The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

If Kennedy really wanted to save Kopechne’s life why did he not call for help from the cottages near the bridge, instead of going all the way back to the party? It is difficult not to believe that Senator Kennedy put his career before Kopechne’s life.

The conspiracy kicks in thereafter:

There are speculations that the Kennedy clan put subtle pressure on the police to avoid scrutinizing the Kopechne accident too closely.

On 19 July, when Registry Inspector George Kennedy (no relation) requested a copy of Edward M. Kennedy’s driving licence from the Boston Registry, it was confirmed that it had expired; the next day it had been miraculously fixed and updated.

Kennedy possessed a litany of driving offences, but the court did not learn about them because his driving record miraculously disappeared from the system.

No autopsy was performed on Kopechne. This caused a public outcry, leading to a motion to have her body exhumed. The request was successfully challenged by the Kopechnes’ lawyer Joseph Flanagan. Flanagan was hired and paid for by Teddy Kennedy.

If an autopsy had been carried out it might have come to a chilling conclusion. Diver John Farrar, on entering the sunken car, found Kopechne’s corpse in a posture that suggested she’d been trapped in an air pocket — she’d died, therefore, not of drowning but of suffocation. It has been estimated the air in the pocket could have supported her for over two hours — plenty of time, then, for her to have been rescued had Teddy Kennedy acted more expeditiously.

The Kennedy family protected Teddy Kennedy from proper criminal proceedings following death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

Jack Olsen, The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, 1970 http://www.ytedk.com

Chechen bombings

The bombings started on 4 September 1999, when an explosion destroyed a block of military flats in the southern Russian city of Buinaksk, killing 62 people. Two civilian apartment blocks in Moscow were blown up on 9 and 13 September that same year, with 212 fatalities. Then, on 16 September, 17 people died in a truck-bomb blast in Volgodonsk.

The Russian secret service, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), quickly identified one of the perpetrators as Achimez Gochiyaev, a foot soldier for the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. Since 1994 the Chechens, led by Basayev, had been fighting fanatically for independence from Russia. Case closed: the bombings were committed by Chechen militants as part of their terrorist campaign for a free Chechnya. In response, the acting prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ordered a mass counter-terrorism campaign in Chechnya, a piece of hardman politicking that so endeared him to a fearful Russian electorate that they voted the former FSB director their President in 2000.

Conspiracy theorists pounced. And not just conspiracy theorists, but respected politicians like British Conservative MP Julian Lewis, and respected journalists, like the Financial Times’s. Moscow correspondent David Satter. What sense did it make for the Chechens to commit outrages likely to cause an invasion of Chechnya? Not much. What tangible evidence did the Russian authorities offer to prove Chechen involvement in the bombings? None. Strangest of all was the bomb that failed to explode in the city of Ryazan, where an apartment resident noted two men acting suspiciously and reported the matter to the city police. On investigating the apartment block’s basement the police found sacks of hexogen (also known as RDX, the explosive ingredient used in the four bombings) and timers. Swiftly the FSB confiscated the sacks, before announcing that they contained sugar and had been used as a prop in a counter-terrorist exercise.

Evidence that the bombings were a «false flag» operation undertaken by the FSB to provide a casus belli for a Russian incursion into Chechnya mounted. In December 1999 Lieutenant Alexei Galkin, a Russian spy captured by the Chechens in the siege of Grozny, testified to Western journalists that the Russian secret services had planted at least some of the «Chechen» bombs. The transcript of his interview included:

Journalist/Interpreter: Can you introduce yourself please.

Galkin: Assistant head of sector senior lieutenant Alexei Viktorovich Galkin, employee of the Central Intelligence Office [GRU] of the Russian Federation.

[…]

Journalist: Did you take part in the bombing of buildings in Moscow and Dagestan?

Galkin: I personally did not take part in the bombing of the buildings in Moscow and Dagestan, but I know who blew them up, who is behind the bombing of buildings in Moscow and who blew up the buildings in Buinaksk.

Journalist: Can you tell us who?