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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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 Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 10:50 pm Post subject: TWA 800: The Great Untold Story of Our Time |
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I knew it.
I remember, from years ago, the scrutiny that surrounded this stink pile.
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June 7, 2016
TWA 800: The Great Untold Story of Our Time
By Jack Cashill
On the pleasant summer evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York bound for Paris. Twelve minutes after takeoff, about ten miles south of the popular south shore of Long Island, at least two surface-to-air missiles blew the 747 out of the sky, killing all 230 people on board.
I write the above with 100 percent confidence. I owe that confidence to the efforts of a small corps of committed individuals -- eyewitnesses, independent researchers, whistleblowers from within the investigation, and family members who have turned their grief into action. In attempting to get at the truth, at least three of these people were arrested, several others were thrown off the TWA 800 investigation, and every one of them was ridiculed.
In TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5), I get to tell their story, an epic one. What makes the story so compelling is that these everyday citizens have struggled against a Goliath that could not have been more powerful. The opposition includes, among other powers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the FBI, and the CIA.
In a totalitarian country, authorities can suppress information at will. In America, the media have to collaborate in that suppression, and this they did, closing their eyes to the obvious and accepting without evidence the government’s unproven theory of a spontaneous fuel tank explosion.
The fact that TWA 800 went down during the reelection campaign of a popular Democrat contributed mightily to the ensuing psychosis. This was less a media conspiracy than a collective pathology, as unwitting as it was unhealthy. So locked were the media into their delusions they quickly came to mock those who did not share them.
Whatever its flaws, America is not the Soviet Union. Thanks to the various sunshine laws, the U.S. government proved surprisingly helpful to researchers. Once the NTSB wrapped up its case in August 2000, citizens had access to a wealth of data, much of it visual. This included an animation of the crash created by the CIA, NTSB animations, hours and hours of video from the NTSB hearing, all seven hundred or so of the FBI witness interviews, scores of eyewitness drawings, and a vast library of charts and photos and technical data.
Working through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), researchers have kept the pressure on ever since. This past year, either through indifference or carelessness, authorities released two distinct items that remove virtually all doubt as to what happened on that July night in 1996 and in the months that followed.
One is the video of a missile test in the waters south of Long Island shot five days before TWA 800 was destroyed. The second and more comprehensive is a mother lode of CIA documents. These memoranda spell out in detail how the CIA covertly assumed control of the investigation and corrupted it. They also point to a scandal within the scandal, one whose implications are no less than historic.
The reader might recall the testimony of George Tenet, then the Director of Central Intelligence, before the 9/11 Commission in March 2004. It was Tenet who first introduced America to “the wall that was in place between the criminal side and the intelligence side.” He was referring specifically to a memorandum issued by the Department of Justice in 1995.
Said Tenet for the ages, “What’s in a criminal case doesn’t cross over that line. Ironclad regulations, so that even people in the criminal division and the intelligence divisions of the FBI couldn’t talk to each other, let alone talk to us or us talk to them.”
In his testimony to the 9/11 Commission John Ashcroft explained the impact of this memorandum on national security. “The single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall,” he noted, then added the kicker, “Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission.”
That commissioner, one of only five Democrats, was a Clinton-era deputy attorney general named Jamie Gorelick. As Hillary’s go-to-person in the DOJ it was she was oversaw the TWA 800 investigation. On her watch, as the CIA documents show, the FBI and CIA regularly breached the allegedly ironclad “wall” to collaborate on the subversion of that investigation. Tenet himself was deeply involved.
Although authorities have tried to make TWA 800 a story of “physical evidence,” such as frayed wires and bent metal, it has always been a political story, one that the media have done their best to avoid, if not delete.
I got a good sense of their complicity three years ago. Following the release of Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson’s excellent documentary, TWA Flight 800, I was invited to discuss the crash on CNN’s “New Day” with host Allison Kosik. At the end of this short segment, Kosik asked me why there might have been a cover-up.
“This was Bill Clinton’s Benghazi moment,” I said. “They [the Clintons] just wanted to kick this can down the road until after November so it would not affect the outcome of the [1996] election.” When CNN released the transcript the next day, someone had edited out my answer.
The major media will do their best to ignore the evidence reported in my book, but American Thinker will make it a little more difficult. In the weeks that follow, readers will get to hear from some of the people who have fought in the front lines of this battle over the last twenty years.
