[A repost - see AC's Anti-Fascist Research Bin, 2006-07 archive, for subsequent parts of the Lexington Comair crash series.]
Monday morning, weekend already fading into memory. There is an ache impaling the axis of your brain. You head for the corner coffee shop, order a large. A layer of innocence is about to be stripped away from you like a coal deposit at a Pennsylvania butte but you have no idea and pick out a muffin. A ruffled newspaper waits at a table. You sit down to the front-page story on a plane crash near Lexington, Kentucky. No lights on the runway (?). All passengers dead.
What?
There is a book about the locale, Sally Denton's Bluegrass Conspiracy, a book that never received much press. You recall some of the details ... CIA-trained police, cocaine smuggling, political murders. Who'd think to find so much political intrigue in stove-pipe country? Off the beaten path. The very idea.
The governor at the time was involved in the Bluegrass scandal, and a criminal network with ties to Oliver North and Adnan Khashoggi. They were known as "The Company."
But this downed commuter jet in horse country had nothing to do with all that ancient history, you tell yourself, stirring in a little raw sugar.
The plane taxied on the wrong runway ... heart-breaking. You imagine the plane rolling down a black, short runway ... the moment when the headlights caught the fence, the trees, the furious attempt to rise clear of them before the quake of rent metal from below ... The lone dispatcher had been distracted by paper work. A series of ludicrous errors. Pointless horrors, meaningless existence.
The authorities ruled out foul play.
You take the paper cup and newspaper, push through the doors into the autumn sunlight, content that life - now seasoned by a warm neuro-toxic glow - is merely meaningless and bleak, tainted not by foul play but common human failings. 
Two days pass. You watch the news, back to the murky runway, the 40-degree error in take-off heading, the burning plane. That flight number ... 5191. You pick a name from the Flight 5191 passenger list, Fenton Dawson, and do a Google search ...
Dawson is survived by his wife and had two children.
He had a steady job.
Fenton Dawson: ACS employee was en route to Washington
Fenton Dawson, who worked for Affiliated Computer Services in the government solutions department, was on his way to a business conference in Washington, D.C., when Flight 5191 crashed...1 Affiliated Computer Services ... ACS ... a company currently under investigation by the Justice Department for back-dating stock options. Fenton Dawson, the government liaison at ACS, was on his way to Washington to attend a conference – other sources said seminar, minor difference – and the pilots tried to take off on the wrong runway. A horrible, pointless death among many. 
The founder and chairman of the ACS board is Mr. Darwin Deason, a generous contributor to the Republican Party. Deason's "partner in crime" at ACS, and a ranking company director, is J. Livingston Kosberg - a former S&L thief. Pete Brewton, in The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, wrote: "Gibraltar Savings, whose chairman, J. Livingston Kosberg, was a prominent fund-raiser in Texas for the Democratic Party."2 Patriots. And "prominent," too. Their company lost a government solutions man on August 27, 2006 - no one will ask him what he knows about back-dating stock options or anything else. Ponder that one. A flush of suspicion freezes your gaze ... Back to the Internet, take another look at that S&L, get to know the pre-history of Fenton Dawson's employer.
At Gibralter Savings down in Dallas, there was this nasty business ...
"ROBERT STRAUSS, Dallas attorney; U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; friend of George Bush and former business partner with James A. Baker III; he and his son, Richard, were involved in a number of failed Texas S&Ls, including Lamar and Gibraltar." - http://www.freewebs.com/ciascams/
Yes, "CiaScams." Gibralter, like the other S&L heists of the '80s, was a CIA/Mafia operation.
CIA/Mafia, like ACS, with "prominent" friends at the pinnacles of both political parties.
Dawson must have known many of them.
A little searching on the net turns up another interesting connection to ACS - the destruction of the World Trade Center, or at least the plotline.
ACS approved the change in Mohammed Atta's visa status in the US from tourist to student, according to the testimony of Huffman Aviation CEO Rudy Dekkers, and Tom Blodgett, a managing director at ACS, before the Kean Commission.3
How far, exactly, was ACS involved in CIA business? The GovExec website reports, "in November 2003, Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp. acquired a government contracts division of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., a smaller firm, headquartered in Dallas, with DEEP CONNECTIONS TO THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES."4 The very idea.
The intimate bond was apparent when it emerged that it was an ACS division purchased by Lockheed responsible for torture at Guantanamo Bay.5
What a busy little computer company.
One week before the Comair crash in Lexington, on August 20, 2006, the Associated Press released a story on the "ACS Bribery and Federal Contract Fixing" scandal: "Affiliated Computer Services Inc., one of the companies negotiating with the Family and Social Services Administration for a state welfare eligibility contract worth an estimated $1 billion over 10 years, formerly employed FSSA Secretary Mitch Roob." But most significantly, "Privately-owned" ES&S and Sequoia voting machine concerns are effectively controlled by the same company - Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) of Dallas, Texas."
