Crashing into history

Cannon here: I've been taking a look at Alaska's Republican congressman Don Young -- the guy who wants to spend megabucks on a bridge to nowhere -- and his links to Jack Abramaoff. Actually, Young is tied in with what may be worst part of the Abramaoff scandal: The sad affair of the Marshall Islands.

Young, it turns out, owes his seat to one of those convenient plane crashes that tend to take out people who might threaten the powers-that-be. In 1972, on a military junket in Alaska, Congressman Nick Begich -- Young's popular Democratic predecessor -- went down in a still-mysterious incident. No trace of the craft was ever discovered, despite a massive search. If Begich had remained alive, he surely would have held onto that seat for the rest of his life.

The most famous victim of that crash was House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, member of the Warren Commission and father to Cokie Roberts. Cokie once dismissed as a mere "internet" rumor the claim that her father disappeared shortly after he began to voice doubts about the Warren Commission findings. Her statement has only two flaws: 1. The "rumor" long predated the widespread use of the internet and 2. It was no mere rumor.

For example, Anthony Summers, the respected British writer, once interviewed an aide to Boggs. According to this aide, Boggs complained that J. Edgar Hover "lied his eyes out to the Commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."

Hale Boggs also offered these prescient words a year before he left us:

"Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance."

Have you ever heard Cokie ever speak as bravely as her father did? I haven't. I suspect that she will die in bed.

Side note: Here's a top-of-my-head sampler of other names that appeared in other all-too-convenient plane crashes (and feel free to add to the list):

-- John Tower (a Republican, but his Tower Commission report published a few things that the Bushes probably didn't want exposed)
-- Dorothy Hunt (wife to E. Howard; some say she was threatening to become "chatty" as Watergate unfurled)
-- Paul Wellstone
-- Larken Smith (a Democratic congressman who was looking into CIA drug dealing in 1989),
-- Mel Carnahan
-- Charles McKee and Matthew Gannon (who headed a DIA unit which looking into CIA drug dealing in Lebanon; they went down at Lockerbie)
-- Dan Rocco (executive at Choicepoint, a firm which played a part in the 2000 vote steal)
-- Amriram Nir (Israeli agent who -- some say -- could have testified about Bush's Iran-contra activities)
-- John F. Kennedy Jr.

Actually, there is a little-known history of mysterious aircraft incidents involving the Kennedy family. Ted Kennedy came that close to dying in a 1964 crash. And some paranoids have even alleged that the wartime flight which took out Joe Jr. was sabotaged.

(Speaking of near-fatal aircraft mishaps, I seem to recall reading in Bob Woodward's Veil that Gary Hart nearly died in a similar incident. Unfortunately, I read that book ages ago and I don't have a copy to hand. Is my memory playing tricks on me...?)

Perhaps we should also note the strange role aircraft have played in the Bin Laden family. Patriarch Mohammed died in a crash in the United States in 1968. Salem Bin Laden -- brother to Osama, and widely reported to be an investor in Dubya's Arbusto Energy -- went down in a microlight plane crash in Texas, in 1983. I'm not sure what to make of these incidents, so I merely make note of them.

These occurrences are pure coincidence, of course. Every single one of them. Pure coincidence.