TWA 800: Ten Years Ago

I must confess that while I find it almost impossible to believe that the Clinton Administration could have persuaded so many people to cover up a missle attack, I have never been comfortable with the official conclusions about what caused TWA 800 to explode and crash. Why? Because there were so many eyewitnesses who reported seeing a streak from the surface headed up to TWA 800 just before it exploded.

I take most things that I see published in WorldNetDaily with a grain of salt (often two grains of salt), but I do know Jack Cashill, and I respect him. That's what makes this ten part series of his about TWA 800 so disturbing.

From part 1:

Lahr’s persistence, however, has finally paid off. In response to his petition, the CIA sent to Lahr in March 2006 tabular listings of the primary radar returns of the doomed airplane. This data lacked title, annotation or any sense of its importance. Those who released it may not have known what they were releasing. Glen Schulze did. Lahr turned the data over to this “engineer and researcher extraordinaire,” and Schulze went to work.

Some years ago, at the behest of certain family members of the crash victims, Schulze analyzed the flight data recorder (FDR). After much painstaking research of the timing blocks in the recording sequence, Schulze determined that the four seconds following the initial explosion had been eliminated from the FDR. In Lahr’s opinion, this was a deliberate attempt to hide an initial break-up sequence that differed from the one offered by the authorities.

Schulze and one of the family members, Don Nibert, presented his FDR findings to NTSB Chairman Jim Hall in a closed-door meeting. Although challenged to do so, the NTSB has never refuted those findings.

Part 2 gives the accounts of some of the 270 people who saw what sounds like a missle streaking skyward towards TWA 800--and why it was in the interests of the Clinton Administration to cover it up, if that's what happened:

The evening of July 17 was not as peaceful as it appeared to be. Not nearly so. In Iraq, July 17 just happened to be National Liberation Day, Saddam's evil 4th of July. To celebrate, Saddam had made some of his most serious threats yet against the United States. Iran was restless as well. The White House believed it responsible for the lethal bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks earlier that killed 19 American servicemen.

On that fateful eve, just two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, the United States military was on its highest state of home-front alert since the Cuban missile crisis.

Shortly before noon, Washington time, on July 17, the Islamic Change Movement sent a fax to Al-Hayah in London, the most prestigious Arabic language newspaper. The warning came one day after the group had taken responsibility for the destruction of Khobar Towers. It was as serious as a truck bomb:

The mujahedeen will give their harshest reply to the threats of the foolish U.S. president. Everybody will be surprised by the magnitude of the reply, the date and time of which will be determined by the mujahedeen. The invaders must be prepared to leave, either dead or alive. Their time is at the morning-dawn. Is not the morning-dawn near?

As the sun was about to rise on the Arabian Peninsula, it was about to set on Long Island.

In part 3, Cashill examines Richard Clarke's description of events, and makes a case that Clarke played some part in creating the cover-up:

In his book "Against All Enemies," Richard Clarke offers the only published inside account of the demise of TWA Flight 800, much of it transparently false, but all of it entirely revealing. At that time Clarke served as chairman of the Coordinating Security Group on terrorism.

Within 30 minutes of the plane's crash, Clarke tells us, he had convened a meeting of the Coordinating Security Group in the White House situation room. This is not something he had done for the ValuJet 592 crash in Florida two months prior or for any other crash.

"The FAA," Clarke reports, "was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft." In fact, the FAA did have an explanation. Its radar operators in New York had seen on their screens an unknown object "merging" with TWA 800 in the seconds before the crash and rushed the radar data to Washington. This is why Clarke called the meeting.

In fact, the last altitude the FAA actually recorded was about 13,800 feet. This is easily verified and beyond debate. There is a reason here for Clarke's dissembling. He needs to lift the aircraft – even if just in the retelling – above the reach of a shoulder-fired missile.

About four weeks after the crash, Clarke met with the late FBI terrorist expert, John O'Neill, who told Clarke that the eyewitness interviews "were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger." For the record, no eyewitness ever mentioned a "Stinger." But by this time some 270 eyewitnesses had described to the FBI something looking very much like a missile attack. Many of them had provided detailed drawings.