And it was an election year ...While digging about, you will find an anonymous blogger who observes that ACS and ES&S are "a major player in providing technology services to the US court system, USPS, DOT, FCC, the US Senate, the White House, and several other government agencies.... What does this mean? It's an interesting concentration of power. If one controls the datastream of an organization, one has a great deal of knowledge of what it's really doing. Actually, in this case, it would be interesting to know the relationship between ACS and the GOP and/or the Bush family."6
Fenton Dawson was just the man to know all about that relationship. But he's dead ...
NOTES
1.) http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/15385951.htm?source=rss&channel=kentucky_news
2) Brewton, P., The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, 1992, p. 241.
3) Library of Congress release:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2002_h/hju78298_0.htm#7
- "TESTIMONY OF TOM BLODGETT, MANAGING DIRECTOR, BUSINESS PROCESS SOLUTIONS, AFFILIATED COMPUTER SERVICES, INC.," and "TESTIMONY OF RUDI DEKKERS, CEO, HUFFMAN AVIATION INTERNATIONAL, INC."
4) Shane Harris, "Intelligence Inc.," May 15, 2005.
http://www.govexec.com/features/0505-15/0505-15s1.htm.
5) http://www.apfn.net/MESSAGEBOARD/03-09-05/discussion.cgi.53.html.
6) Anon., "A Parable of the US 2000 Election,"
http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/vote2000.html.
PART TWO: The Teterboro Incident
Had he lived, it's certain that Fenton Dawson, a government liaison at ACS, would have been called as a witness in any federal probe into the litany of illegalities that the company had racked up, including stock fraud, domestic spying, torture at "Gitmo," votescam, even a possible role in 9/11, any or all of these excesses ... assuming, of course, investigation and perhaps even renovation of Bush's congressional Mustang Ranch by an incoming Democratic majority ... My God, you think ... forty-eight unsuspecting passengers on that flight may have been murdered to silence a witness to a multitude of crimes. (At this point, you naively assumed there was only one passenger on board with a security clearance.) The motive was transparent: If anyone knew where the bloody ACS/CIA bones were buried, it was a government point-man.
But shallow media reports weren't much help ... "Dawson graduated from Trigg County High School in 1978 and worked in Lexington for Affiliated Computer Services ... the 46-year old was headed to Washington on business ... " The business that ACS does is grounds for a protracted prison sentence in most civilized countries.
Why precisely did Dawson leave home in the middle of the night to board Flight 5191? Didn't other press reports state that he was headed for an unspecified "conference," or "seminar," in DC? The questions left begging were aggravating. So were the newspaper reports, the fake caring. "' ... ACS is a tightly-knit organization, and we are deeply saddened by the loss of one of our employees ...'" To read the newswire stories, you'd think that Dawson worked for Human Rights Watch. ACS is a vote-rigging, bribing, Islamo-torturing, techno-fascist, criminal business empire with ties to the pyramidal eyes of both parties, a CIA front run by a pair of former Dallas S&L thieves with Total Information Awareness Disorder. And ruptures of scandal at ACS were sinking the ship:
Fraud: North Carolina Terminates $171 Million Medicaid Contract with ACS - The state alleges breach of contract by ACS; ACS responds with legal action. ... said Kevin Lightfoot, vice president of corporate communications at ACS. ...
www.techspend.com/.../document.php?dA=northcarolinaterminates& PHPSESSID=1e88c4f6cd2705577b450f62d52421d8
ID theft: Another week, another identity theft scandal: ... computers from the offices of Motorola’s human resources services provider, Affiliated Computer Services. ...
www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/ /learn_more/002232indiv.html
Bribery: Canada: ACS, Cops Charged in Camera Bribery Scandal ... Wednesday formally charged photo enforcement vendor Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) with bribing ... www.thenewspaper.com/news/09/965.asp
Illegal lobbying and contract fixing: " ... ACS has donated $12,500 to Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels' campaign committee over the past three years, including the maximum $5,000 each of the past two years. ... " (Daniels subsequently reviewed a billion-dollar ACS contract, a possible conflict-of-interest.7)
The cockroaches were taking over the house.
Was there ever a company on the third planet more corrupt, pound for pound, than this one?
ACSgate is a multi-faceted beast, an octopus. It embraces the Republican Party: "Subj: NewsFlash: Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) contributed $258,275 to repubs., $0 to dems, 1995 - 2000 ... "8 The very idea ...
Break time.
The election theme will recur time and again but you had no idea and stopped to watch the morning news: "President and first lady help ‘Make a Difference...'" A presidential plug. That's all you need at the break of dawn. ‘Today’ host Matt Lauer talks to George and Laura Bush about the rebuilding efforts and their help delivering a Habitat for Humanity house ... "
Well, at least he isn't a full-time pariah - there's still time for charitable pursuits, you tell yourself. Break over, back to work. Bush's supposed altruism and Lauer's nasal voice fade to background babble.
Our ACS data mining on the Internet proves to be a highly-constructive process:
ACS Officer Looted a Savings-and-Loan
August 16, 2006
The ABCs of ACS Lawsuits
Filed under: News You Can Actually Use, Actually
"... There’s more information regarding a failed savings-and-loan in which Deason was involved with ... J. Livingston Kosberg. The two also were involved in an ACS spin-off that filed for bankruptcy in Dallas federal court in 2001 and a lawsuit over its demise, which resulted in a cash settlement–with Deason himself paying out $3 million...."
