Murder in the First Degree?

On August 6, 1996, 16 officers were punished with official reprimands and other non-criminal punishment incident to the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 other Americans in the airplane crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The following article was excerpted from a private letter from Nicholas A. Guarino, former TV Host of Commodities Week, former Arkansas businessman, and editor of Wall Street Underground. We submit it for your own evaluation.

Events at Cilipi Airport, Dubrovnik, Croatia, on the afternoon of April 3, 1996:

2:10 Captain Amir Schic lands a twin-engine corporate jet carrying the Croatian Prime Minister and the American Ambassador. It is one of five planes to land routinely on Runway 12 in the hour preceding the scheduled 3:00 arrival of IFOR-21, the Boeing T-43A,[1] carrying Ron Brown and his entourage of American deal-makers.

2:15 Businessmen begin to straggle into the lobby, a few carrying umbrellas to ward off the very light to moderate rain. They're early because they're anxious to greet the 35 Americans who at this moment are taking off from Tuzla, Bosnia, 130 miles to the northeast. It is only a 45-minute flight. For those passengers it would usher in eternity.

2:30: In the radio shack of the Cilipi Airport, Maintenance Chief Niko Jerkuic, 46, nervously fiddled with the dials of his NonDirectional Radio (NDR) beacon, the only instrument he has to guide approaching planes. In a couple of hours he will be a rich man, the two American operatives told him, if he can quietly send IFOR-21 into Sveti Ivan (St. John's Hill), one of the highest mountains in the area at 2400 feet. Jerkuic will simply shut his beacon down_at the same moment that a decoy beacon is turned on by an American operative sitting near the base of Sveti Ivan. This is an old trick dating back to pirate days. There are some broken clouds at 400 feet; the main cloud is at 2,000 feet. Sveti Ivan rises almost 400 feet into the overcast.

2:48 Captain Schic climbs to the control tower to give IFOR-21 a friendly radio greeting and assurance that all is well. He describes the Cilipi weather: visibility 8 kilometers (5 miles), winds still at 14 mph, all flights arriving normally. Flying at about 10,000 feet and 40+ miles away, Co-captains Ashley J. Davis, 35, and Tim Shafer, 33, thank Schic for his words of welcome. These conditions are later described by Newsweek and others as "the worst storm in years" with "visibility just 100 yards." This was refuted by Aviation Week and the Air Force Accident Investigation.[2]

2:50 IFOR-21 reports in to Cilipi routinely. It is the last time their voice is heard.

2:52 The main regional radar station loses IFOR-21 from its screen.

2:52 Jerkuic shuts down his NDR beacon; the decoy powers up.

2:54 At Kolocep Island, IFOR-21 is on course as it passes over Cilipi's first beacon, 11.8 miles from the airport, and locks on to the second and final beam that is being transmitted from Sveti Ivan. This changes the plane's actual heading from 119° to 109°, straight into Sveti Ivan. The Cilipi control tower doesn't know the plane is now off course: it has no radar.

2:56 The U.S. Air Force AWACS plane keeping track of air traffic in the Bosnian conflict area loses track of IFOR-21 just after it passes over Dubrovnik. Since it is less than a mile off course at this point, no one on the AWACS notes anything wrong.

2:58 Aboard the plane, the klaxon of its ground-proximity warning device suddenly blares, but the two or three seconds of warning are far too little. The plane crashes into the rocky hillside and explodes. The tail section remains intact, but the rest of IFOR-21 and its occupants are scattered over the hill. All 35 people aboard are dead except for stewardess Shelly Kelly, who, riding in the tail, sustained only minor cuts and bruises. So far.

3:18 U.S. authorities are notified that IFOR-21 is down, location completely unknown. There will be 11 1/2 hours of confusion before arriving at the scene.

4:00 In the Republic of South Africa, news reports say that an attempt has been made on the life of Ron Brown's law partner, Tommy Boggs, by unknown assailants in a staged car accident in Capetown. Later, Boggs will refuse to discuss it.

Later that afternoon, Niko Jerkuic goes home to collect his reward. It is to come three days later: a bullet through the chest, just shortly before he is scheduled to be grilled by the U.S. Air Force accident investigation team. A hit squad wraps his hand around the gun and departs. Like many of the White-water dead, Jerkuic is immediately labelled a suicide even though there's no evidence. A chest wound is a rather rare cause. The quick official reason given for bachelor Jerkuic's death is despondence over romantic troubles. Neighbors and friends deny this and agree that he was not depressed. Like many of his friends who had survived the years of the Bosnian war, he was excited that life was finally getting better.