"[TWA 800] was at 15,000 feet," Clarke reportedly answered O'Neill, who died at the World Trade Center on September 11 and can no longer correct the record. "No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high." One would think that on so sensitive and contentious a point, Clarke would have made an effort to get the altitude of TWA 800 right or even consistently wrong. He does neither. The real altitude is not 15,000 feet or 17,000 feet, but 13,800 feet – an altitude at which the Stinger could be effective. In a book of this importance, such mistakes and omissions shock the knowing reader.

In part 4, he discusses how the New York Times, the lion of full disclosure and openness in government, first published news reports that suggested the government knew that there was a missle involved--and then mysteriously started taking the government line:

On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded on a beautiful summer night only 12 minutes out of JFK. Had the plane crashed in Kalamazoo or Keokuk or Kansas City, chances are the American people would have known the cause of the crash almost immediately.

But it didn't. It crashed in the New York Times' backyard. The Times' reporters owned the story from day one.

On July 18, the last day of official honesty, Times reporters were all over the place, and they were pressing for the truth. On that day, unnamed "government officials" – most likely the FBI – told the New York Times that air traffic controllers had "picked up a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion."

These officials and the Times unequivocally linked the radar to the multiple eyewitness sightings and the sightings to a missile attack.

According to the Times' sources, "The eyewitnesses had described a bright light, like a flash, moving toward the plane just before the initial explosion, and that the flash had been followed by a huge blast – a chain of events consistent with a missile impact and the blast produced by an aircraft heavily laden with fuel." As one federal official told the Times that first morning, "It doesn't look good," with the clear implication of a missile strike.

This was the last day these officials were open with the media about the possibility of a missile. Once they changed the story, so did an oddly quiescent Times. The words "radar" and "eyewitness" would all but disappear from the Times' reporting after the first day. Nor, inexplicably, would the Times investigate the possible role of the military in the downing of TWA 800 – not one paragraph – and not one word about satellites and what they might have captured.

...

In due time, the FBI would acknowledge that 270 eyewitnesses saw not just the white flash, but streaks of light in the sky converging on TWA Flight 800 before the flash. The New York Times would interview not a single one of them.

For all its misdirection, the FBI seemed to have been struggling against the White House throughout August. The Aug. 23 Times headline story – "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800" – stole the thunder from Clinton's election-driven approval of welfare reform in that same day's paper and threatened to undermine the peace and prosperity message of the next week's Democratic convention.

"Investigators have finally found scientific evidence that an explosive device was detonated inside the passenger cabin of Trans World Airlines Flight 800," reported the Times authoritatively on the 23rd. The paper referred specifically to the traces of PETN, first identified by a bomb-sniffing dog more than two weeks before.

These investigators told the Times that PETN is commonly found in bombs and surface-to-air missiles, "making it impossible, for now, to know for sure which type of explosive device destroyed the Boeing 747." The Times reminded its readers that 10 days prior the FBI had said that ''one positive result'' in the forensic tests would cause them to declare the explosion a crime.

Now, however, senior investigators "were not ready to declare that the crash was the result of a criminal act in part because they did not yet know whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or a missile."

But there was a speed bump ahead. On the 25th, for the first time, the New York Times published a story with a "missile" lead. "The discovery of PETN," claimed the article, "has kept alive the fearsome though remote possibility that the airliner was brought down by a surface-to-air missile."

On Aug. 30, the FBI announced that it had discovered additional traces of explosive residue "on a piece of wreckage from inside the Boeing 747 near where the right wing meets the fuselage." The location is critical. This is exactly where the first explosion seemed to be centered. At the briefing, the FBI did not identify the type of chemical, but "senior investigators" tipped off the Times that the substance was RDX. One agent told the Times that finding the two ingredients together, RDX and PETN, was ''virtually synonymous with Semtex.''

