that the missile was 100 miles off course. Siberia has over 50 research centers working on bio-chemical weapons. But the prime intelligence focus is on the use China may have made of a sophisticated computer program, Promis, that was stolen from the Washington company that created it, Inslaw. Inslaw’s president, Bill Hamilton, said “ the theft of our software would give any country a flying start in keeping track of just about anybody’s work. It is capable of integrating a wide number of data bases.” Both MI6 and CIA sources have told me that Promis has now been modified by Chinese intelligence, CSIS, to allow it to tap into the databases of all the mysteriously dead scientists and identify their line of research – one that almost certainly threatened to leave China’s own work in bio-chemical weaponry behind. That may turn out to be the most logical explanation for their deaths. That they were murdered to allow China to steal their research – and to ensure they would do no more work for Britain and the United States. 9/11, Anthrax & Doctor Death – Confronting the Ghosts of the Past by Bob Coen September 15, 2009 Confront • verb 1 meet face to face in hostility or defiance. 2 (of a problem) present itself to. 3 face up to and deal with (a problem). 4 compel to face or consider something. It’s interesting that the filmmakers and authors behind Anthrax War/Dead Silence found ourselves on opposite sides of the globe during the week of 9/11 – Eric Nadler on the West coast of the USA showcasing the film at the 9/11 Truth Film Festival and myself Bob Coen in South Africa at the Tri Continental Human Rights Film Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa… During our investigation we came to realize that -9/11, anthrax and the man who came to be called Doctor Death, the Mengele of the South Africa’s racist apartheid regime, are all part of this global shadow world of secrets. 9/11 and anthrax will always be inexecrably linked – “the one, two punch against our Republic” as Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law put it… even though the anthrax attacks appear to be all but forgotten, not only now eight years after the event, but beginning just months after the anthrax letter attacks spread fear and panic across the USA and beyond when the story faded from the headlines. While the attacks on the Twin Towers are remembered and ritualized it’s almost as if we just don’t want to know about germ warfare… it’s too scary… too dark. And you know what – it is… and more. To begin with the very basis of germ weapons research undermines the moral foundations our so called “civilized” societies are built upon – a subversion of the life-sciences into the death-sciences. Instead of finding cures for germs, actually turning them into more efficient and deadly killers. And it doesn’t get much darker than Doctor Death… Following leads on the anthrax trail took us across four continents – filming outside the high security perimeter fences of some of the world’s most secret germ war labs (and inside a couple), tracking down and talking to experts and scientists some of whom were members of the so called “International Bio-Weapons Mafia”. None was more chilling than the face to face we got with Doctor Death – Wouter Basson, the army scientist who headed apartheid South Africa’s secret germ war program – Project Coast. Shrouded in mystery and hidden behind front companies that used worldwide intelligence connections, the shocking activities of the program only emerged after the fall of apartheid – revealing a shockingly sophisticated operation that had 200 scientists developing germ war agents to be used against the country’s black population. This was one of the very few interviews Doctor Death has given and for the first time he talks candidly about the help the received from the West, his relationship with David Kelly and the creation of “the Black Bomb” an agent that could sterilize blacks without their knowledge. Larry... Mad as hatter... And then there’s his strange relationship with Larry Ford, the Mormon gynecologist to Hollywood stars who was also moonlighting for the South Africans and had CIA connections. Some experts we spoke to wonder whether Doctor Death’s program provided a convenient off-shore operation for Western germ ware experimentation. So it’s especially fitting that the South African premiere of Anthrax War was held in Soweto – the township where the final struggle against apartheid was born and where so much blood was spilled in the fight for freedom. In attendance were some of the “Rainbow Nation” generation, students like Phunulani Khanyile and Mbuso Mkhize who are eager to about the sins of the past of their young democracy and the threat that germ weapons pose to the future of our planet today. Soweto Anthrax Posse It’s a reminder of how we are all connected… and it’s time for people everywhere to confront the demons of germ war. A NATION CHALLENGED: ANTHRAX MYSTERY; Some Clues About Victim In the Bronx Lead Nowhere By KATHERINE E. FINKELSTEIN Published: November 24, 2001 Three weeks after Kathy T. Nguyen, a hospital worker who lived in the Bronx, died of inhalation anthrax, investigators have excavated her discreet and simple life, turning up briefly provocative coincidences and evidence of curious habits. But for all the legwork and momentary excitement, they have come no closer to learning how she was exposed to anthrax or who might be behind the nation's 19 recent anthrax cases, five of them fatal. According to city officials, the woman's estranged second husband, tracked down by investigators, said that while he had no specific information about how she might have been exposed, he knew she did like to smell things. A former neighbor of Ms. Nguyen's who now lives in Lantana, Fla., near the tabloid media company that was contaminated by anthrax, told a Miami detective that her mail was still sent to the apartment next door to Ms. Nguyen's in the South Bronx. Such revelations, though intriguing, have led nowhere. And investigators continue to face a terribly difficult task: reconstructing the movements of a friendly but private hospital worker who lived alone and died suddenly, giving no one the opportunity to interview her. Even Dave Cruz, who manages the Bronx apartment complex where Ms. Nguyen lived, and who rushed her to the hospital and was the last to speak with her, told investigators that he had little to offer. She seemed to have no idea what ailed her, he recalled, speaking to a reporter about that terrible car ride. It was on Oct. 28, a sunny Sunday, when a porter came looking for Mr. Cruz, saying that one of his tenants, Ms. Nguyen, needed him urgently. As Mr. Cruz headed towards Ms. Nguyen's courtyard, she was headed out. '''Dave, I'm not feeling well,''' he recalled her saying. '''Please take me to the hospital.''' Those words from such a quiet and undemanding tenant made him rush for his van. And as he drove off with Ms. Nguyen inside, headed for Lenox Hill Hospital, he could hear that she was having difficulty breathing. ''She said in her soft voice, 'Dave, it just hurts when I try to breathe,' '' he