The miscreant's crimes followed him to the computer business: "ACS Adds SEC Investigation To Bribery Charges, Other Woes."9
This thriving computer company and criminalized sectors of government were symbiotic.
Do they still do background checks in the District of Columbia? "Lawrence C. Hale is the Chief Information Security Officer for ACS. He joined the Company in January 2005 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he served as deputy director of the National Cyber Security Division's Computer Emergency Readiness Team.... While at the Pentagon, he was a member of the Joint Staff Information Operations Response Cell during a number of cyber events and exercises that helped shape the U.S. government's computer security policy...."10
Our ACS crime-data mining goes on ... the surfeit of ill-gotten profits - but you're looking for specific answers to the death of Fenton Dawson and 48 others. Then you find this - A PRIOR PLANE CRASH: "... ACS recently said it plans to sell a corporate jet it originally purchased from a firm owned by ACS founder and chairman Darwin Deason. The firm, DDH Aviation, has fallen under the scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration as part of an investigation into a February 2005 crash at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport that injured 20 people. The jet is owned by DDH ..."11
The downed flight was a "bootleg," a violation of aviation law. The Dallas Business Journal reported in July 2005 that it's "not uncommon for owners of expensive business jets to put their planes to work earning revenue - without benefit of obtaining a Part 135 certificate - by flying others in what the industry calls 'bootleg' charter flights." There are "numerous other variations on that theme that are equally ILLEGAL, according to industry sources ..." Another broken law to throw on the ACS stockpile.
The Dallas Business Journal reported on July 10, 2005 that DDH "declined to comment." Curiously enough, the Federal Aviation Administration, in a July 8th letter to Platinum Jet Management, proposed a fine of $1.86 million, "which in the industry is considered unusually large." But the plane's owner was not touched by the FAA: "Deason's company that owned the aircraft - DDH Operating Ltd. - has not been cited by the FAA for any violations."12
The Teterboro crash was similar to the Lexington disaster: A CL-600 Bombadier (The Comair plane was also a Bombadier) corporate jet bound for Chicago with 12 people on board shot off runway no. 6 during take-off early in the morning, about 7:23 am, colliding with two automobiles on Route 46, leaving two people with serious head trauma, and plowing through a wall at the Strawberry Clothing Warehouse across the highway. The jet skidded across Route 46. Further casualties were prevented only by the red light at Huyler Street, where 20 to 30 westbound vehicles waited for the light to change. The passengers were injured and doused with jet fuel but managed to walk away, despite the fires that erupted at the clothing store.13 (The Teterboro Airport would be in the news again on October 11, 2006 when Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger, his flight instructor, would take flight there in a Cirrus SR20 en route to Tennessee, only to collide fatally 13 minutes later with the Belaire condominium at 524 East 72nd Street.)
Many in the media assumed, because the temperature was 20 degrees that morning, the cause of the crash was "ice." But according to NTSB staff and wire reports, "Investigators said Thursday [February 3] they have found NO EVIDENCE OF ICE on the wings of a corporate jet that skidded off a runway, crossed a busy highway and slammed into a warehouse. [....] None saw any evidence of ice on the wings or other surfaces of the plane, the National Transportation Safety Board said."14
John Kimberling of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the pilot, told investigators that the plane's controls "MALFUNCTIONED," forcing him to abort takeoff.15 Now we are looking at the possibility of sabotage.
"Five of the passengers aboard the runaway CL-600 were employees of Kelso & Co., a private-equity investment firm with offices at 320 Park Ave. in Manhattan, and three were business associates, company officials said."
AP reported that day after the accident, "Kelso & Co. DECLINED TO IDENTIFY THE FIVE EMPLOYEES and three guests on board."16 Why?
Kelso & Co. is another firm with considerable political influence. In 1999, K&C donated $7,000 to the short-lived Dan Quayle presidential campaign.16 "Quayle surprised everybody in the most positive way with his insights, judgments and ability to net out the issues," Joseph S. Schuchert Jr., chairman of Kelso & Co., explained to Business Week in October 2005.17
Once again, you think, contemporary physicists must be correct in assuming the existence of a quantum dimension parallel to our own. And it was right there in the pages of the media all along, hiding in plain sight ...
NOTES
7) AP story, "Company vying for $1 billion state contract had problems elsewhere," August 20, 2006.
8) http://www.dnovus.com/companynews.asp.
9) http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181501504.
10) Paul McDougall, "ACS Adds SEC Investigation To Bribery Charges, Other Woes," InformationWeek, Mar 7, 2006. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:oEVms9sgYMwJ:www.acs-inc.com/about/bios/larry.html+%22Lynn+Blodgett%22+and+HOMELAND&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=6
11) Ibid.
12) Ibid.
13) The National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination, "NC4 INCIDENT MONITORING CENTER FEATURED INCIDENT: "Teterboro, NJ Plane Crash," http://www.nc4.us/nc4/NJPlaneCrash.php.