Their story is so compelling that no dispassionate observer who reads these accounts or my book will be able to deny the unsettling truth of TWA 800’s final flight.
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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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| Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2016 3:43 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/twa_800_what_the_cia_did_to_witness_571_mike_wire.html
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June 9, 2016
TWA 800: What the CIA Did to Mike Wire, Witness 571
By Mike Wire
TWA 800 was destroyed twenty years ago this July off the coast of Long Island. Mike Wire was one of the 258 FBI witnesses who reported an apparent missile strike. The New York Times, which owned the story, interviewed not a single one of them. In the absence of real information, the CIA and FBI collaborated to discredit the eyewitnesses and advance an exploding fuel tank theory. Wire’s case is just one shocking example out of many. To learn more, see Jack Cashill’s introductory article in this series or his book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5).
Recently the CIA released documents pertaining to the tragic destruction of TWA 800. During review of those documents, I have learned that the CIA had designated me as Witness #1 to the heartbreaking events of that day. For the FBI, I was only Witness #571. How the CIA came to decide upon me is at the heart of this miscarriage of justice.
On July 17, 1996, I was working to get the new Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton ready to open. The bridge crosses the narrow inland waterway and connects the mainland with a small strip of beach beyond.
As a millwright tradesman, I had been working all day in the mechanical room of the bridge. A little before 8:30 p.m. that night, I surfaced to get some air. I was talking to one of the many men working with me when I saw what looked like a cheap firework rising from beyond the houses along the beach. This wasn’t out of the ordinary for a summer weekday so close to the 4th of July.
I watched as the sparkling white light zigzagged southeast away from shore at about a 40-degree angle. At its peak, it arched over and disappeared. Then I saw what appeared to be an explosion, it expanded into a large fireball, and then I watched the aircraft in flames descend from the fireball and fall to the sea, breaking up as it fell.
After a few seconds had passed, I heard the first of four explosions. The first was the loudest. I could feel a shock wave against my chest. It shook the bridge enough that the other workers came running up to see what was going on.
At first, I thought it was a mid-air collision. I called my wife Joan at home in Pennsylvania and asked her to watch the news to see if anything was reported. At that point, the other men and I observed a rescue helicopter fly overhead and listened to the aircraft chatter on the PA system from the State Highway communications truck on site. Still unsure of what was unfolding; I went back to work and stayed on the job until after midnight.
The next morning at breakfast I overhead a man, a lawyer as it turned out, telling friends what he saw the night before. It was almost exactly what I saw. The only difference was that I described what I saw as “fireworks.” He was more familiar with the sea and took to describing the light as a “flare.”
Later, when I was back home in Bucks County, my employer called to inform me that the FBI wanted to speak to me. The FBI took my observations seriously enough to send an agent to my house named Andrew Lash. He interviewed me with Joan present on July 29, twelve days after the disaster.
Lash was conscientious and wrote what I said on a yellow legal pad, allowing me to check what he’d written for accuracy. We spoke for about 90 minutes, and that was the last time I talked to the FBI.
After that I followed the news on TWA 800 from a distance. Like most Americans, I trusted that the FBI would do the right thing. In November 1997, I saw the animation of the crash that the FBI showed to close the criminal case. It did not match anything I saw, and I wondered why the CIA was recruited to produce the animation. I presumed it was a temporary measure designed to pacify the public until a final cause for the crash was determined.
I paid little attention to the case after that, until the spring of 2000 when I received a call from Reed Irvine of the media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media. He asked if I was “The Man on the Bridge,” to which I replied that I was.
Irvine had something he wanted me to see. It was a certified word-for-word transcript of a 1999 meeting between the NTSB’s witness group and the CIA analysts who created the animation the FBI used to close the case. I was amazed that I was referenced so much; it seemed that a third of this 81-page document mentioned me (the man on the bridge) in some way.
As it turns out, the CIA based its animation around what I saw. However, there was a big problem. The CIA claimed that the nose of the plane blew off and when it did, the plane soared up for more than 3,000 feet. This, according to the CIA, confused me and other witnesses into thinking we saw a missile. I saw nothing of the kind. I saw an object zigzag up off the horizon at about a 40-degree angle, arch over and culminate in an explosion. After the explosion, the plane fell straight out of the sky.
As the transcript showed, at least two of the NTSB people gave the CIA resistance. They had seen the FBI “302” that Lash prepared, and it honestly reported what I had seen. When cornered, the CIA analyst responded, “He [I] was an important eyewitness to us. And we asked the FBI to talk to him again, and they did.”