recalled. ''I thought in the back of my mind that she had pneumonia but I didn't want to scare her.'' Instead, he quizzed her. Did she have asthma? Bronchitis? '''No, no,''' he recalled her saying. '''It just hurts. It hurts to breathe.''' Expressing concern that she might be admitted to the hospital and fall behind on her rent, the punctilious Ms. Nguyen then reached into her purse and withdrew two money orders for two months' rent. Mr. Cruz said he told her to put them away and not to worry about such things at the moment. Once at Lenox Hill Hospital on East 77th Street in Manhattan, Ms. Nguyen was taken into the emergency room and Mr. Cruz left her with his phone numbers. He heard nothing. But some 12 hours later, at 3 a.m. that Monday, Mr. Cruz heard a banging on his apartment door: a nervous security guard was telling him to wake up because detectives were outside. Mr. Cruz dressed and stepped outside, where he saw a team of F.B.I. agents and detectives, men climbing into white biohazard suits, and rows of cars with flashing lights. On being told that someone in his building was stricken with anthrax, the bleary-eyed Mr. Cruz quickly made the connection and said, ''Oh, Kathy Nguyen.'' The startled detectives, not expecting him to know the victim's name, surrounded him. Under the streetlights on Freeman Street, he explained. Ms. Nguyen's apartment and her workplace, Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, tested negative, so investigators cast a wider net. Several days after Ms. Nguyen died, a resident at her apartment complex, Evelyn Diaz, was interviewed and a biopsy of a lesion on her hand was delivered to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The tests were negative. Investigators tracked down an estranged second husband of Ms. Nguyen's, Jeng Gang Chi, who said that Ms. Nguyen had no contact with family members who remained in Vietnam. He did tell them, curiously, that she liked to smell things. Tests using 140 swabs taken from six different East Side subway stations also proved negative, according to a city official. The neighbor now in Florida, Leidy Gonzales, said that a Miami investigator visited her and asked whether Ms. Nguyen ever visited Florida. Ms. Gonzales said she told investigators that Ms. Nguyen had ''no kids, no husband. She didn't take vacation.'' In short, she took few unexpected trips, except the one to Lenox Hill Hospital from which she did not return. As Mr. Cruz said of that day, ''I thought I had gotten her to the hospital on time, but I was wrong.'' Russian Surgeon, 24, Dies on Highway While Fleeing Police By Masha Herbst Associated Press, Dec 11, 2001 WATERBURY, Conn. (AP) - A 24-year-old Russian surgeon studying in Connecticut was fatally struck by a car as he fled a store with three stolen rolls of film, police said. Doctors who worked with Roman Kuzmin at Waterbury Hospital said they were stunned to hear of his death Sunday evening and many couldn't believe the circumstances. "I think that's rubbish," said Ted Kennon, a Yale physician who worked closely with Kuzmin. "I'd be very surprised if there was anything to that." According to police, Kuzmin was carrying the film when he walked out of BJ's Wholesale Club in Waterbury and security guards chased him across a parking lot after an alarm sounded. By the time two police officers arrived, Kuzmin had fled into a ravine that runs along Interstate 84, Capt. Paul Bruce said. When the officers' flashlights came upon Kuzmin, he scrambled up the embankment and onto the highway. "The officers warned him to stop, not to go into the highway," Bruce said. Kuzmin left Vladivostok in September to study orthopedic surgical techniques at Waterbury Hospital under a Keggi Othopedic Foundation program. Dr. Kristaps Keggi, who organized the program, said Kuzmin was "very able, very bright -- a superb student and a superb individual." Keggi said he thought it impossible that the young man would steal. He said Kuzmin was so honest that he refused to take toilet paper from the surgeon's lounge when he ran out at his apartment. Kuzmin's parents have begun the 6,400-mile journey to Waterbury and are expected to arrive Wednesday evening to claim their son's body, Keggi said. Igor Kuzmin is a prominent orthopedic surgeon in Vladivostok. "It's an amazing loss
for us personally, and an amazing loss for Russia too,
because he was a man who was going to be a leading
person in Russian orthopedic surgery, without question,"
Keggi said. Key Witness to WTC 7 Explosions Dead at 53 Aaron Dykes Infowars.com, September 16, 2008 Emergency coordinator and 9/11 witness Barry Jennings has passed away with controversy about WTC7 still hot– as the BBC hit piece and NIST report have been released to counter Jennings’ exclusive testimony of explosions inside Building 7 UPDATED SEPT 17 4:05 PM CST: NYC Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder has now officially confirmed that Barry Jennings indeed passed away approximately a month ago after several days in the hospital, matching confirmations from several other employees at the Housing Authority. Marder commented that Jennings was a great man, well liked by everyone at the Housing Authority, and that he would be missed. No other details were available. Barry Jennings– now dead at 53– details his eyewitness account while trapped inside WTC7 on 9/11 in a 2007 interview. Jennings told reporters on the day of 9/11, as well as Loose Change cameras in 2007, that he heard repeated explosions inside the building before either Tower 1 or Tower 2 collapsed and testified that he was "stepping over dead bodies" while exiting the ‘blown-out’ lobby to WTC7. Barry Jennings, a key 9/11 eyewitness who was an emergency coordinator for the New York Housing Authority, has passed away at age 53 from circumstances not yet disclosed. A spokesperson for the Housing Authority has now confirmed his death, after weeks of rumors circulating online, but refused to give any further details. Several other individuals at the Housing Authority also confirmed that they knew Barry Jennings, and that indeed he had passed away about a month ago. No other details were available. This office has not yet been able to contact anyone in the Jennings family and the official cause of death is not yet known, but online comments have reported the date of death as August 19, 2008. It is very unusual that a prominent — and controversial– 9/11 witness would die only days before the release of NIST’s report on WTC7 and shortly after a firestorm erupted over his testimony that he heard explosions inside the building prior to collapse of either tower and that there were dead bodies in the building’s blown-out lobby. The BBC aired The Third Tower in July in attempt to debunk Barry Jennings’ account– which is both contradictory and damaging to the official 9/11 story– by making issue over whether or not he said he “saw” dead bodies in the lobby. Yet Jennings own statement in an exclusive interview with Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas– which has not been denied– was: “The fire fighter who took us down kept saying, ‘Don’t look down.’ And I said, ‘Why.’ And we were stepping over people– you know, you can feel when you’re stepping over people.” Now the release of Jason Bermas’ Fabled Enemies is giving further exposure to Jennings’ controversial account. The film features a full interview with Barry Jennings, as well as the statements he and Michael Hess, who was also trapped with him inside WTC7, made to news media on the day of the attacks. Barry Jennings reiterated in the exclusive interview his confusion over the explanation for WTC7′s collapse– given that he clearly heard explosions inside the building: “I’m just confused about one thing, and one thing only– why World Trade Center 7 went down in the first place. I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard– I heard explosions. The explanation I got was it was the fuel-oil tank. I’m an old boiler guy– if it was a fuel-oil tank, it would have been one side of the building.” That interview was not released until June 2008 at the request of Mr. Jennings, who had received numerous threats to his job and asked that it be left out of Loose Change: Final Cut because of those threats. Jennings statements have lit fire to questions about what really caused the sudden collapse of WTC7 just as NIST had hoped the release of their report would quash widespread beliefs that the building was brought down by controlled demolition. News of Jennings’ death comes on the heels of losing another 9/11 hero and eyewitness– Kenny Johannemann, who reportedly committed suicide 12 days before the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Johannemann is credited with saving at least one man’s life on 9/11 and was also a witness to explosions in the towers. NIST’s report, as well as that of the 9/11 Commission (which did not even mention WTC7), completely ignored statements from the building leaseholder Larry Silverstein as well as numerous police, fire fighters and other eyewitnesses who have testified that they were warned about the building’s collapse and told to get back. One rescue worker even heard a countdown for the building’s implosion. Unfortunately, Barry Jennings, whose testimony was ignored by the 9/11 Commission, can no longer raise questions personally about his experience inside WTC7, but his account will remain on the record and available in-full on the Fabled Enemies DVD so that what he witnessed about 9/11 cannot be ignored. The truth about WTC7 will come out, and Barry Jennings’ testimony will not be in vain. NEW INFORMATION ON THE DEATH OF 911 EYEWITNESS BARRY JENNINGS SEEMS TO POINT TO FOUL PLAY by Jack Blood April 16, 2009 www.wFUradio.com Barry Jennings, a key 9/11 eyewitness who was an emergency coordinator for the New York Housing Authority, passed away last August 2008 at age 53 from undisclosed circumstances. Mr. Jennings was an eyewitness to the devastation of the World Trade center towers on September 11th 2001. On the morning of 911 Barry Jennings with Michael Hess, (one of Rudy Giuliani’s highest ranking appointed officials, New York city’s corporation counsel), entered the famed Building 7. It was just after the first attack on the North tower, but before the second plane hit the South Tower, when Barry Jennings escorted Michael Hess to the World Trade Center Tower 7. Mr. Jennings recalls a large number of police officers in the lobby of WTC 7 when they arrived. The two men went up to the 23rd floor, but could not get in, so they went back to the lobby and the police took them up in the freight elevator for a second try. When they arrived on level 23, at the Office of Emergency Management (FEMA),) they found it had been recently deserted, “coffee that was on the desk, smoke was still coming off the coffee, I saw half eaten sandwiches”. At that point he made some phone calls, and an un-named individual told them to “leave, and leave right away”. Jennings and Hess then proceeded to the stairs, and made it to level 6, when there was an explosion, and the stairwell collapsed from under their feet, Mr. Jennings was actually hanging, and had to climb back up. They made it back up to level 8, where Barry Jennings had a view of the twin towers, both buildings were still standing. This is an important detail, as many debunkers have used Mr. Jennings statements out of context to claim the damage came to WTC 7 from the towers collapsing, not the case according, to Mr. Jennings. When they made it to the lobby, Mr. Jennings found it destroyed and littered with dead bodies. He said it looked like, “King Kong had came through it and stepped on it, (it was) so destroyed, I didn’t know where I was. So destroyed that they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, that I believe the fire department made to get me out.” Shortly after he made it out, he was seen on several news channels telling his story. Mr. Jennings was admittedly confused as to why Building 7 had to come down at all, and does not accept the official reason that the noises he heard were from a fuel oil tank, “I know what I heard, I heard explosions”. Jennings testimony was recorded by Loose Change for the Final Cut version of the extremely popular documentary, but was edited out at the final stage due to Jennings misgivings about losing his job, and endangering his family. The BBC later interviewed Jennings for a “911 debunking special” and Jennings seemed to retract the testimony given to Loose Change. Subsequently the creators of the film released the original interview to protect their own credibility. Barry Jennings passed away shortly thereafter and coincidentally just a few days before the long awaited NIST report on Building 7 was released to the public. It is quite possible that Jennings would have exposed the cover story of NIST, and their overall excuse that the 47 story building was the first and only skyscraper felled by fire. He never got that chance. NEW INFO Yesterday, April 15th 2009 I was contacted by “Loose Change” director, and narrator Dylan Avery who said that he had recently begun investigating the death of Barry Jennings, and had found some new information relating to his death. It seems that there is a very good possibility that Jennings’ death could have been due to foul play. Though the investigations are on going, initial findings are somewhat alarming. The conclusion is still forthcoming, but I was shocked by what I heard. It seems that Dylan had hired a private investigator to look into Jennings death which remains shrouded in mystery. His motive was simply to bring some closure to the life of Barry Jennings, and in doing so to honor the memory of this brave American. The Investigator ended up referring the case to Law enforcement before refunding his pay, and told Dylan never to contact him again. Very unusual to say the least. Dylan also paid a visit to the Jennings home. He found it vacant and for sale. Personally, something is really beginning to stink here. Why would a highly paid PI refuse to continue his investigation? Why did he refer the matter to police? He is not talking. What is he afraid of? Was he warned to cease and desist? If so by whom? These are some of the new questions revolving around the Jennings