-Caveat Lector-
Monday January 8, 2001
Revealed: Gun lost on fatal Brown flight
Secret Commerce report says bodyguard�s firearm never recovered
from crash scene
By Paul Sperry
� 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- A handgun carried by a bodyguard assigned to
protect the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown "was lost and not
recovered" from the wreckage of his plane, which crashed in
Croatia in 1996, reveals a still-secret Commerce Department
report, a copy of which was obtained by WorldNetDaily.
The internal security report was completed in March 1999 -- 15
months after an Air Force forensic pathologist disclosed that an
unusual wound at the top of Brown's head could have been a bullet
hole.
Jesse Jackson and other black leaders at the time called for an
autopsy to find out if the hole was caused by a bullet.
"I think people have a right to know what really happened," he
said in January 1998.
Jackson was joined by NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and Democratic
Rep. Maxine Waters in demanding a new investigation into Brown's
death.
The Air Force ruled that Brown died of multiple blunt-force
injuries sustained in the crash of the Air Force jet in which he
was a passenger.
On April 3, 1996, he and his bodyguard, Duane Christian, went
down with 33 others traveling on a Commerce trade trip. All 35
aboard died.
But military investigators did not order an autopsy of Brown's
body, and failed to recover Christian's weapon when they
investigated the crash scene.
"One gun was lost and not recovered in the tragic April 1996
airplane crash in Croatia that killed 12 Commerce employees,
including the secretary," found Commerce Inspector General
Johnnie E. Frazier in a review of weapon and ammunition
inventory.
His findings were part of a department-wide inspection of
security procedures. On March 31, 1999, he delivered his 33-page
report -- which still hasn't been cleared for public release --
to David Holmes, deputy assistant secretary for security.
Holmes previously had led Vice President Al Gore's Secret Service
detail.
The report also says that there has been no internal accounting
for the missing gun.
"Because the investigation of the crash was under the
jurisdiction of the military, no OSY (Office of Security) report
was needed," Frazier added on page 26 of the report.
.357 Magnum
The gun that turned up missing was a .357 Magnum, which fires a
.38-caliber round.
"Brown had a .45-inch inwardly beveling circular hole in the top
of his head, which is essentially the description of a
.45-caliber gunshot wound," Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell
told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in December 1997. At the time,
he was a deputy medical examiner with the Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology in Washington.
But another military doctor, who reviewed external examination
photos, found the circular wound in Brown's head to be smaller,
the Tribune-Review said.
According to Dr. Martin Fackler, former director of the Army's
Wound Ballistics Laboratory in San Francisco, the hole was more
consistent with a .40-caliber, or 10-millimeter, bullet -- such
as the kind used by law-enforcement agencies.
Also, a ballistics expert familiar with the ammunition issued by
Commerce told WorldNetDaily that the .38-caliber bullets can
flatten on impact and leave a larger hole.
"Given the right conditions," he said, "a soft-point, or
hollow-point, slug could leave a .45-size hole."
In an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily, the former primary
agent on Brown's protective detail says there's nothing
suspicious about the lost weapon.
He speculates that the impact from the crash may have simply
ripped it away from Christian's waist holster, which has a strap
that snaps shut over the hammer, and thrown it far enough from
the wreckage that investigators overlooked it.
Croatian special forces?
"I figure either that happened or Croatian special forces guys
are walking around with the weapon" after picking it up as a
souvenir, said James E. Ochs, Brown's top bodyguard, who was busy
deploying the secretary's motorcade at the Dubrovnik airport when
the plane crashed.
Ochs says Croatian police beat U.S. forces to the mountainous
crash site and may have scavenged for such items of value.
As for Brown's gunshot-like head wound, Ochs says it was more
likely caused by a rivet, bolt or rod that broke free from the
plane on impact and penetrated the top of his skull.
"If the plane plowed into a mountain, there would be a lot of
debris flying around," he told WorldNetDaily.
Dr. Cogswell, however, says he looked for such objects at the
crash site and couldn't find any that would fit the wound.
Others offer darker explanations.
"My theory is that Brown was still alive. And local Croats who
came to loot didn't want anyone to see what they were doing. So
they found the gun and shot him," said Accuracy in Media's Reed
Irvine, who was asked to comment on the findings in the secret
Commerce report. Washington-based AIM has followed the tragic
story closely from the start and has argued for an autopsy.
But why in the top of the head?
"They didn't want it to be obvious, so they got down and fired
the gun point-blank into the top of his head," he said. "What
happened to the bullet? It went down into the body cavity.
Investigators wouldn't have found it unless they did an autopsy."
The ballistics expert, however, says that even such a dense area
of bone and tissue wouldn't have stopped a bullet fired by a .357
Magnum, which packs a heavy hit.
"It would have gone all the way through," he said. "There would
have been a major exit wound."
No exit wound
No such wound was found on Brown's body -- although the forensic
photographer who snapped shots of Brown's corpse when it arrived
at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, says examiners failed to
thoroughly inspect the buttocks and groin area where a bullet
probably would have exited. Nor was she asked to take photos of
that area.
"They never looked for an exit wound," said Kathleen Janoski, who
was the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's senior lab
photographer then. "And I was there for the entire external
examination."
A pathologist hired by the Brown family concluded there was no
exit wound, she says, but he made his conclusion based on photos.
Other suspicious circumstances surround Brown's death, leading
some to suspect foul play on the part of the Clinton
administration.
At the time Brown died, a special prosecutor was investigating
his financial dealings, including his presidential fund-raising
practices. And Brown was reportedly making noises he would rat
out the president -- in the middle of an election year -- if
squeezed too hard.