14) See: http://mirrorh.com/timeline2005.html
15) Anon., "Pilot in Teterboro crash goes home," PhillyBurbs.com. Feb/18/2005.
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/articlePrint.cfm?id=452359
15) AP release, "Authorities Probe N.J. Plane Crash," cf. FoxNews.com, February 3, 2005. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146275,00.html
16) Press release, Center for Responsive Politics, "BUNDLES PROLIFERATE IN LATEST PRESIDENTIAL FILINGS," July 22, 1999.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pressreleases/july22_99_release.htm
17) Anon., "They're Not Telling Quayle Jokes At Cerberus," Business Week, October 3, 2005.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_40/b3953117.htm
••••••
PART THREE: Darwin's Devolution and CIA-Republican Terrorism 101
At this point, hard questions come begging with a tin cup. Did executives of ACS orchestrate the Teterboro crash? (it was a "bootleg" charter and only a select few knew about it: Deason, his fellow DDH officers, the nameless Kelso employees on the plane, their three guests. It was a hushed-up flight. This narrows the list of possible suspects, if indeed the plane was sabotaged, and this is the topic of part four.) Complicity might be easier to establish if the identities of the Kelso & Co. officers on that illegal DDH charter were known. Spokespeople for Kelso and Deason's DDH stone-walled reporters. So you begin with secrecy, and that speaks ... maybe volumes. Deason knows a thing or two about corporate turpitude, but is he capable of murder?
A profile of the ACS founder, published in D (for Dallas) Magazine in 2003, is revealing ... it wasn't illustrated by Goya, but could have been:
"Accounts differ as to what exactly happened aboard the Cartoush II during its pleasure cruise in the Bahamas in September 2001. Darwin Deason denies that he threatened to kill the chef. Others claim he did. 'There certainly was a threat of getting a gun and doing something,' says one person intimately acquainted with the details of the incident. As for the chef, he isn't saying much."
Deason's guests on this voyage included ex-Cowboy punter Mike Saxon, Carter Abercrombie of Dallas, and their wives. The yacht sluiced along the Exuma island chain, the sun was high "when the trouble started." Deason "flew into a rage. 'The guy was definitely having a psychotic episode,' says a source. He began yelling at the chef, Vinny Feola, who locked himself in his quarters. As the standoff dragged on for hours, the ship's captain, Don Hopkins, worked the satellite phone, frantically trying to reach someone back in Dallas who could mollify Deason. Another source says that Deason pulled Saxon and Abercrombie aside and asked them, 'Would you guys be willing to beat the shit out of the chef for me if I asked you to?'"18 (Later, Deason couldn't recall exactly what had incited him, but grumbled that the chef had been "insubordinate.")
Deason's tirades shrink in comparison to the violence he commits as a CIA contractor. Lest we forget the torture charges, People's Weekly World reported in 2004 that the CIA torture scandal was in fact the ACS torture scandal: "According to the Springfield, Va.-based Federal Times, ACS in 2002" – a year BEFORE Lockheed bought out ACS Government Services – "provided 30 intelligence analysts and 15 to 20 INTERROGATORS for the U.S. Navy’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
The feds and ACS execs attempted to keep a lid on the deal for obvious reasons. At the time, violations of the Geneva Convention didn't have the blessing of congress. They conspired to keep it covert "because the $13.3 million contract states that ACS was to provide technology services to the government, not interrogators and intelligence analysts. According to the Federal Times, the U.S. Southern Command contacted the GSA in October 2002 for help in hiring interrogators for the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The GSA put the contract up for bid, but not as an intelligence-gathering contract." There was a cover story. "Instead, the contract stated that that GSA was seeking information technology workers to assist with a project that the U.S. Department of Interior was overseeing at Fort Huachuca, Ariz."19 It can safely be said that Deason, founder of ACS, a "tightly-knit organization" of spooks and "interrogators," is capable of extreme, second-hand violence. When the CIA needed competent torturers, to whom did it turn? The Special Forces, Sandanista death squads, the School of the Americas? It turned to a scandal-ridden computer company in Dallas. This isn't to say that he was responsible for Teterboro or the Lexington crash, but he was capable of it.
Hold that thought.
CIA-REPUBLICAN TERRORISM 101
Theoretical problem - you are a a CIA-Republican terrorist and your well-financed cell intends to bring down an airplane to kill off troublesome witnesses. You might hire a "mechanic" to sabotage the fuel line, short-circuit the flight controls, plant a radio-bomb in the cargo hold - but these forms of subterfuge might be detected in the post-crash forensic investigation. You might call a favor from Pakistan's ISI, arrange to have a suicide-bomber on board. But suicide-bombers are mentally erratic and explosive residue is traceable. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal might connect the dots, and you've been wary of the press since last year's gay sex scandal, not to mention the stock manipulation and torture charges hanging over your head.
What to do?
Destroy the plane without messy explosives and undependable suicide-bombers.
Clue: It only takes a "MOMENT." (Any trained pilot will know the answer immediately.)
The solution will be revealed in part four.
NOTES
18) Tim Rogers, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless," D Magazine, June 1, 2003.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_qa3862/is_200306/
ai_n9293138
19) Jeremy Ryan, "Contractor Probed on Guantanamo Deal," People's Weekly World Newspaper, August 12, 2004.
http://www.pww.org/article/
articleview/5604/1/227/
••••••
PART FOUR: FLIGHT LESSON
In our hypothetical example (part three) - CIA-Republican terrorist facing criminal charges plots to crash a plane to silence witnesses - it's assumed that this practice is fairly common. Is it?
Families of the victims in this documented instance have their own perspective: "Havana, Oct 3 (Prensa Latina) Cuba investigators held Tuesday the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) responsible of the explosion in mid-air of a Cuban airplane with 73 people aboard in 1976.... "20
Pan Am 103 was destroyed by CIA-Republican terrorists facing criminal charges, too. Look not to Libya, but to "Coreans": "... It was the McKee team that reportedly uncovered evidence that a 'rogue' CIA unit called COREA, based in Wiesbaden, was doing business with Monzar Al-Kassar [Adnan Khashoggi's co-conspirator in the Iran-contra scandal], Syrian 'arms dealer and drug trafficker'. Al-Kassar 'was part of the secret network run by US Lt. Colonel Oliver North.' Outraged that COREA was doing business with a Syrian 'who made money from drugs/arms/terrorism', the McKee team 'decided to fly to CIA HQ in Virginia to expose COREA'. They flew on Pan Am flight 103 ... "21Dorothy Hunt. Carmel researcher Mae Brussell found that she was carrying a fat bundle of cash with consecutive serial numbers ... "Dorothy Hunt, the wife of convicted White House 'plumber' E. Howard Hunt, was killed, along with 41 other people, when United Airlines Flight 553 crashed near Chicago's Midway Airport on Dec. 8, 1972. Mrs. Hunt, who, like her husband, had worked for the CIA, was allegedly carrying $100,000 in "hush" money so her husband would not implicate White House officials in Watergate. The day after the crash, White House aide Egil (Bud) Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Association — the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash. A week later, Nixon's deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA, and five weeks later Dwight Chapin, the president's appointment secretary, was dispatched to Chicago to become a top executive with United Airlines. The airplane crash was blamed on equipment malfunctions."
Langley patriots consider aviation a well-stone of assassination politics. Ron Brown might look into it if he was alive. And if your wife or children are on board - who's to know? A CIA-Republican terrorist has no regard for human life (he is a totalitarian gestalt of armed "conservative principles," and empathy is for weepy liberals).
This is a fine science. It doesn't necessarily stoop to wild-eyed Saudis with box-cutters or radio bombs planted in the cargo hold - that's for show. There are more subtle means. As in the martial arts, the CIA-Republican terrorist looks for a weakness to exploit:
"Weight Is Focus of Plane Safety" - New York Times.22 American Airlines has a web page on weight factors here:
http://www.americanwaymag.com/aw/issue/vantage_point.asp?archive_date=9/1/2004
The distribution of weight is a critical factor in any airplane flight. A miscalculation can be fatal, and there are standard formulae used by every pilot before every takeoff to determine if the plane is balanced properly. The NewsReleaseWire stie published a story the day after the Comair crash that makes this same point:
"Passenger Obesity as a Contributing Factor in Commuter Airplane Crashes
"In January 2003 an Air Midwest Beech 1900 with 19 passengers aboard failed to gain altitude quickly enough and crashed into an airport hanger during takeoff in Charlotte, North Carolina. All passengers and crew died in the incident. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Air Midwest used "substantially inaccurate weight and balance calculations for company airplanes," which were based on incorrect "average passenger and baggage weights ... "23
Aviation News recently had a story on a plane brought down by its weight and distribution of the same: "MAY 2006: weight distribution factor in West Caribbean MD-82 accident - French newspaper Le Figaro, quoting an anonymous source, reported that the West Caribbean MD-82 that crashed in Venezuela, August 2005, was overloaded. It reportedly had a takeoff weight of 70,300 kilos, where mtow is 67,600 kilos. The cargo was badly distributed as well..."24 An airplane has a center of gravity and this must be respected or ...
There's this: "'A weighty issue. And a balancing act too' - [A] commuter airliner has all chairs occupied as the Captain rotates. After a brief normal flight profile the nose of the airplane pitches up to the extreme. After a breathtaking stall the airplane plunges back onto the airport surface killing all on board. What happened here? ... Because the flight was full, and standard passenger and baggage weights were used, there is a possibility that the aircraft was severely overweight and out of CG. The second possibility is that the baggage in the aft cargo bay shifted after rotation creating an extreme aft CG. Lastly, there is a potential mechanical problem in the elevator mechanism itself."25
Back to Teterboro, New Jersey:
First Findings See No Brakes Used in Most Of Jet's Path
"The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash of a corporate jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on Wednesday, said yesterday that its findings indicated no braking system was in effect until the plane was 5,000 feet along the 6,013-foot runway. NORMALLY, A LIFTOFF TAKE PLACE AROUND 3,000 FEET ..."