case. In every major cover up from the JFK assassination to Iran Contra, we can see one common thread. The untimely death of eyewitnesses. Barry Jennings was not only an important and most credible eyewitness, but he openly refuted much of the government, and media version of events. He was a liability. Testimony of Barry Jennings taken from the movie "Fabled Enemies," Written and Directed by Jason Bermas http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2144933190875239407# [Transcribed from the movie by Tara Carreon, ABOL Librarian] [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] When the Office of Emergency Management did an activation, they always included our locale. I received a call shortly after the first plane hit. I got there, I had to be inside on the 23rd floor when the second plane hit. Upon arriving into the OEM EOC, we noticed that everyone was gone. I saw coffee that was on the desk, the smoke was still coming off the coffee. I saw half-eaten sandwiches. And only me and Mr. Hess was up there. After I called several individuals, one individual told me to leave and leave right away.... [ABC Reporter] Barry Jennings, you were on the 8th floor. You work for the city housing department. Explain to me the moment of impact. [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] Well, me and Mr. Hess, the corporation counsel, were on the 23rd floor. I told him we got to get out of here. We started walking down the stairs. We made it to the 8th floor. Big explosion. Blew us back into the 8th floor. And I turned to Hess and said, "This is it. We're dead. We're not going to make it out of here." I took a fire extinguisher, and I bust the window out. That's when this gentleman here heard my cries for help. This gentleman right here. And he kept saying, "Stand by. Somebody's coming to get you." They couldn't get to us for over an hour because they couldn't find us. [ABC Reporter] You thought that was it? [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] I thought, "We're dead." I thought, "That was it."... [Frank Ucciardo, 9 News] That's right. I'm standing here right now, I'm just on Broadway by City Hall with Michael Hess, who is the City's Corporation Counsel. Mr. Hess, you were trapped in I believe Seven World Trade Center. Go ahead, sir. [Michael Hess] Yes, I was up in the Emergency Management Center on the 23rd floor, and when all the power went out in the building, another gentleman and I walked down to the 8th floor where there was an explosion. And we were trapped on the 8th floor with thick smoke all around us for about an hour and a half. The New York Fire Department, terrific as they are, just came and got us out. [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] When I made it to the 6th floor, and there was an explosion, the explosion was beneath me. Keep in mind now it's pitch black in there. All the lights went out. So when the explosion happened, it blew us back. I'm thinking I'm standing on the landing, I'm actually holding on to a pole above us. And I had to climb back up. Because Hess is yelling, "What do we do now?" I said, "There's only one thing we can do, and it's go back up." Both buildings were still standing. Keep in mind, I told you the Fire Department came and left. They came twice. Why? Because Building Tower 1 fell, then Tower 2 fell. And then when they came back, they came back with [inaudible] to get me the hell out of there. I was trapped in there for several hours. I was trapped in there when both buildings came down. All this time, I'm hearing all kinds of explosions. All this time, I'm hearing explosions. When they finally got to us, and they took us down to what they call the "lobby," because I asked them, I said when we got down there, I said, "Where are we?" He said, "This was the lobby." And I said, "You gotta be kidding me." It was total ruins. Total ruins. Now keep in mind, when I came in there, the lobby had nice escalators. It was a huge lobby. And for me to see what I saw, it was unbelievable. And the firefighter that took us down kept saying, "Do not look down." And I kept saying, "Why?" He said, "Do not look down." And we were stepping over people. And you know, you can feel when you're stepping over people.... They called me down, I think it was part of the 9/11 Commission. They asked me the same questions that you guys are asking. And at that point they said, "Okay. Thank you." They sent me on my way. [Jason Berman] You told them pretty much everything you just told us? [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] Yes. [Jason Berman] You were in the building, got rocked by an explosion -- all that? [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] Yes. [Jason Berman] And you know they didn't mention Building Seven once in the 9/11 Commission report? [Barry Jennings, Emergency Coordinator] I told them that's where I was. It was very scary, because they looked like very important people. They were questioning me about certain things. I don't know if they liked the answers I gave. I could care less. I gave my account of it, the truth, and that was it. That day I'll never forget. And the explanations that were given to me were totally unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. I'm just confused about one thing, and one thing only. Why World Trade Center Seven went down in the first place. I'm very confused about that. I know what I heard, I heard explosions. The explanation I got was it was the fuel oil tank. I'm an old boiler guy. If there was a fuel oil tank, it would have been one side of the building. Victor Korshunov by Pravda February 9, 2002
It was the third death of a scientist within a few weeks. In January, the Russian Academy of Science lost two scientists, both well known around the world. Academician Ivan Glebov died as a result of a bandit attack in St Petersburg and corresponding Member of the Academy of Science Alexi Brushlinski was killed in Moscow. © Copyright 2002 Witness To WTC Explosions On 9/11 Kills Himself: Suicide of hero WTC janitor raises suspicions among truth groups by Steve Watson Infowars.net, Friday, Sept 5, 2008 A janitor who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers and helped save lives on 9/11, in addition to witnessing what he described as "explosions" in the tower basement, has committed suicide. The New York Daily News reported yesterday that Kenny Johannemann shot himself in the head last Sunday, August 31, 2008. Mr. Johannemann's suicide note stated that he was taking his own life as he was being evicted and could not handle homelessness. The note also stated that since 9/11 he had become depressed and had been drinking. Here is the entire text of the note, a picture of which can be found here, as reported in the Daily News:
According to the Daily News report, relatives found another letter next to his suicide note. The second letter (right), dated October 31, 2001, and type written on White House stationery featuring the president's signature, was an acknowledgement of Johannemann's bravery on 9/11.
