-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- [....if Daschle had been a Republican, 60 Minutes and the New York Times would have buried him long, long ago....] Tuesday, May 29, 2001 1:34 p.m. EDT Tom Daschle's Deadly Skeleton Closet With the Democrats' nasty habit of accusing Republicans of poisoning children and killing old people, it's a wonder no one in the media, let alone the GOP, has mentioned a rather disturbing and deadly chapter from South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle's recent past, now that he's taking over as Senate Majority Leader. It was quite a scandal back in 1994, when reports began appearing in the New York Times and elsewhere suggesting Daschle had improperly intervened with the Federal Aviation Administration on behalf of a friend whose charter airline company had killed three government doctors in a crash. The doctors' widows appeared on "60 Minutes," wondering aloud if the investigation into their husbands' deaths wasn't being pursued because of Daschle's influence. Making matters worse, the Senator's wife, Linda, was second in command at the FAA at a time when an agency office manager said she had destroyed documents relevant to the fatal crash on orders from superiors. Three government physicians were killed when a plane operated by B & L Aviation crashed in Minot, N.D., on Feb. 24, 1994. B & L was owned by longtime Daschle crony Murl Bellew, who, before the crash, had asked his senator friend to help when the Forest Service found numerous safety violations with his aircraft. According to the New York Times, the Senator then began "a two-year effort to strip the U.S. Forest Service of authority to inspect air charter companies." What's more, it appears Daschle tried to cover up his attempt to undermine the Forest Service. In a Feb. 5, 1995, report, the Times revealed: "[Daschle] initially said that he never pressed the Forest Service to get its inspectors to relax their inspections on B & L. But in November, a senior Daschle aide said that he had, with the Senator's knowledge, intervened directly with the Forest Service inspectors who had warned that B & L was unsafe." More evidence that the senator's denial was untrue emerged when documents turned up showing that Daschle had personally leaned on the Washington supervisors of the inspectors who had given his friend a bad rating. The Times added: "Two FAA inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity said in recent interviews that the Senator helped Mr. Bellew when he flunked a safety check in 1987." After Daschle intervened, one agency official was "called on the carpet to explain what happened," the FAA source said. Then there's the account of Cathy Jones, an FAA office manager in Rapid City, S.D. Jones told investigators that she was ordered to destroy documents relevant to the case because they "contained information with the possible appearance of improper intervention by Senator Daschle on behalf of the FAA." The documents in question, Jones said, "would make the FAA look bad" because of Mrs. Daschle's top job with the agency. Not surprisingly, the Clinton-Reno Justice Department never expressed much of an interest in Daschle's case, despite the fatalities involved and grieving relatives irate over unanswered questions. The only investigations ever undertaken were done by the Clinton Transportation Department and the Senate Ethics Committee, both of which determined that the South Dakota Democrat had done nothing wrong. Maybe that's why the media has decided to file this tidbit from Daschle's resume down its memory hole. But we suspect that if a Republican had suddenly taken the reins of senatorial power on a quirk and declared most of the president's agenda dead, somehow this information would have found its way into mainstream news reports. ------- End of forwarded message ------- -- Best Wishes All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. -�Mark Twain's Autobiography; Mark Twain in Eruption <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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