7:20 Four hours and 20 minutes after the crash the first Croatian Special Forces search party arrives on the scene and finds only Ms. Kelly surviving. They call for a helicopter to evacuate her to the hospital. When it arrives, she is able to get aboard without assistance from the medics. But Kelly never completes the short hop. She dies en route. According to multiple reports given to journalist/editor Joe L. Jordan, an autopsy later reveals a neat three-inch incision over her main femoral artery. It also shows that the incision came at least three hours after all her other cuts and bruises.

Further necropsies will not happen. Clinton has ordered the cremation of all victims. It is hard to perform autopsies on ashes.

Confusion or Coverup?

None of the explanations advanced explain the impossibility of how two experienced pilots, on a 45-minute flight, could follow an NDR beam (accurate to within two feet at the landing point) and crash 1.6 miles off course.

The official Air Force explanation is that the pilots set the compass 10° off course. That is unlikely. Pilots routinely set the compass right before takeoff. If this explanation were correct, they would not have been on course when they passed the first beacon, 11.8 miles from the airport. Furthermore, they were flying on the NDR signal, not the compass.

Another view is that a nasty crosswind "blew" the plane sideways. Not credible: this would require a wind 90° off from the actual wind. Blown off course 1.6 miles?

Most of the press and officialdom have blamed poor visibility to some extent. To do this, they have to take the ferocity of the rainstorm later that afternoon and evening and move it back in time to the crash hour. Records show the weather from 2:54 to 2:58 PM was well within the normal limits for the landing.[3] And NDR beacons never get blown off course.

Pilot fatigue and strain? Not likely on a 45-minute flight.

Equipment malfunction on a rickety old plane? IFOR-21 was the number two plane in the White House fleet: in essence, Air Force Two. It had carried Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Defense Secretary William Perry just the week before. Everything about the flight was checked out and rehearsed a week in advance.

None of the "official" explanations hold water. All of them ignore the fact that IFOR-21 did not simply stray off the path at the last moment. It went straight as an arrow to its doom the moment it left the Kolocep Island beacon and picked up the Cilipi beacon.

The problem had to be the Cilipi beacon which was shut down at the right moment and a decoy beacon at Sveti Ivan turned on. Couldn't the air traffic controller shed some light on things? Certainly. But now he, too, has "committed suicide!"

The chief investigator for Pratt & Whitney happened to be at the Paris Air Show on April 3. Since Pratt & Whitney always sends an investigator when a plane powered by their engines has a mishap, the man called his boss in America and was to be sent to the site.

As he was packing, however, his boss called back and said, "Don't go. There's not going to be a safety investigation."

The Air Force had, for the first time in its history, canceled the safety investigation of a crash on friendly soil. There would be a token legal investigation to enable the assignment of blame and then they'd go home.

Where are the Black Boxes?

Within hours of the crash, the Croatian Ministry of Transport announced that they had the black boxes. One and half days after the crash, Croatian TV (plus Russian and French TV) announced that the FDR (flight data recorder) and the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) were safely in the hands of U.S. Marines. The U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, also stated that a black box was on board.

Later, the Pentagon brass stoutly disputed all this, stating that there were no black boxes aboard. It is difficult to imagine that America's #2 VIP plane had no black box. Veteran Air Force mechanics claim that they never have seen a T-43A without a black box.

Why Hit Ron Brown?

Ron Brown was, by all accounts, just a charming fellow working very hard to promote U.S. business. Why would anyone want to kill him? And who would have the resources to do it by bringing down a large White House airplane?

The answer, in brief, is that Ron Brown was going to prison and had threatened to bring Bill Clinton down with him. He was up to his neck in numerous major scandals: Whitewater, the Denver airport mess, Mena, the Keating Five, Lillian Madsen and her Haitian prostitutes, etc.

Twenty-two Congressmen wrote Clinton in February of 1995 demanding that he fire Brown. At the time of his murder, Brown was under investigation by: a special prosecutor in the Justice Department; the FDIC; the Congressional Reform and Oversight Committee; the FBI; the Energy Department; the Senate Judiciary Committee; and even his own Commerce Department Inspector General.

Involved in over a dozen major scandals, Brown was, among other things, Clinton's point man to bring Iranian Muslims and their weaponry into the Bosnia war. That broke the U.S.-endorsed arms embargo. The money for the arms was most likely from Commerce and Agriculture-slush fund money channeled to U.S. manufacturers, thence to U.S. friendly nations and firms overseas, thence to Iran.

The arms included heli-copter gun-ships, stinger missiles,[4] land mines, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers, and other quality weaponry.

The last nail in Brown's coffin was pounded four days before the crash. The FBI and the IRS subpoenaed as many as 20 witnesses for a serious new grand jury probe of Brown in Washington.[5] The February 8, 1996 Washington Post reported that Brown had retained top legal gun Reid Weingarten, a former high official in the Justice Department, as his criminal attorney. You don't pay his prices ($750 an hour) unless you know a criminal indictment is coming and you're probably going to jail.