The letter refers to Johannemann's actions of pulling a burning survivor to safety, thus saving his life. In the aftermath of the attacks, Johannemann appeared on the "Jenny Jones Show" to relate this story. Johannemann's employer at the time, ABM Industries featured him on the front cover of their 2002 magazine which recounted employee accounts of the events of 9/11. The Daily News article features quotes from a Joseph Maya, described as a cousin of Johannemann. Maya reportedly stated that during this time after 9/11 Johannemann became reclusive and stopped associating with his family, something he had previously "delighted in". It must be stressed that in such a delicate situation it is not our place to theorize on the tragic death of a someone who was clearly a very private person and whom those outside his own family know very little about. However, it is our duty as a primary source of information for questions and repressed information surrounding the attacks of 9/11 to point out that Mr Johannemann was a key witness to what he described as "explosions" in the basement of the north tower of the WTC, and that his suicide has raised suspicions amongst some 9/11 researchers. Like William Rodriguez, Kenny Johannemann was working as a janitor at the World Trade Center towers on September 11th. He appeared on live TV on the morning of 9/11, a clip that later became viral on the internet and has been used in several 9/11 truth documentaries, including William Rodriguez's Last Man Out. In the clip (featured below) Johannemann states that a second "explosion" occurred in the north tower 10 minutes after an "explosion" in the south tower. The footage shows the two burning towers in the background before they were demolished.
Johannemann describes how he was in the basement and witnessed the elevator "blow up" and how he dragged a man out whose "skin was hanging off". This is identical to the story that William Rodriguez has related, the only difference being that he continues to tell it in the spotlight in public venues across the world. Kucinich Introduces Impeachment Articles Against Cheney Washingtonpost.com Tuesday, April 24, 2007; 6:09 PM REP. DENNIS J. KUCINICH, D-OHIO: Thank you very much for being here. We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. These words from the Declaration of Independence are instructive at this moment. Because not only whenever any form of government, but whenever any government official becomes destructive of the founding purposes, that official or those officials must be held accountable. Because I believe the vice president's conduct of office has been destructive to the founding purposes of our nation. Today, I have introduced House Resolution 333, Articles of Impeachment Relating to Vice President Richard B. Cheney. I do so in defense of the rights of the American people to have a government that is honest and peaceful. It became obvious to me that this vice president, who was a driving force for taking the United States into a war against Iraq under false pretenses, is once again rattling the sabers of war against Iran with the same intent to drive America into another war, again based on false pretenses. Let me cite from the articles of impeachment that were introduced this afternoon, Article I, that Richard Cheney had purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and the Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States armed forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security. That despite all evidence to the contrary, the vice president actively and systematically sought to deceive the citizens and the Congress of the United States about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That preceding the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the vice president was fully informed that no legitimate evidence existed of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The vice president pressured the intelligence community to change their findings to enable the deception of the citizens and the Congress of the United States. That in this the vice president subverted the national security interests of the United States by setting the stage for the loss of more than 3,300 United States service members and the loss of 650,000 Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $500 billion in war costs, which has increased our federal debt; the loss of military readiness within the United States armed services, through an overextension and lack of training and lack of equipment; and the loss of United States credibility in the world affairs and decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq. That with respect to Article II, that Richard Cheney manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and the Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida in order to justify the use of United States armed forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security. And that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the vice president actively and systematically sought to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida. That preceding to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the vice president was fully informed that no credible evidence existed of a working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida, a fact articulated in several official documents. With respect to Article III, that in his conduct while vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran, absent any real threat to the United States, and has done so with the United States's proven capability to carry out such threats, thus undermining the national security interests of the United States. That despite no evidence that Iran has the intention or the capability of attacking the United States, and despite the turmoil created by the United States's invasion of Iraq, the vice president has openly threatened aggression against Iran. Furthermore, I point out in the articles that Article VI of the United States Constitution states, and I quote, "This Constitution and the laws of the United States shall be made in pursuance thereof and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land. Any provision of an international treaty ratified by the United States becomes the law of the United States." The United States is signatory to the U.N. Charter, a treaty among the nations of the world. Article II, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter states, and I quote, "All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." The articles conclude by pointing out that the vice president's deception upon the citizens and the Congress of the United States that enabled the failed United States invasion of Iraq forcibly altered the rules of diplomacy so that the vice president recent belligerent actions toward Iran are destabilizing and counterproductive to the national security of the United States of America. These articles of impeachment are not brought forth lightly. I've carefully weighed the options available to members of Congress and found this path the path that is the most important to take. The justifications used to lead our nation to war have unquestionably been disproved. Brave