This was nonsense. The FBI never spoke to me after the initial Lash interview. The CIA analyst continued, “In his original description, he [I] thought he had seen a firework and that perhaps that firework had originated on the beach behind the house.” This was true.
According to the analyst, though, I was “reinterviewed,” and I changed my statement. According to this fictional second interview, I did not see the light ascend from the beach. I first saw the light appear “as if -- if you imagine a flagpole on top of the house it would be as if it were on the top or the tip of the flag pole.” As a millwright, we do not use flagpoles as an increment of measurement. I would use degrees of angle in this kind of instance as in the original statement.
“Now, when the FBI told us that,” said the analyst, “we got even more comfortable with our theory.”
I do not know who generated this false interview to fit their scenario, but I stand by my original approved statement made to agent Lash. No other statement exists as there were none. The CIA built its case-closing animation around an interview that never took place. I would learn later that the CIA manufactured interviews with several other key witnesses.
This whole experience has left me disillusioned with the FBI, disillusioned with the CIA, and totally disillusioned with the news media that bought this whole story without ever questioning it -- even after the truth about the fake interviews had become impossible to deny.
I never wanted to go public. However, as a parent, when I think about the people who lost their children on this plane -- 230 people died in all -- I felt compelled to reveal the facts as I saw them first hand. That’s what I would want, the Truth, not a convenient fabrication. |
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yodanole
Joined: 02 Mar 2003
Location: La Florida
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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| yodanole: You're wasting your time; you're not dealing with a rational person in the OP. |
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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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| Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
| yodanole: You're wasting your time; you're not dealing with a rational person in the OP. |
Hey now...it is not the fault of anyone here, that you continuously, like your friend PMS, drop the soap. Just because you get owned time and time again (mainly by Swartz) does not mean you have earned the angst to hijack a thread. You have be relevant to do that... |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 3:31 am Post subject: |
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| ^More proof of your delusion. I've not been "owned" by anyone on this board. |
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young_clinton
Joined: 09 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2016 5:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Did radar pick up the missiles? |
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yodanole
Joined: 02 Mar 2003
Location: La Florida
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| Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2016 8:10 am Post subject: |
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Wasting my time is why I come here ...
| CentralCali wrote: |
| yodanole: You're wasting your time; you're not dealing with a rational person in the OP. |
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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2016 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/practicing_journalism_in_a_failed_republic.html
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June 16, 2016
Jack Cashill's TWA 800: Practicing Journalism in a Failed Republic
By James Sanders
James Sanders was the first investigative reporter to get beyond the TWA 800 press releases issued by the FBI. He paid a high price for doing so. If Sanders seems a bit cynical, the reader will soon understand why. -- Jack Cashill
America’s citizens must learn the truth: Reality is what remains after federal propagandists interpret fact. This is an absolute truth for citizens living in a failed republic -- including the United States in 2016.
I’m a medically retired police officer from southern California with more than thirty years experience investigating federal lawlessness buried within the National Archives storage boxes and the Freedom of Information Act. In my investigation of TWA Flight 800 among other incidents, I discovered that the greater story was the fall of the American Republic.
Over the decades it became abundantly evident the federal National Security State does not care what the law states. It will fight to keep the worst sins classified even though the law says documents classified secret and more than fifty years old must be declassified with only two very narrow exceptions: weapons of mass destruction and the name of a source.
Whenever the United States goes to war, the Republic ceases to exist for the duration. After World War I the defenders of a republican form of government rose up and forced a return to limited government, the Republic given to us by the Founding Fathers.
America’s road to Big Government and an expansionist foreign policy was beaten back. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rise to power brought the Republic once again under attack. Expansionist foreign policy cannot exist within a republic.
A republic exists to serve the needs of its citizens. Expansionist foreign policy within a National Security State exists to serve the perceived needs of the State. A common interest between an individual’s freedom and the National Security State cannot exist in perpetuity.
Ten years into my second career -- journalism -- July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 was shot down by the United States Navy just south of West Hampton, Long Island, shortly after 2030 hours. It was the second time in four days the United States Navy shot something out of the sky in the waters south of Long Island, and I have the video to prove it.