Janet Reno appointed Daniel Pearson as Brown's special prosecutor.[6] When she gave him blanket permission to investigate anything, Brown angrily demanded that Clinton force her to withdraw Pearson. But Reno couldn't do that; she had been backed into a corner by Representative William F. Clinger, Jr., who is chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, and who had possession of incriminating documents on Brown.

According to confidants who insist on anonymity, when Clinton indicatedhe couldn't comply, Brown went ballistic. His fatal mistake was telling Clinton that he wasn't going to take the rap. He was going to finger Bill and Hillary instead.

From that point on, Brown was a dead man walking. Like Vincent Foster before him, Brown knew too much. More than any man in Washington, he knew where all the money went for the payoffs, bribes, scams, money laundering, cover-ups, participation fees, hush money and side deals_all the way from one-man operations to vast multinational trade treaty deals.

The phoney suicide fake-out used on Foster could not be repeated, of course. But an airplane "whack" is always viewed as an accident. This was not the rag-tag "Arkansas Mafia" that followed Clinton to Washington. This was the muscle squad of the establishment.

Is it possible that 34 innocent Americans were murdered to silence Commerce Secretary Ron Brown? Was this another in a series of cover-ups spanning 13 years and involving our current President?

This article was excerpted from a letter from Nicholas A. Guarino with confirmation by James W. Nugent, the Publisher of Wall Street Underground. The full report also includes details of the 56 Clinton dead: the unknown and deadly side of the Whitewater Scandal. You can obtain a complete report by contacting the address below and then form your own conclusions. You may also want to review the following video documentaries:

The Clinton Chronicles (now also in book form)

The Mena Connection: Drugs, Money Laundering, and the Making of a President

Obstruction of Justice

These are all available from the producers at (800) 828-2290.

The ValuJet Crash Another Attempted Hit?

Chuck Hays, CIA contract operative, was supposed to be on the ValuJet that crashed in May. He was the one who broke the news that Vince Foster had received $2.73 million from Switzerland just before his death. It was put into a U.S. slush fund bank account that he controlled, but it was designated as a "U.S. Treasury Escrow Account."

After his death, the number of the account was found in his wallet. Hays was a key source to Jim Norman, former senior editor of Forbes, who wrote disclosures in Media Bypass.

Hays's name was on the ValuJet manifest, but he was unable to catch the flight. Lucky.

Bibliographic Sources:

Murder in the First Degree , An Interim Report on the Death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 Other United States Citizens, Concluding Report Date Contingent Upon Hearings in House Committee on National Security and Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), Private Report by Nicholas A. Guarino, received from The Wall Street Underground, 12254 Nicollet Ave. S., Burnsville, MN 55337. (800) 290-9953. (See also The Presidential Mess, a book by Nicholas A. Guarino, also available through the same address.)

, An Interim Report on the Death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 Other United States Citizens, Concluding Report Date Contingent Upon Hearings in House Committee on National Security and Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs (Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations), Private Report by Nicholas A. Guarino, received from The Wall Street Underground, 12254 Nicollet Ave. S., Burnsville, MN 55337. (800) 290-9953. (See also The Presidential Mess, a book by Nicholas A. Guarino, also available through the same address.) Air Force Details Results of CT-43 Accident Investigation, DefenseLINK News Release, Reference No. 342-96.

"Keep Our Mouths Shut," Serbian Unity Congress News Bulletin

Newsweek , April 15, 1996.

, April 15, 1996. Jeppesen Approach Charts for Du-brovnik, Croatia (Cilipi).

Notes:

The T-43A is the military version of a Boeing 737-200. (Cf. Air Force Accident Investigation, see sources, above. [back to text] "The weather was not a substantially contributing factor in this mishap." Air Force Details Results of CT-43 Accident Investigation, Reference No. 342-96. [back to text] See note 2. [back to text] TWA 800 may have been hit with such a missile. Our sources have indicated that a significant number of portable surface-to-air missiles are missing from inventories and are in Muslim hands in the United States. The rumored strategy has been to hit 747's on take-off. We understand that the TWA flight to Tel Aviv, Israel, was scheduled to leave JFK at 8:00 PM, but was on a gate hold due to a late passenger. Did they hit the wrong plane? [back to text] There is little chance you heard about this deathknell grand jury case. It was reported on radio station KTOK in Oklahoma on March 28 and on the front page of the Washington Times on March 29. But then a lock was put on the story; the AP and New York Times wire services blocked any further release of the information. (Welcome to the New World Order.) [back to text] If you are a member of Congress, assign your most trusted staff member to investigate these crimes, starting with a conversation with Daniel Pearson, who is still willing to share his information. [back to text]

This article was first published in the September 1996 edition of Personal Update.

Copyright (C) 1996 by Koinonia House Inc., P.O. Box D, Coeur d'Alene, ID 83816-0347

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