Adding to suspicions, Brown's papers -- like the late deputy
White House counsel Vincent Foster's -- were spirited away from
his office shortly after he died. Some were destroyed, some were
locked up in off-site storage and some were taken to other
agencies by Clinton appointees.
Internal documents and testimony from Commerce officials gleaned
since his death show that Brown coordinated with the Democratic
National Committee and the White House to sell seats on overseas
trade junkets for campaign cash.
Convicted Clinton-Gore fund-raiser and suspected Beijing agent
John Huang was one of the aides who helped Brown arrange the more
controversial missions to the Far East, including China. Huang's
immediate boss at Commerce, Charles Meissner, also died in the
Croatian plane crash.
Perhaps most chilling, though, is the way the White House rushed
the examinations of the victims at the morgue, Janoski says.
"There was a lot of pressure from the White House to get the
bodies out of Dover and buried," she told WorldNetDaily.
"In fact, our team leader in this -- Dr. Edward Kilbane -- was
ordered to the West Wing for a meeting the Friday before the
bodies came back" from Croatia on Saturday, April 6, 1996,
Janoski added.
A second gun
The inspector general's report also mentions another gun missing,
this one from Commerce headquarters.
"The other handgun was reported stolen or missing in HCHB
(Herbert Clark Hoover Building)," the report says, "so an
internal report was prepared."
It turns out that the other gun, also a .357 Magnum, also
belonged to Christian, who died at 42. One day in 1995, he
reported it missing from his office.
When he was tapped to accompany Brown on his mission to the
Balkans, Christian had to borrow a gun from another security
specialist. It was the loaner that was lost on the fateful
flight, Ochs explains.
"Duane borrowed that weapon to make that trip," he said.
Ochs, a former firearms training officer for the department, says
he still doesn't know the whereabouts of Christian's own gun,
which mysteriously vanished from his office.
The serial numbers of both guns were reported to the National
Crime Information Center.
"That's a big deal to lose a weapon," a high-level federal
security official told WorldNetDaily.
Ochs, an ex-Secret Service agent, agrees.
But he explains that Brown traveled so much that it became
impractical for agents to lock their guns up in the department
safe when they weren't on the road guarding him. And that made it
harder to keep track of them.
"With Brown, the weapons were issued to each agent," he said.
"And each agent was charged with the care and well-being of that
weapon, because we were always on the road."
After Brown died, Ochs says he "kept them all in a gun safe," and
the department didn't have any more problems.
'Lead snowstorm'
Dr. Cogswell, the whistleblower who left AFIP after being demoted
and now works as a coroner in Shreveport, La., also cited as
evidence of a possible gunshot wound initial X-rays that showed
what appear to be small metal fragments in Brown's head --
similar to the "lead snowstorm" left by a slug as it breaks up in
the body.
Janoski, a 23-year Navy veteran, claims that the first set of
X-rays were "destroyed" because they showed evidence of a
possible bullet entry.
And a second set of X-rays were taken and "deliberately" made
less dense to try to diminish the lead snowstorm, she says.
How does she know? She says a Navy criminal investigator,
Jeanmarie Sentelle, told her so.
Attempts to reach Sentelle were unsuccessful.
She also says Sentelle told her a gift from Brown's alleged
mistress, Yolanda Hill, was ordered destroyed.
The gift -- an Indian good-luck charm consisting of a cigarette
butt, a feather, turquoise stones and red beads rolled up in a
shammy and tied with twine -- was found in Brown's diplomatic
pouch.
"Personal effects are never destroyed," she said.
Janoski, a registered Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and
then worked as a White House volunteer, also noted that examiners
did not test for gunshot residue around Brown's head wound.
Empty 9-millimeter clip
As body bags were unzipped at the Dover morgue, she noticed
something else.
"A burnt 9-millimeter clip was thrown in with one of the bodies"
by one of the crash scene workers, Janoski said.
She says that although the gun clip was charred from the plane
fire, she could see that it was empty -- except for perhaps one
round.
Christian's .357 Magnum was a revolver. So the presence of a clip
suggests there was another gun -- a semiautomatic -- on board the
plane.
Theories about what created Brown's perfectly round wound are
predicated on an airborne object hitting his skull, such as a
bullet or rivet, rather than his skull hitting a stationary
object.
But close-ups of the hole in his skull show less a tunnel than a
shallow but clean-cut indentation, or punch-out, as if Brown were
thrown head-first into some kind of protrusion, such as a metal
stud, connected to a hard, round surface.
In fact, the top of Brown's skull was depressed and fractured,
and his scalp was torn away around the hole -- injuries not
caused by just a gunshot.
Janoski allows that she probably never would have spotted the
hole if the skull weren't exposed by the large laceration.
Still, she says only an autopsy could rule out a bullet.
"City coroners do autopsies on homeless people," Janoski said.
"Yet here we have a dead Cabinet member with a hole in his head,
and there's no autopsy."
"What they needed to do was open up the skull with a saw and take
the brain out and slice it up like a loaf of bread to find out
how far this wound went," she added. "Without an autopsy, we're
never really going to know what happened."
Jesse Jackson agrees.
"It may only prove that he was not murdered," he said. "But that
would relieve people of reasonable doubt."
Janoski, who was demoted by AFIP after she publicly complained
about the cursory examination of Brown's corpse, says she told
her story to Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in a January 1998
meeting.
She said Conyers, one of the founders of the Congressional Black
Caucus, taped the conversation in a recording room on The Hill
and said "he wanted to look into it." But she says he never
followed up.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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