The 747 was seriously injured when the force of a thermite warhead, unique to the United States Navy in 1996, struck in the area where the leading edge of the right wing attached to the fuselage. A few feet away was engine number three, the first significant piece of the 747 to hit the water about 14,000 feet below, so close to JFK Airport that it was outside the initial search area.
Its factual location was so damaging to the FBI/CIA cover-up ordered by the National Security State that its actual location was expunged from the debris recovery log and moved more than 5,000 feet to the east to comport with a mechanical explanation.
Witness 73 told the FBI that she observed a missile strike the right side of the 747 at the point where the leading edge of the right wing attaches to the fuselage. All non-altered evidence confirms her observation. The FBI/CIA cover-up team altered her statement, but not just hers.
For instance, Mike Wire, Witness 571, was declared by the FBI/CIA cover-up team to be the most important witness, so important that if his original statement was correct, TWA Flight 800 must be investigated as a shoot-down.
So the cover-up team concocted a fictional follow-up interview with Wire, who allegedly confessed that his initial statement was completely false in all important aspects. Wire then supposedly agreed with the FBI/CIA cover-up team that their version of what happened was 100% correct.
These factually false alterations of witness statements are each felonies that I (and other investigators) uncovered during my investigation of the FBI/CIA cover-up team.
The normal American is like the frog in the high school lab experiment. Put the frog on a hot skillet and it will instantly hop off. Put the frog on a cool skillet and gradually increase the heat and the frog will sit there until it dies. That’s what happens to the normal citizen’s brain in this era of National Security State operating under the façade of Democracy.
The 1992 presidential election opened America’s political sewer floodgates. Political bodies soon surfaced: Billy Dale and the White House Travel Office; Drug Running out of Arkansas’s Mena Airport; Whitewater, Hillary’s cattle futures and ongoing bimbo eruptions where the President of these United States was constantly sexually harassed by a seemingly never-ending stream of morally depraved women.
Dominant media, particularly the New York Times and network television News were, with some justification, accused by those not of the extreme left of being thoroughly corrupted protecting their President during the never-ending stream of scandal and lawlessness Hillary insists was nothing more than a “vast right wing conspiracy.”
I stepped into this boiling caldron of political filth shortly after TWA Flight 800 was shot down. Dominant media had already circled the wagons, protecting the Clinton con game that must be run in a presidential election year when a horrendous event occurred, the possible murder of 230 people onboard TWA Flight 800. The National Security State had already tasked the FBI and CIA to come up with a believable con.
One medically retired California police officer backed by one medium size California newspaper. What could possibly go wrong?
The level of disgust within the alleged investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 made it easy to develop sources. By far the most productive was Terry Stacey, a TWA 747 pilot assigned to the NTSB side of the investigation. He was confident a cover-up was in progress.
Stacey met almost nightly with TWA legal counsel where the details of this suspicion were discussed. A second source at the top of the FBI, within Louis Freeh’s inner circle, soon developed. Eventually the evidence of a government conspiracy became so obvious, a large number of TWA Flight 800 investigators began to form a secret team.
Then my wife and I were indicted for conspiring with Terry Stacey to have residue from the thermite warhead tested. The federal judge refused to allow us a First Amendment defense and removed all potential jurors that would not swear they believed the federal government couldn’t possibly engage in the cover-up I alleged. Second Circuit Appellate Judge Sonya Sotomayor (now on the Supreme Court) conspired with two other temporary judges to alter facts from the trial in order not to overturn the verdict.
The Supreme Court effectively killed Freedom of the Press in the 1970s. Individual rights have been superseded by the perceived needs of the National Security State. This trend will continue unabated.
James Sanders is one of family members, whistleblowers, researchers and others who have not given up the pursuit of the truth. To learn more about their story please read Jack Cashill’s introductory article in this series or his book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5).
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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2016 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/twa_800_how_the_cia_hijacked_the_fbi_investigation.html
June 14, 2016
TWA 800: How the CIA Hijacked the FBI Investigation
By Jack Cashill
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Within hours of the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the Long Island coast on July 17, 1996, the FBI seized control of the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Although illegal, this was done in full view of an indifferent media.
What the media did not see was the CIA’s illegal seizure of the investigation from both the NTSB and FBI. We know about this quiet coup now thanks to a treasure trove of CIA documents recently unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act separately by attorney John Clarke and physicist Tom Stalcup.
In a July 30, 1996, internal CIA memo, headlined “Hold the Press,” a CIA analyst warned his unnamed superior of an impending FBI report on a likely missile strike. This was less than two weeks after the July 17 crash.
