Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Tragic story of Mike Connell, GOP IT guru, breaks in Maxim

Brad Blog:

The Maxim piece also adds a number of other previously unreported details along the way.


Among them:

During his calls to the tower, after word of the crash, a Greentown Fire Department official is quoted as explaining the he was told "the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available."

The night crash scene, which would normally be roped off and investigated in daylight, was lit by towers, photographed and documented by officials from the NTSB and FAA, and then "Connell's plane was hastily removed to a secure hangar under the cover of darkness. By 6 A.M. the investigators had vanished, leaving behind them a trail of debris and one very angry widow."

Connell's final words, just after screaming "Nine nine November declaring an emergency!" were "Oh, fuck!" and then silence as the control tower tape goes dead. Officials reported his last words as "Oh, God!" out of purported respect to Connell's deep Catholic religious beliefs. [Note: We've heard those recordings, and can confirm Worrall's reportage here, though we don't believe we've ever reported specifically on them, or publicly released the audio here on The BRAD BLOG.]

The contracts between OH Sec. of State Blackwell and Connell, on behalf of GovTech, contradict his testimony that SMARTech, a highly partisan rightwing outfit in Chattanooga, TN, "merely acted as a backup site for election data". SMARTech owns the servers where Ohio's election night reporting system was mysteriously transfered to in the middle of the night as the country was waiting for final results in 2004. The setup allowed for a potential "man-in-the-middle" hack of the data. The contract shows that Connell's company and/or Blackwell had direct remote access to both server systems on Election Night.

Worrall reports that a "deep throat" document anonymously sent to Connell's family and a number of FBI agents last year, purporting to be an "after action report" by a black ops agent tasked with sabotaging Connell's plane --- as we briefly discussed in a report here last November --- is believed to be "genuine" by "a number of experts from the intelligence community" who have seen it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reported in detail on Ohio's 2004 election debacle for Rolling Stone magazine was interviewed for the story, and tells Worrall that he believes what happened during that election was "more serious than Watergate" as "The Ohio vote undermines the very foundation stone of American democracy." He goes on to call for an "official investigation. Otherwise this becomes a blueprint for how to steal an election from here to eternity."

No comments: