Empire of Lies: The Left's 30-Year War on Truth, 1994-2024

Chapter 8—Ron Brown's Body

I have been serializing this book-in-progress for paid subscribers, but in this one instance, I will be sharing this chapter with all subscribers, paid or otherwise. You will want to know what happens next. Thanks to everyone for following!

On January 10, 1997, ten days before a relieved President Clinton’s second inauguration, the Washington Post surfaced a curious document that had been floating around the White House since 1995. This 332-page report bore the Austin Powers-like title, “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.” In its unapologetic paranoia, the effort recalled nothing so much as the final days of the Nixon administration.

“What is striking about the document,” observed the Post, “is that it lays down this suspicion-laden theory about how the media works in cold print, under the imprimatur of the White House.” According to the document, here is how “the stream” worked:

“First, well-funded right-wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator, and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the Internet where they are bounced all over the world.”

From the Internet, according to the report, the stories go through the right-wing British media, back through the respectable right-wing American press, into Congress, “finally to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”

Looking back from 2025, this “stream” seems a pitiful trickle. At the time of the 1996 election, no more than 15 percent of the public had regular access to the Internet. The American Spectator was a monthly publication with no online presence. And the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was the nation’s only daily willing to investigate the Clinton White House.

By this time, Rush Limbaugh had established himself as a formidable media presence, but neither he nor the other right wing talk shows did investigative reporting. As a result, the truth behind the TWA 800 crash and the crash of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s USAF plane in Croatian barely caused a ripple even in the conservative stream. Meanwhile the major media reinforced their levies and protected their audiences from even a rivulet of unwelcome evidence.

The hydraulics of the conservative communication stream, as described, were not entirely fanciful. What the White House failed to address is whether or not these stories were accurately reported. Much to the Clintons’ chagrin one story did surface late in 1997. Its source was the feisty Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and it was accurate enough to scare.

In December 1997, US Navy Chief Petty Officer Kathleen Janoski just happened to be home on leave in Pittsburgh. For the past two years Janoski had served as a forensic photographer at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), an inter-service institute managed by the Army. On the morning of December 3 she stepped out to grab the paper only to see a headline that made her stomach jump, “Experts Differ on Ron Brown Head Wound.” It was she who discovered that head wound when photographing Ron Brown’s body upon its arrival at the U.S. Army base in Dover, Delaware. Janoski’s life was about to change, and she knew it.

Brown’s body had arrived at Dover on Holy Saturday, 1996, three days after the plane crash. The following day, Easter Sunday, Janoski mounted a stepladder and commenced to photograph Brown’s surprisingly intact body. Janoski could see the chemical burns to Brown’s torso and face and the lacerations on the front and sides of his head as well as on the top, but none of these injuries, she believed, would have been lethal.

She had not gone far when she saw something memorable enough to alert her colleagues. “Look at the hole in Brown’s head,” she exclaimed. “It looks like a bullet hole.”

Col. William Gormley, the pathologist examining Brown, instinctively shushed her, but a buzz quickly ran through the room. U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Hause, an experienced deputy medical examiner, left his examining table to take a look. “Sure enough,” he remembers saying. “It looks like a gunshot wound to me, too.” He would later add that the wound “looked like a punched-out .45-caliber entrance hole.”

Gormley consulted with the other pathologists present, including Cmdr. Kilbane, and they all agreed it looked like “an entrance gunshot wound.” This, Gormley would admit on Black Entertainment Television. Yet despite this consensus, Col. Gormley did not do the obvious. He did not call in the FBI. He did not ask the Brown family to permit an autopsy. Nor did he take the opportunity to look for an exit wound or test for gunshot residue.

From the examination station, Brown’s body passed through the next phases: embalming, wrapping/dressing, and casketing. By the end of the process, there could be no more examinations of Brown without undoing a lot that had been done. Indeed, a day later, Brown’s body lay in state in the rotunda of the Commerce Department. Inexplicably, his casket was closed. Janoski could not understand why. His head wounds were not that severe. It would have been easy work to make him presentable.

On Monday April 8, five days after the crash, Deputy Medical Examiner Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell arrived at the crash site in Croatia. Soon after his arrival, Col. Gormley called with a request. He wanted Cogswell to look for an object that might have punched a “.45 [inch] inwardly beveling, perfectly circular hole in the top of [Brown’s] head.” These were Gormley’s words as Cogswell noted them at the time. The previous day’s exam had apparently alarmed Gormley.

For Cogswell, the search for a part should have been a second step. “Open him up,” He told Gormley. “This man needs an autopsy. This whole thing stinks.” As they both knew, what Gormley described sounded like a wound from a .45 caliber weapon. Even more suspicious, Brown was the only person on the plane with a hole in his head. Despite an intense search, Cogswell found no part that matched the hole.

That same Monday, the Associated Press reported that the man responsible for the Croatian airport’s failed navigation system, maintenance chief Niko Jerkuic, had fatally shot himself in the chest an hour after the bodies of Brown and the other Americans had been flown out. The New York Times reported that a “failed romance” had left the forty-six-year-old bachelor despondent.

Times editors took the Croatian authorities at their word. They had an election to win. The reflexive media strategy, never admitted, was to suppress damning stories and elevate politically useful ones. That particular April, while massaging the Brown story to its best advantage, the Times and the other media were stoking the nation’s anxiety with sporadic tales of arson attacks against black churches in the South.

In March 1996, shortly before Brown’s death, the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal had held a highly publicized press conference to shed light on “the well-organized white-supremacist movement” behind the church burnings. The major media took it from there. A database search turned up more than 2,200 articles on the subject by July—including three huge layouts in USA Today on consecutive days. Time magazine captured the spirit of the coverage, describing the phenomenon as a “national epidemic of violence against black churches.” Brown’s plane crash only intensified fears of a wide-ranging conspiracy against African Americans.

For Kathleen Janoski, that spring and summer of 1996 passed without much stress. The hole in Ron Brown’s head had already devolved into something of a darkly ironic joke among her colleagues at the AFIP. One day in the fall of 1996, however, NCIS investigator Jeanmarie Sentell volunteered an extraordinary bit of information.

“Did you know the first set of Brown’s head X rays were destroyed?” said Sentelle. When Janoski asked why, Sentell confided they showed a “lead snowstorm.” Janoski had to ask what a “lead snowstorm” was. Sentell explained that it referred to a pattern of metal fragments one might see after a gunshot wound. Sentell then offered another stunning tidbit: “They took a second set of X rays and made them deliberately less dense.”

Janoski found the conversation with Sentell unnerving, “Twilight Zonish.” Immediately afterwards, she went back to her office and retrieved the 35 mm color slides of Brown’s X rays she had casually taken at Dover to help calibrate her camera. She got hold of the one person she most trusted at the AFIP, Lt. Col Steve Cogswell. He put the images in his projector and flashed them up on the wall. There it was. Even in a photo of the X ray, they could see the “lead snowstorm.”

Later, Janoski went to the AFIP library and asked to pull two sets of X rays. When Janoski laid Brown’s out on the light box, she came to still another unnerving realization: the head X rays were missing. That is when Janoski realized her slides were the only proof.

No word of the hole in Ron Brown’s head had yet reached the media. Janoski did not feel like she was in a position to say anything, and the culture of the military did not encourage whistle-blowing. She did, however, start paying more attention to the Ron Brown story.

For his part, Cogswell took a more active role. In charge of training for the AFIP, he had added the Ron Brown case to a slide show he presented at professional conferences and to FBI agents in homicide courses. He called the presentation, “Mistakes and Failures in Forensic Pathology.”

Brown’s was one among many cases Cogswell featured. Indeed, he had been involved with more than one hundred civilian and military crash investigations since joining the Air Force. But Brown’s was the most provocative, the one that would eventually catch the attention of reporter Christopher Ruddy, now Newsmax CEO but then the national correspondent for the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The Ruddy article in question was straightforward, specific, and comprehensive. It covered many of the more damning details of the case, including the famous “lead snowstorm” and what Cogswell matter-of-factly called “an apparent gunshot wound.”

There was nothing matter-of-fact about the AFIP response. The next day, the institute came out firing. ‘‘This is a closed case,’’ insisted the public affairs officer. Officials had conducted a ‘‘full discussion’’ of Brown’s injuries, including the head wound, and had dismissed any possibility of foul play.

On December 5, the AFIP imposed what was essentially a gag order on Cogswell. He was forced to refer all press inquiries on the Brown case to AFIP’s public affairs office and told he could leave his office only with permission. More intimidating still, military police escorted him to his house and seized all of his case materials on the Brown crash. When Janoski returned from Pittsburgh, under suspicion for her friendship with Cogswell, she and others were restricted to their floor and could not even go to lunch without permission.

The AFIP would soon clarify that neither Cogswell nor anyone else was under “house arrest.” The institute was merely conducting an internal investigation to make sure no “internal policies or procedures were violated—unrelated to the forensic findings—and it is important that Dr. Cogswell be available during this review.”

This was a stunning admission. The AFIP was prepared to investigate Cogswell’s media relations but not Gormley’s forensics. And lest anyone be uncertain of the outcome, the AFIP publicly chastised Cogswell for bringing “unnecessary grief to the families of those who died in this tragic accident.” This, by the way, was the exact strategy used to discredit critics of the ongoing TWA 800 investigation.

On that same December 5, F. Whitten Peters, Acting Secretary of the Air Force, sent an angry, apologetic letter to the families of the crash victims. “The alleged ‘bullet fragments’ mentioned in the [Tribune-Review] reports were actually caused by a defect in the reusable x-ray film cassettes,” Peters wrote. “Medical examiners took multiple x-rays using multiple cassettes and confirmed this finding.” He went on to claim that Brown had died of “multiple blunt-force injuries” suffered in the crash. Despite the hole in Brown’s head and the apparent “bullet fragments” that necessitated multiple X rays to explain, Peters saw no reason for the medical examiners to pursue an autopsy. “Had there been suspicion regarding the nature of Mr. Brown's death,” they certainly would have.

On December 6, Howard Kurtz, now with Fox News but then with the Washington Post, did his best to help the AFIP undermine Cogswell and his claims. Kurtz gleefully cited the article’s presumably tainted source and its movement up the now famous “media food chain.” An experienced media critic, Kurtz was able to deconstruct the story with a phone call or two.

“Cogswell never actually examined the body,” Kurtz revealed as though this were news. He then added with preposterous certainty, “There definitely was no bullet because there was no exit wound.”

Here, Kurtz cited Gormley as his authority. If Gormley were not authority enough, Kurtz fell back on an “army spokesman,” who had assured him the case was “closed.” With this assurance, the case was closed for Kurtz and the once-inquisitive Washington Post as well.

If Kurtz or the AFIP thought the outbreak had been contained, they underestimated the growing power of the alternative media. In a refreshingly noble gesture, Lt. Col. David Hause ignored the heat and went public on December 9 in support of Cogswell. Unlike Cogswell, Hause had been present for the examination. The authorities and their media friends could no longer write off Cogswell as some lone eccentric. Hause, who had won a purple heart in Vietnam as a combat infantryman, had been involved in autopsy procedures for twenty-five years. He was not one to be taken lightly.

Hause added one other bit of useful evidence. When the Tribune-Review had interviewed Gormley, he insisted that whatever caused the hole could not have been a bullet because it did not perforate the skull. No brain was allegedly visible.

Hause begged to differ. “What was immediately below the surface of the hole was just brain,” he asserted. To Gormley’s claim that there was no exit wound, Hause and Cogswell both agreed a bullet could have traveled down the neck and lodged elsewhere in the body. Although Janoski had not yet said so publicly, she knew one other fact of critical importance: Gormley had never even looked for an exit wound.

The AFIP fired back that same day with a press release rich in the kind of detail that would make a good defense lawyer cringe. “Due to the initial appearance of Brown’s injuries,” Gormley was quoted as saying, “we carefully considered the possibility of a gunshot wound. However, scientific data, including X rays, ruled out that possibility,” Gormley repeated publicly Peters’s claim that the alleged “bullet fragments” were “actually caused by a defect in the reusable X ray film cassette.” For Gormley, there was not “the slightest suspicion” regarding the nature of Brown’s death.

What the release did not say, but what the AFIP finally had to admit, was those multiple new X rays were all now missing, as were the original ones. “Wecht’s law,” famed coroner Cyril Wecht called the phenomenon. The more controversial a case, the more likely evidence is to turn up missing. He cited the Brown case as a classic example of the same. In real life Wecht described as “very, very rare” the times key X rays actually disappeared.

Not about to back off, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review had brought Wecht in to review the case. A prominent local Democrat, the Pittsburgh coroner could not be easily dismissed as a trafficker in Republican conspiracy commerce. He noted the “perfectly circular” nature of the wound, its “inwardly beveling path,” the “tiny pieces of dull silver-colored” material around the edge of the wound, the “lead snowstorm” shown in the photo of the X ray, and came to a damning conclusion.

Said Wecht, “There was more than enough evidence of a possible homicide to call in the FBI so that [the autopsy could have been conducted] and a gunshot could have been ruled out. The military had a duty to notify the family, and if the family didn’t allow an autopsy, go to another authority and have it conducted.”

As Brown’s daughter, Tracey Brown, would later concede, she learned about the hole only from the media and then more than a year and a half after the crash. “Had my family known about the suspicious wound at the time,” said Tracey, “we would have requested an autopsy.”

Wecht was not the only problem for the White House. Although the mainstream media were still largely avoiding the subject, the story, like some rogue salmon, made an unusual jump from the conservative media stream to the black media stream. On December 11, 1997, the Chicago Independent Bulletin ran a story headlined “Pastor Demands Investigation into Late Ron Brown’s Death.”

Two days later, the influential Baltimore Afro-American ran a lengthy front-page story, “Brown Head Injury Suspected Bullet Wound.” If the White House could ignore the conservative media, it could not ignore the black media. Nor could the Brown family. In December, the family asked for and got an audience with the AFIP. After looking at a photo of her father’s lifeless face, Tracey Brown came to a startling conclusion.

“I stopped caring how my father died,” wrote Tracey. “It may seem strange, but whether his death was an accident or an assassination, he’s not coming back.” In any case, Tracey’s newfound indifference to a possible assassination of her father did nothing to pacify the black community.

To head off the unrest, Col. Gormley appeared on “BET Tonight,” a national cable show hosted by Tavis Smiley. By this time, Gormley knew the Tribune-Review had run actual photos of Brown’s wound, and the brain was clearly visible. He conceded he had been wrong on that point and wrote off his mistake to faulty memory. Still, he insisted the X rays showed no metal fragments, and there was no exit wound.

It had to have been an excruciating time to be Col. Gormley. He was by no means a White House operative. It’s as likely his botched examination resulted from a generalized pressure to move quickly as it did from any direct order. And yet, as Gormley unwittingly admitted to Smiley, he had chosen not to pursue an autopsy based “on discussions at the highest level from in Commerce (sic), at the Joint [Chiefs of Staff], and the [Department of Defense], the White House.”

In other words, Gormley was sufficiently concerned about the wound to consult with his superiors at the time of the examination. This inquiry reached the White House. According to the relevant law that covers executive assassination, 18 U.S.C. § 351, the president should have referred the case to the FBI. At the very least, Clinton should have informed the Brown family. That he did neither suggests he had good reason not to.

Now, Gormley was being hung out to dry. The pressure on him was specific and surely exerted by a high authority. That authority was compelling Gormley to invent answers, even on national TV, and his inventions were increasingly transparent. A quick summary:

—The lead snowstorm seen in the Janoski photos of the Brown head X rays was a result of a defective X ray cartridge.

—A second set of X rays had been taken, and they showed no fragments.

—Unfortunately, all the head X rays were now missing from Brown’s files.

—Despite what Gormley had said earlier, Brown’s brain was visible. Gormley had forgotten.

—Although there was not the “slightest suspicion” of foul play, examiners took multiple X rays to explain away the apparent lead snowstorm, commissioned a search for an airplane part that could explain away the hole, and referred the case to the White House.

Janoski could see right through Gormley’s uneasy dither. She had followed Brown’s body all the way until embalming, which came right after the examination. She had wondered, even at the time, why Gormley did not look for an exit wound or test for gunshot residue.

Janoski could not imagine when a second set of X rays could have been taken. Besides, at the morgue she had heard no talk at all about a problem with the original X rays. More to the point, naval investigator Sentell had long ago confided in her that the original X rays had been deliberately destroyed precisely because they showed a lead snowstorm.

At the time, Janoski was making no friends among the brass. She and several others refused to talk to investigators. A smooth, southern colonel had been assigned to ease the story out of her, but Janoski had been around the Navy block too many times to fall for his sweet talk.

Janoski felt that her colleagues had no choice but to go public. They could not appeal to a chain of command that had ignored the presidential assassination statute, denied Brown an autopsy, concealed the wound from his family, lied about his examination, and possibly destroyed evidence, including critical X rays.

“This was not textbook ‘how to be a good petty officer’ stuff,” said Janoski. “We were naive. We had no idea we could get in so much trouble for telling the truth.”

Meanwhile, the pressure from the black community was growing more insistent. On December 18, the AP was reporting that the head of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume, was now taking the Brown case to the White House and demanding answers. That pressure turned nightmarish on Christmas Eve. Possibly for the first time in its history, protestors showed up at the AFIP headquarters at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Leading the charge was veteran activist and former comedian Dick Gregory. He staged a protest and prayer vigil that culminated in the TV-friendly gesture of wrapping yellow crime scene tape around the area.

DC police obliged Gregory by arresting him. He vowed he would not pay any bail and would spend Christmas in jail until he could make his case before a judge. “We are not going to allow this to pass,” he vowed. “There is very strong evidence the AFIP found a gunshot wound on Brown’s head and decided to cover-up this evidence.”

The mainstream media largely ignored Gregory, just as they had Mfume. But there was one black leader neither the media nor the White House could ignore. That was Jesse Jackson, and he came forward on January 5, 1998. At the time Jackson still had the perceived moral force to shake up Washington, and now he was exerting that force to call for an investigation.

With Jackson on board, reporters finally raised the Brown question at a press conference on that same day. They obviously struck a nerve. “The Pentagon, I think, has very thoroughly and in very gruesome detail, and no doubt in ways painful to the Brown family, addressed this issue. And it’s time to knock this stuff off,” snapped press secretary Mike McCurry. “I’m not going to talk about this further or take any further questions on the subject.”

For all of McCurry’s bluster, the White House could not just blow Jackson off. It had to respond. On January 8, the administration’s designated buffer, Janet Reno, held a press conference to announce the Justice Department had, in fact, consulted with the Defense Department in the past month but saw no reason to investigate further.

“The department is not looking into the matter,” Reno said, before adding the meaningless sop, “If there is credible information developed that a crime has been committed, then we will pursue it immediately.”

The next day, January 9, the Washington Post clarified what had gone on behind the scenes to justify Reno’s decision. As reported by Michael Fletcher, the AFIP had convened an internal panel of pathologists to review the Brown case, and the panel, including the presumed dissident Hause, “unanimously backed” Gormley’s findings.

In the January 11 issue of the Tribune-Review Hause roared back in dissent. “Fuming,” he denied he had ever said any such thing. Like the others, he had been asked in private whether he thought Brown’s wound was from a gunshot.

Hause had answered that he thought it more likely to have come from an “exotic weapon,” like a captive-bolt gun. Designed to kill livestock, the gun had been used by drug traffickers to kill an American DEA agent in Mexico in 1985. In any case, Hause had told his AFIP interviewer that “Secretary Brown’s body should be exhumed and an autopsy performed by someone not associated with AFIP.”

In that same issue of the Tribune-Review, a third pathologist, Air Force Maj. Thomas Parsons, also came forward. Although not present at the examination, he agreed the hole was “suspicious and unusual” and worthy of an autopsy. Like Hause, he firmly denied he had ever signed off on a report backing Gormley’s findings and just as firmly argued for an autopsy.

Appalled by the treatment of Cogswell and Hause, Chief Petty Officer Janoski decided to talk on record, and her account appeared two days later. Although lacking the clout of a pathologist, Janoski strengthened the group’s hand considerably. She had discovered the hole. She had been with Brown’s body longer even than Gormley. She had heard firsthand about the purposeful destruction of property and X rays, and on top of that she was a woman and a Democrat. She fit no one’s profile of a right-wing kook. And when she talked to the Tribune-Review, she told them everything.

With momentum still building in the black community, the Washington Afro-American ran a lengthy front-page story on January 17 focusing on Janoski’s claims. At this moment in time, the story had enough substance and enough bi-racial support to breach the levies of the mainstream media and shake Washington to its foundation, but this was not to be.

In one of the great ironies of modern media, a separate stream of conspiracy commerce had been simultaneously gathering force. This second stream followed much the course the White House report had described. One could trace its genesis to a January 1994 article in the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded American Spectator. The force of this second stream would sweep Jesse Jackson off his feet and strand the AFIP whistleblowers on an island of media indifference.

With no one looking Janoski, Hause, Parsons, and Cogswell were all “reassigned” to meaningless jobs designed to force them out of the military. Janoski lost her photography gig and was told to sit at a desk and do nothing. The AFIP barred Hause and Parsons from doing autopsies and transferred them away from Dover.

If anything, Cogswell was treated worse. Just the year before, he had been cited as the number one forensic pathology consultant in the Department of Defense and was called, ironically enough, “AFIP’s expert on gunshot wounds.” No more. In late January 1998, after ten years of the best possible reviews, Cogswell received a negative evaluation. Cogswell knew this was a career killer. He did not have to wait long to find out just how dead his career was. Despite his exceptional skills as a forensic pathologist, he was banished to dental pathology. There he would spend his final days in the military reviewing slides of mouth tumors.

As to those nicely-timed church burnings, in the run-up to the 1996 election, Clinton exploited them as best he could, telling a national radio audience that “racial hostility is the driving force.” He added, “I want to ask every citizen in America to say we are not slipping back to those dark days.”

Science writer Michael Fumento fired back in the July 8 issue of the Wall Street Journal. “OK, Mr. President, I’ll say it. I’ll say it because this supposed ‘epidemic of hatred’ is a myth, probably a deliberate hoax. There is no good evidence of any increase in black church burnings.” Fumento had the numbers to prove it. The only surge in church burning had come after the media hype as a result of copycat crimes, targeted at no particular race, and perpetrated not by Christian right-wingers but by self-described “satanists” more than any other identifiable group.

For the most part, the major media ignored Fumento. They had a president to re-elect.