The plane did not lift-off at Teterboro because, according to the NTSB, the baggage was improperly loaded.
But before turning to the matter of airfoil balance, this factor, raised over a year before the tragedy at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, is significant:
"NORMALLY, A LIFTOFF TAKE PLACE AROUND 3,000 FEET."
Hold that thought. Don't forget it.
The cause of the Teterboro crash was reported by the New York Times on March 24, 2005:
"Plane in Crash Was Imbalanced, Investigators Say"
The corporate jet that crashed into a warehouse in Teterboro, N.J., last month with 11 people on board was carrying too much of its weight in front, federal investigators said in a preliminary report released yesterday ..."26
Excess baggage loaded toward the front of the plane weighed down the nose. The jet was unable to lift and take flight. The pilot thought it was a "malfunction" initially (see part two), but the failure to lift off the tarmac was due to baggage load distribution. It was that simple. The plane accelerated on runway six, reached 3,000 feet ... but gravity held the nose down and the jet would not disengage from the tarmac. The pilots attempted to take-off for another 2,000 more feet ... it stubbornly refused to go airborne. At 5,000 feet they hit the brakes and aborted the flight. Too late.
The plane shot off the end of the runway, across the street and into the warehouse.
The baggage was loaded on the illegal charter flight by Darwin Deason's tiny DDH, Inc. He owned the jet and the charter company. Was the flight deliberately sabotaged by the CIA's ranking contract torturer? You come to realize that this may be the only possible explanation by considering that - before ANY flight - a trained pilot calculates the weight of passengers and luggage to determine if it is safe to fly. AND there are standard calculations for weight distribution. The pilot does not want to die. He knows that if the weight and balance of the plane is off, he and his passengers could perish. So he is certain before setting off down the runway that all weight factors are correct.
The pilots at Teterboro did their calculations. They assumed the plane was loaded by professionals and properly balanced. Satisfied that it was safe to fly, they headed out, unaware that the plane had been disabled. There was sufficient appearance of wrong-doing here to blind a saint. The cargo loaders knew their jobs, and the balance of the plane is ALWAYS a critical issue before take-off. The pilots were confident that the trim was correct and expected the plane to lift-off. Did DDH employees - a sample of whom we've already visited at Guantanamo Bay - deliberately pile cargo toward the front of the plane, and feed false data to the pilots? How else to account for the ludicrous mishap at Teterboro?
It is far more probable that the cargo was loaded improperly by design than human error - it was all piled toward the front, and that's how a trained CIA-Republican terrorist would commit mass murder.
NOTES
20) Anon., "Cuba: CIA Sabotaged Cuban Plane - Terrorist act of 1976 was at agency's behest," Prensa Latina, 03 October 2006."
http://www.cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news.asp?ItemID=872
21) http://spookterror.blogspot.com/2005/08/lockerbie-bomb-london-bombs.html
22) Mae Brussell, "30 Watergate Witnesses Have Met Violent Deaths," Midnight, July 12, 1976.
http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Watergate%20Deaths.html
23) Mark Schrimsher (president, CalorieLab, Inc.), "Passenger obesity as a contributing factor in commuter airplane crashes (backgrounder)," August 28, 2006.
http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseWire/default.cfm?Action=ReleaseDetail&ID=13628
24) http://aviation-safety.net/news/news.php?field=datumcode&var=200605%25
25) http://stoenworks.com/A%20Weighty%20Issue.html
26) Patrick McGeehan, "Plane in Crash Was Imbalanced, Investigators Say," New York Times, March 24, 2005.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_transportation_safety_board/index.html?s=closest&query=TETERBORO%20(NJ)&field=geo&match=exact
••••••
PART FIVE: TETERBORO & THE CIA
Before returning to Lexington, you have to know about the airport in Teterboro, about whispers overheard at the pilot's coffee shop, insinuations, rumors, gaps in the record, men in uniform, obscure movements in the middle of the night ...The town is the home of Bendix Corp. - a company that demonstrated during the Big (German-American industrial-based) One that Nazi total-war profiteering is a capitalist's wet dream, a member of the notorious Stuttgart-based Bosch patent pool that sent American military data to Germany as late as May, 1940 - today, a division of AlliedSignal.27
Teterboro has a busy little airport. Some very well-known aviators have called it home and made their mark in history - you would recognize their names in an instant:
"April-July 2001: Hani Hanjour Receives More Flight Training; Rents Small Aircraft - According to the 9/11 Commission, soon after settling in the area, hijacker Hani Hanjour starts receiving 'ground instruction' at AIR FLEET TRAINING SYSTEMS, a flight school in Teterboro, New Jersey. While there, he flies the Hudson Corridor: 'a low-altitude "hallway" along the Hudson River that passes New York landmarks like the World Trade Center.' His instructor refuses a second request to fly the Corridor, 'because of what he considered Hanjour’s poor piloting skills.'... "28Shortly, another aviator connected to 9/11 will surface in Teterboro, but first Air Fleet:
From the Air Fleet web site, we learn that the facility is "the only Part 141 school within easy public transportation reach of New York City." The school is run by the Bopps - you remember them - there was a comet named after them. "The Bopps, who own and operate Air Fleet, have a much longer family history of involvement in aviation. Beginning in the 1950s, Paul Arnold (Susan Bopp's father) was the Chief Pilot for Bendix Corporation, now better known as AlliedSignal, for more than twenty years. During that time, he also assisted with the development of some of the equipment now used in aircraft. He was also responsible for instilling a love of aviation in his daughter, Susan. ... "29
There is some tension in Teterboro among the locals concerning obscure, "immoral" parapolitical activities - that is, apart from Nazi collaborations:
Troubling uses for Teterboro - Moral issues raised over flight bookings
MIKE KELLY
10 April 2005
The Bergen Record
... one of the most disturbing revelations about recent Teterboro jet traffic almost slipped under the public's radar screen. It seems that Teterboro was the launching pad for a secret flight in which U.S. agents sent a suspected al-Qaida operative to Syria, where he says he was tortured.