The Times, which prided itself on its sources, was now being steered by the FBI agents exactly where they wanted this investigation to go – away from the "missile" and back towards the bomb, even if it meant revealing more information. If PETN alone allowed for the possibility of a missile, PETN and RDX together argued much more strongly for a bomb.

The shrapnel in the bodies is the subject of part 6:

In the intense crucible of an explosion, the debris and shrapnel created usually retain residues and mechanical and physical characteristics that define the precise nature of that explosion. The different types of explosions have unique characteristics of temperature, pressure and duration, which create recognizable "signatures" of chemical residues, fragment size and composition. Thus, if a fuel tank explosion had destroyed the plane, its artifacts – low temperature, low energy, low velocity, no significant metal fragmentation – could be confidently identified and distinguished from the high velocity artifacts caused by a bomb or missile. These could be corroborated with certainty from the residues and the smaller and shattered fragments.

In contrast to all the evidentiary debris pulled out of the ocean, the autopsy-derived evidence is also the least likely to be randomly contaminated by ocean and sludge or have any explosive residues abraded or dissolved away. Many explosive residues are known to be soluble in ocean water.

And what did the foreign object evidence reveal? One of the many peculiarities of the investigation was that the FBI never released, nor even shared inside the investigation, any of those related details.

According to the county coroner, Dr. Charles Wetli, the FBI never provided him with any of those specific forensic details. That in itself constitutes a serious irregularity in the investigation and yet its very weirdness typified much of the probe. Dr. Wetli was obliged by federal law to relinquish the autopsy evidence items to the FBI. That makes sense because of the vast and sophisticated forensic explosive expertise the FBI had at its disposal and available on-site. But Dr. Wetli also has the statutory responsibility and obligation as the chief county medical officer to determine the cause and manner of death. The FBI, by law and by convention, is required to provide such forensic evidence to the coroner. Even 10 years after the event, he cannot conclude an adequate inquest without those very pertinent facts of the case.

Even more surprisingly, the FBI did not share those particular forensic results with the National Transportation Safety Board, either. In 1998, the NTSB responded to a FOIA request about the foreign object evidence by stating that the FBI had eventually transferred all of those actual objects to them, but without any forensic or descriptive details or documentation whatsoever. The NTSB probably still has this evidence, still with no clue as to what it all signifies.

There's a lot of material in this series, and it raises enough questions that as much as I hate bizarre conspiracy theories, I do find myself wondering about TWA 800.

Some years back, I saw an interview (I think with CBS) with President Lyndon B. Johnson about the Warren Commission report. This was very shortly before LBJ's death, when he had let his hair grow long, and looked like the world's oldest hippie. In that interview, he admitted that he encouraged the Warren Commission to not look too closely into Lee Harvey Oswald's involvement with the Soviet Union, out of fear that if they found a connection, it could lead to World War III. It was a startling statement, and it ran completely contrary to everything that I thought about the Warren Commission. I am surprised that I have seen no mention of those statements over the years--but it would certainly explain a great deal about the many, many discrepancies in John Kennedy's autopsy and lingering questions about who shot him, and the curious connections between Jack Ruby and the Mafia. (The Mafia had strong reasons to want to get rid of John Kennedy, and Kennedy's CIA had paid the Mafia to assassinate Castro.)

I don't know what to think about TWA 800. It is pretty clear that the Clinton Administration was doing everything it could to avoid confronting Iraqi involvement in other terrorist attacks. I've mentioned before (and here) that there are disturbing coincidences involving Iraqis and the 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. Clinton had a strong interest in avoiding going to war, since that tends to be bad for the economy--and in 1995, it was certainly in Clinton's political interest to pin the Oklahoma City bombing entirely on someone whom he could use to smear Republicans. (McVeigh did eventually admit that he did it.)

I can see why Clinton's people would have wanted TWA 800 turned into a mechanical failure, not a terrorist attack. I find the official explanation wildly inconsistent with the eyewitness accounts that suggest a missle attack. I just can't believe that so many people working for the FBI would engage in a cover-up so massive when there was no federal government criminal action that needed covering (unlike Waco).