soldiers and innocent civilians have lost their lives in a war the United States should never have initiated. The weight of the lies used to lead us into war has grown heavier with each death. Now is the time for Congress to examine the actions that led us into this war, just as we must work to bring the troops home. This resolution is a very serious matter, and I will urge the Committee on Judiciary to investigate and carefully consider this resolution. At this time, I'm happy to take any of your questions. QUESTION: Congressman, at this point do you have any other -- any fellow members support this? KUCINICH: At this very moment, the resolution is being transmitted to members of Congress. Because this resolution is so weighty in its import, it's going to be important for members of Congress to have sufficient time to study the articles. This is unlike any other type of legislation or resolution. This is not something that you can ask anyone to make a snap judgment on. It took me a while to come to this point. And I would expect that members of Congress, given the opportunity to review these articles, will be able to come to a conclusion consistent with their own concerns and the concerns of their constituents. QUESTION: But at this point, you stand alone, at this point? KUCINICH: At this point, I believe that I stand with millions of Americans who have expressed concern through their state legislatures, through petitions to Congress, through contact with their members of Congress, that something has to be done to reclaim our country's goodness, to reclaim a government which the American people want to be honest, want to be just. And so I do not stand alone. I have multitudes of people backing this. QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) Chairman Conyers to look at this? KUCINICH: I will discuss this with Chairman Conyers, now that this has been introduced, and I will ask for his consideration. And I will communicate this to all members of the House and ask them to give it the kind of thoughtful consideration that it deserves. KUCINICH: I might point out that -- that when you read the annotations here, you will see that everything that has been said in these articles has been carefully documented. In fact, I would imagine that some of you have even reported some of the statements, although perhaps the statements have not been challenged in this way until now. QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) KUCINICH: The question relates to why I'm bringing the articles of impeachment against Mr. Cheney, and not Mr. Bush. Is that it? QUESTION: Why solely Mr. Cheney? KUCINICH: Well, there's a practical reason here. And the practical reason is -- first of all, I want to say that each and every charge against Mr. Cheney relates to his conduct or misconduct in office. Now, with respect to the president. I think that it's very important that we start with Mr. Cheney. Because if we were to start with the president and pursue articles of impeachment, Mr. Cheney would then become president. It's significant and responsible to start in this way, because if the same charges would relate to the president as relate to the vice president, you would then have to go through the constitutional agony of impeaching two presidents consecutively. QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) KUCINICH: Well, actually -- I'll wait until that truck goes by here. Let me tell you the difference. The difference today is that this vice president is actively encouraging aggression against Iran. It is urgent that Congress take steps to check the abuse of power. And that's what this impeachment resolution will do. KUCINICH: There is no comparison whatsoever -- in any way, shape or manner -- between these articles of impeachment and the articles of impeachment which were presented to the House of Representatives in 1999. In fact, these articles of impeachment are deeply researched, will stand up in a discussion in the House and in the Senate. And I believe that they are -- that they're imperative to bring forth right now because the threat of war against Iran is very real. And this vice president cannot be permitted to continue to violate both the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter. QUESTION: Congressman, you're running for president. Are you hoping to get the others (OFF-MIKE)? KUCINICH: Each person has to -- each person will have to make his or her own decision. This goes beyond partisan terms. This is being done to defend our constitutional system of government. This is being done so that all those of us who took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States can understand that this impeachment is one valid way in furtherance of the defense of our Constitution. I don't see this as being distant from anyone, in any capacity in our government. Everyone must reflect on this. Years from now, people will ask, "Why didn't the United States government respond when they saw this threat to our democracy? Why didn't people inside the government respond?" if this doesn't move forward. And so this really isn't so much, I might add, about the vice president as it is about who we are as a people. What is it that we stand for? What kind of government do the people of the United States expect and deserve? KUCINICH: It's not appropriate for the government to lie to people. It is wrong for government officials -- you know, the vice president, in this case -- to take this nation into war based on lies. And so, again, this becomes a question of who we are as a people. And so this resolution 333, articles of impeachment against the vice president, will let future generations know that no one is above the law of this country and that Congresses have the specific responsibility to provide a check to administrative abuse of power. That's the way the framers set this government up. QUESTION: Congressman, Speaker Pelosi has said on more than one occasion she's not interested in impeachment. Have you had conversations with her on this, or some exchange, in your mind... KUCINICH: No, I have not discussed this with Speaker Pelosi. I want to stress that this is not a partisan action at all. I have not confided in anyone in the leadership of my party, because I take this action beyond partisanship, beyond party, as an obligation and commitment to my nation and my loyalty to America and my willingness to say, "Stop the lies. Stop the lying. Stop the dying that's occurring in Iraq over lies." It's imperative that America stand for the truth. It said in the Bible, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." Well, let then these articles of impeachment help set our nation free from the lies that have enveloped our governmental process, the lies that are trapping us still in a war in Iraq, the lies that could take us into a war against Iran. This is about the truth. QUESTION: Congressman, it's been said by some pundits that you're just introducing these articles to gain publicity for your presidential campaign. What do you make of those allegations? And do you think this is going to help you out in your race for the presidency?