The story of Maher Arar has emerged as a focal point in congressional debates over the secret Bush administration policy of "rendition" - or sending suspected terrorists to nations where they can be tortured. But almost lost in the story is this footnote: After American agents apprehended Arar in late September 2002 and held him for two weeks, they secretly took him to Teterboro and hopped aboard a chartered private jet that eventually made its way to Syria.
Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who denies he is a terrorist, was released 10 months later. He is now suing the United States, claiming he was brutally tortured in Syria.
Teterboro Airport was used in the early 1990s by federal agents to fly mob boss John Gotti on a small chartered plane to a federal prison in Illinois. The
airport was also linked in the 1980s to a Virginia firm that chartered private jets through a Teterboro-based carrier to fly CIA agents and U.S. military commando units on covert missions.
But the secret trip by U.S. agents with Maher Arar raises an additional concern. Obviously, the agents wanted to keep a low profile. But it's one thing to use Teterboro's privacy to transport a convicted mob boss or CIA agents. It's something else when the airport is used to maintain the secrecy of a controversial program that involves torturing suspected terrorists.
Is this why North Jersey residents should endure the hassles of Teterboro? That question is important, not just for the moral debate over torture of suspected terrorists, but because of the thousands of northern New Jersey residents whose lives are affected by Teterboro's low-flying jets.
With so many ordinary citizens in the flight path of these jets, it's important to question the safety and noise of the airport. But once safety or noise is debated, then authorities should discuss what kinds of flights come in and out of Teterboro. Are we interrupting the lives of thousands of area residents for the convenience of guests at Trump's wedding, professional basketball stars and now possible torture victims? And if U.S. authorities plan to use Teterboro for more rendition flights, will the airport and surrounding community need additional security?
All sides agree that the neighborhoods around Teterboro Airport are too congested. After a jet rolled off a Teterboro runway in February and smashed into a warehouse, even airport supporters conceded they wished there was more room at the end of runways for crash barriers. But the far-more-basic question about Teterboro is this: Who uses this airport anyway?
The story of Maher Arar and his possible torture adds a moral component to that question about Teterboro's future and the federal grants to soundproof schools. It's about time. Ultimately, the dangers of Teterboro's jets are really
a moral issue.30
Here are some of the *immoral* CIA rendition flights from Teterboro, complete with tail numbers.31 ...
N829MG – N259SK
Teterboro (USA) Hahn (Germany) 07/06/2003
N1HC
Teterboro (USA) Northolt (UK) 16/12/2003
Budapest (Hungary) Teterboro (USA) 09/09/2005
N50BH
Teterboro (USA) Coventry (UK) 02/04/2005
Then there was N829MG-N259SK - a peek at the plane's registration files is revealing.32 ...
A Gulfstream III (Grumman G-1159A), this plane carried Canadian national Maher Arar from the US to Jordan, where he was transferred overland to Syria. He was tortured during 13 months of detention without charge,
and was released in October 2003. The plane has also made over 100 trips to Guantánamo Bay. There are 380 relevant FAA recorded landings or takeoffs between March 2001 and May 2005. Registration: registered by
MJG Aviation in October 2000 in Florida; the company dissolved July 2004. MJG’s owner also owned Presidential Aviation, a company first registered in
Florida in 1998 and dissolved November 2004. The aircraft was re-registered as 259SK in March 2004 by S&K Aviation LLC. S&K Aviation was first registered in Florida in December 2003 and is an active company with a registered agent.__Range and capacity: average range of 3,715 nautical miles. The aircraft can transport up to 22 passengers, but it is usually configured for 10/12 people.
Destinations: Recorded movements of N829MG-N259SK include landings and take offs from the following airports:
COUNTRY CITY/AIRPORT PASSAGES THROUGH THE AIRPORT
Belgium Antwerp 1/Canada Gander, Newfoundland 10/France Le Bourget 2/Germany Frankfurt 1/Germany, Frankfurt-Hahn 1/Germany Nurnberg 1/Ireland Shannon 2/Italy Rome ... United States of America Guantánamo Bay US Naval Air Station, Cuba 2/United States of America Teterboro 3/United States of America Washington, DC 2 ...
One of the key companies involved in the rendition flights was Aero Contractors. Pacifica's Amy Goodman heard tell of Aero's renditions, and ...
AMY GOODMAN: And where did they fly Maher Arar out of from the New York area?
STEPHEN GREY: He was flown out of the local airport here in New Jersey, Teterboro, picked up there. There was an FBI involvement in that particular operation, because it came out of New York, the U.S. airspace. So it wasn't a sort of typical rendition. He was flown from Teterboro to Dulles Airport, where a new team took over. And then he was flown from there to - via
Athens - sorry, via Rome in Italy, and then the plane then landed in Jordan. At that point, I think, the CIA took over.
He was then taken - he was beaten in Jordan, and then he was driven over the border into Syria to this place. You’ve mentioned the Palestine Branch. It’s one of the worst interrogation centers in the world. And what I found [is] that he wasn't the only person that had been sent there by the United States. Up to seven other prisoners were sitting in these same cells about the size of graves, three-foot wide, six-foot wide. And up to seven other prisoners there at the time had all been sent there by the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Are they still there?
STEPHEN GREY: Well, some of them are. I mean, the whole story of this rendition program is that there are only a few people who have emerged to tell their stories, and so many others have DISAPPEARED completely. We don’t know where they are. There’s no accountability as to what’s happened to them.32
Residents of Teterboro might also have a few questions to ask the CIA about the mentor of Mohammed Atta:
RUDI DEKKERS
CIA PLANE REPEATEDLY TAKING OFF AND LANDING AT TETERBORO OWNED BY WALLY HILLIARD
According to European sources who were instrumental in assisting the Council of Europe in its investigation of CIA rendition flights and secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the CIA's Learjet 35A, owned by Aircraft Guaranty Corporation, a brass plate located at 515 N. Sam Houston Parkway East, Suite 305, Houston, Texas, and flying with tail number N35NK, has used Billund, Denmark as a base of operations. Until June 2004, the plane was owned by Wally Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing Co. of Naples, Florida. Plane 1 Leasing is owned by WALLY HILLIARD, the business partner of Rudi Dekkers,
whose Venice, Florida-based Huffmann Aviation flight school helped train Mohammed Atta to prepare for the 9-11 attack. N35NK made a flight to Guantanamo in April 2004.
9/24/2003 KTEB USA Teterboro, NJ KLBB USA Lubbock, TX
N35NK Learjet 35A, Aircraft Guaranty
N35NK has also been leased to Nordic Aviation Contractor at St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport in Florida. The home headquarters of Nordic Aviation in
Billund, Denmark. In 2005, N35NK was re-leased to JetSmart of Connecticut and is now on sale for $2,395,000.33
Concerned residents of Teterboro may also want to write their congressmen about the nature and extent of black operations launched at the airport, particularly those involving black-market guns-'n'-drugs:
US: Secret Task Led to Web Of Firms; Virginian Ran Covert Missions
Washington Post
March 22, 1987
... ANMC provided consulting services for Southern Air Transport of Miami. A Southern Air spokesman said last week that a Gadd company acted as a broker and occasionally was paid a commission for finding charter business for Southern. Southern Air officials have said that the company performed some maintenance work on the aircraft that was shot down Oct. 5 in Nicaragua, which led to public disclosure of the contra resupply operation.
According to a former official of Executive AIR FLEET [where Hanjour took his training?] at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, Gadd's companies contracted for 100 to 150 hours of domestic air charter service a year, at a rate of $ 3,400 an hour for such small, fast, long-range passenger planes as Gulfstreams II.
By 1985, ANMC assets had increased to $ 680,466, up 10-fold from the previous year, and Gadd's EAST had assets of $ 386,308, according to Delaware franchise tax records.
Employes of ANMC were mostly former military men with security clearances, trained not to ask too many questions, according to some of those employes. But by early 1986, it was evident even to them that Gadd was involved in some highly sensitive projects.
According to a report in Knight-Ridder newspapers, persons responding to an ANMC recruiting ad in the Dec. 2, 1985 Air Force Times were told by Gadd that they would be given a stateside job with the company only after working for six months in Honduras.34
NOTES
27) Mae Brussell notes, Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn, "Sabotage! The Secret War Against America," Harpers, 1942.
http://www.maebrussell.com/
Sabotage/Sabotage%20outline.html
28) http://www.cooperativeresearch.org
/context.jsp?item=a0301paterson
29) http://www.airfleettraining.com/
30)
http://www.house.gov/rothman/
SRR%20Clips/04%20April/041005_
Teterboro_Bergen%20Record.htm
31) "RESEARCH ON THE PLANES USED BY THE CIA"
http://www.statewatch.org/news/
2006/jun/ep-cia-inq-research-
report-Rapporteur.pdf
32) Amy Goodman interview, Democracy Now!, "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program," Pacifica Radio, October 19th, 2006.
http://www.democracynow.org/
article.pl?sid=06/10/19/1347246
33) Wayne Madsen.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.
com/2006_06040610.php
34) http://www.warprofiteers.
com/article.php?id=11201
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