KUCINICH: And I believe that the people of this country are demanding that someone stand up and anyone has been free to do this. Anyone in the House of Representatives could take similar action if they so choose, or could take action against the vice president or the president. QUESTION: Pelosi says it's not going anywhere. (CROSSTALK) KUCINICH: Have you talked to her today? QUESTION: Yes, I did. KUCINICH: Then I would say I have not talked to her. And as much as I admire the speaker, as much as I voted to support her, I feel that it's my obligation as a member of Congress to introduce these articles of impeachment. And I believe the American people will be the final arbiters as to whether or not these articles should go forward. QUESTION: Just to follow up, when you say the vice president led us into war, wouldn't that be President Bush? Isn't Cheney working for Bush? (inaudible) KUCINICH: Well, let's go into Article I. "Mr. Cheney: 'We know they have biological and chemical weapons.'" Said this in a press conference on March 17th, 2002. "We know they're pursuing nuclear weapons." He said this in a press briefing on March 19th, 2002. "He is pursuing, activity pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." He said this on "CNN Late Edition," March 24th. "We know he's got chemical and biological, and we know he's working on nuclear." "Meet the Press," May 19th: "But we know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." "There is no doubt he's amassing them against our friends, against our allies and against us." August 26th, 2002. On and on and on. "He has in fact activity and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." September 8th, 2002, "Meet the Press." "He has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." March 16th, "Meet the Press." This vice president was a driving force in trying to create the circumstances to justify the United States's attack against Iran. And he not only deceived the people of the United States, and the Congress of the United States, he deceived the American media. KUCINICH: And so these articles are tightly focused on the conduct of the vice president. And to the extent that they may reflect in some way on the conduct of the president of the United States, is another matter for another day. QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) KUCINICH: I think the record is very clear, that this vice president used his conduct of office to promote a war and Article I and Article II are very clear that he conducted himself in such a way as to use the power of his office to promote that war. And so this relates to the vice president. And I think I answered the question earlier about why the vice president and not the president. Anyone else? I want to thank you very much for being here. QUESTION: Do you have anyone you would identify as a replacement? If Vice President Cheney were impeached, it would have to be voted on the House and the Senate for confirmation. KUCINICH: That would be up to President Bush. Thank you. END Perry Kucinich, Dennis' younger brother, found dead in apartment By Karl Turner, The Plain Dealer cleveland.com Published: Wednesday, December 19, 2007, 9:09 PM Updated: Wednesday, December 19, 2007, 9:18 PM Perry Kucinich, 52, the youngest brother of Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, was found dead Wednesday morning at his apartment above Becker's Donuts & Bakery on East 71st Street in Cleveland. His brother Larry found him face down on the kitchen floor at about 9 a.m., Powell Caesar, spokesman for the Cuyahoga County Frank Miller, said. "Being face down doesn't indicate anything," Caesar said. "Whatever happened to him, gravity took hold, and he went down. There was no blunt force. No trauma. No sign of foul play." The exact cause of death is pending autopsy results. Larry Kucinich had taken his brother shopping Tuesday and then took him home but couldn't get an answer when he tried calling him Wednesday morning, Caesar said. Dennis Kucinich, who represents the 10th U.S. congressional district in Northeast Ohio, returned from Washington after learning of his brother's death. Upon arriving in Cleveland, the congressman said that his brother was a talented artist whose style and structure was influenced by such modern artists as Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. "He was a genius," the congressman said. "He had extraordinary insights. Although he struggled with mental illness, with the help of friends and family he led a productive life. We are a close family. It's just devastating." Perry Kucinich, the fifth of Frank and Virginia Kucinich's seven children, died eight days after his 52nd birthday and nearly 29 years to the day after he became world famous for robbing a bank. On Dec. 18, 1978, while then-Mayor Dennis Kucinich was downtown withdrawing money to make a symbolic gesture in protest of Cleveland Trust's refusal to refinance $5 million in notes the city owed that bank, Perry Kucinich, then 22, was making an unauthorized withdrawal from a Central National Bank branch on the East Side of town. The mayor withdrew nearly $9,200 from his personal savings and checking accounts at Cleveland Trust. His brother, unarmed, wearing a red tassel cap, sunglasses and black leather jacket, handed a teller at a Christmas card with "All your $ or die" written on the back. He took along a light blue suitcase in which to carry the stolen $1,396. Following the colorful description offered by witnesses, Cleveland police caught up with Perry Kucinich as he was walking home, reading the card and smiling. Then Mayor Kucinich told reporters that Perry had been under psychiatric care for five years. "I'm sure that he did not really understand what he was doing," he said. Reports of the event were published internationally. Two months later, Perry Kucinich was deemed incompetent to stand trail on a federal bank robbery charge. He is survived by his brothers, Dennis, Larry, Frank and Gary; and sisters, Theresa and Beth Ann. Funeral arrangements are incomplete. © 2011 cleveland.com. All rights reserved. Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution June 11, 2008, CNN Politics Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential candidate from Ohio, introduced a resolution to impeach President Bush into the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Kucinich announced his intention to seek Bush's impeachment Monday night, when he read the lengthy document into the record. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said she would not support a resolution calling for Bush's impeachment, saying such a move was unlikely to succeed and would be divisive. Most of the congressman's resolution deals with the Iraq war, contending that the president manufactured a false case for the war, violated U.S. and international law to invade Iraq, failed to provide troops with proper equipment and falsified casualty reports for political purposes. Kucinich also charges that Bush has illegally detained without charge both U.S. citizens and "foreign captives" and violated numerous U.S. laws through the use of "signing statements" declaring his intention to do so. Other articles address global warming, voting rights, Medicare, the response to Hurricane Katrina and failure to comply with congressional subpoenas. Last year, Kucinich introduced a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. But in November when Republicans tried to force a debate on the move, the attempt failed. Democrats voted to send the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, where committee chairman Rep. John Conyers has taken no action on it. An earlier resolution to impeach Cheney has languished in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties since May 2007. The House of Representatives has voted to impeach two presidents -- Andrew Johnson, in 1868, and Bill Clinton, in 1999 -- but both were acquitted by the Senate and remained in office. No U.S. vice president has been impeached. Kucinich dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president in January to focus on his re-election bid in Ohio. He handily won the Democratic primary in his district on March 4 and faces former State Representative Jim Trakas in the general election. Beth Ann Kucinich Tuesday, 11 November 2008 Proud Army Veteran, Beth Ann Kucinich, beloved youngest sister of Congressman Dennis Kucinich, died today, Veteran's Day, at Veteran's Hospital in Cleveland, after a battle with acute respiratory distress syndrome. She was 48 years old. Her family was at her side throughout the three week ordeal, as she struggled to survive while on life support. Beth Ann Kucinich served in the US Army at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. A talented musician as well as an artist, she sold many of her works of art to her fellow veterans at the Brecksville Veterans Center. Her specialty was drawing famous cartoon characters for friends and loved ones on special occasions. An avid heavy metal fan, she attended many local area concerts and practiced her own music with a guitar, with an extraordinary impression of Janis Joplin. "She was pure love. Every action, every sentiment, every piece of art, every word she spoke was an expression of love. Beth Ann was our family's angel, our 'Heavy Metal Angel', said her eldest brother Dennis. "Our brother, Perry passed away last December. "Beth Ann never got over Perry's sudden passing. The two had been inseparable. She talked about Perry constantly and she longed to be with him," Dennis said. She was the beloved mother of Asher; treasured sister of Dennis, Frank, Gary, Teresa, Larry, and the late Perry Kucinich; and dear aunt and a great aunt. The
Kucinich family will receive visitors at Golubski
Funeral Home, Kucinich's home targeted by vandals CLEVELAND, Nov. 11, 2008 (UPI) -- The Cleveland home of U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, was the target of paintball-wielding vandals, police records show. The wife of the congressman and former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate told authorities that vandals, likely teenagers, had hit their home with paint balls, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Tuesday. The newspaper said police reports indicate Elizabeth Kucinich told officers she heard a banging noise at 1:30 a.m. last Thursday and noticed her house had been vandalized with paint balls. She said the vandals returned again the next night and lobbed more paint balls. Police told the newspaper they have no suspects in the case. Ezra Harel dies of heart attack By Eytan Avriel and Rotem Starkman 00:00 26.11.03, Latest update 01:54 26.11.03 Israeli industrialist Ezra Harel died Monday night from a heart attack while sailing on a yacht off the Spanish coast. His body will be flown back to Israel. Harel had diverse business interests, including in real estate, security, communications and tourism. He owned a 65 percent controlling stake in ICTS International, which supplies security checks at airports and is traded on Nasdaq at a market value of $33 million. Harel was one of fellow tycoon Nochi Dankner's partners in the Third Millennium tourism corporation, which controls the Tzabar group. He also owned 24 percent of, and chaired, ARM Raanana, which built hundreds of apartments in central Israel during the 1990s. One of Harel's less successful ventures was Rogosin, which collapsed, failing to meet repayments of some NIS 80 million to its bondholders, and several million more to its banks and other creditors. Following Rogosin's downfall, criminal suits were filed against Harel, and an investigation was opened by the Israel Securities Authority. Both Harel and his father Aryeh Mualem, former chairman of Rogosin, were arrested on charges related to the company. The authority will decide in the next few days whether, and how, to progress with the case. Attorney Pinhas Rubin, Rogosin's receiver, said it was fitting, for the moment, to mourn, rather than dwell on the legal issues. Harel's lawyer, Sinai Alias, said it was premature to see what the legal implications were of his death. Some in the business community yesterday thought that, though the criminal suits against Harel would certainly be dropped, the civil matters were more complex, as many people who had lost a great deal of money would be reluctant to let the matter be. Among Harel's other holdings were Harmony Group of the Netherlands, and Lidan, an Israeli firm. Details of his funeral have not yet been determined.
|