After interviewing 144 witnesses, the FBI missile team insisted there was a “high probability” that a surface-to-air missile destroyed the airplane. According to the FBI report, the evidence was “overwhelming.” The witnesses were “excellent” and their testimony “too consistent” for the cause to be anything other than a missile.
From the beginning, the CIA’s job was to make all talk of missiles go away. Less than two weeks after the crash, the CIA analyst boasted to his superior of how he discouraged the FBI from pursuing the missile angle. In fact, the FBI did not go public with this report at the time even though it had “only minor corrections left to make,” and the CIA made sure it never would.
This, of course, raises the question of why the CIA was involved in the first place. A year earlier Deputy Attorney Jamie Gorelick had issued the notorious “wall” memorandum preventing the criminal investigators of the FBI and the intelligence gatherers of the CIA from collaborating. The CIA ignored the memo. So too did FBI agent in charge, Jim Kallstrom. The fact that Kallstrom reported to Gorelick hints at why he was allowed to.
As to the motive for this uneasy collaboration, Kallstrom claimed to have “looked throughout the government” to find the experts best able to answer the question, “What did the eyewitnesses see?” He allegedly found those experts at the CIA.
This was false on many levels. The real experts arrived in Long Island within a day or two of the crash and, for a short while, helped the FBI interview eyewitnesses. They had the instruments and the know-how to do so. These were the agents from the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) in Alabama, a subset of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The shift from MSIC to the CIA took place fully off camera. Although the CIA analysts never left their office and had no relevant expertise, they covertly seized control of witness assessment from the FBI and MSIC.
Once empowered, the CIA analysts bullied the MSIC reps and the FBI into accepting the CIA’s counterfeit thesis, namely that after a spontaneous fuel tank explosion, the now noseless 747 tilted back and rocketed upright more than three thousand feet, confusing the witnesses into thinking they saw a missile.
The NTSB, which should have been in control, did not even get to see the FBI witness statements until two years after the CIA had established its thesis. The MSIC reps protested weakly and to no avail. As the CIA documents make clear, only one lone FBI agent took a strong stand against the agency’s corrupt intervention.
In my book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5), I call this otherwise anonymous missile team member “Lewis Erskine” after the character Efrem Zimbalist Jr. played on the hit TV show, "The F.B.I.".
According to a CIA memo from April 29, 1997, Erskine had sent the CIA a blistering critique of the “zoom climb” and demanded answers to more than a dozen salient questions. He wanted to know why the analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object “hit the aircraft” or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800.
In all, Erskine cited some thirty “problem witnesses” whose accounts did not begin to square with the “agency scenario.” With some precision, he also challenged the aerodynamics of the CIA’s zoom climb.
The CIA analyst responded with his usual obfuscations, but he made one surprising concession, namely that he had no physical proof of a zoom climb. As both he and Erskine knew, not a single witness saw the 747 ascend after the initial convulsion.
The CIA analyst did not contest this point. “Whatever happens after these first few seconds,” he responded to Erskine, “is not understood by the CIA and would require extensive modeling of the aircraft beyond the CIA capabilities.”
In his conclusion, Erskine hit the CIA hard. He recommended that the CIA “withdraw its conclusions” until it could meet several conditions, any one of which would have unraveled the CIA scenario. These included the integration of radar data, the validation of key witnesses, and the reconciliation of the thirty “problem witnesses” with the zoom climb scenario.
The CIA analyst did not seem overly worried. His boss, the newly-minted CIA director George Tenet, had already signed off on his theory, and Tenet was a political guy with White House backing. A month earlier, he sent FBI director Louis Freeh a letter assuring him that “what these eyewitnesses saw was the crippled aircraft after the first explosion had already taken place.”
“CIA will continue to look at problematic witnesses,” the analyst responded to Erskine, “but we believe we have adequately explained all of them within the agency scenario.” The CIA analyst got to work quickly. The very day he sent this memo, April 29, 1997, someone manufactured a new FBI statement for Witness #73, the most observant of all the eyewitnesses, and placed it in her FBI file to discredit her earlier testimony.
Seven months later, in November 1997, the CIA’s quiet work behind the scenes culminated in the public premiere of a CIA-produced animation of the zoom climb. “What the witnesses saw,” the narrator reassured the media, “was a Boeing 747 in various stages of crippled flight.”
The FBI showed the video once during a news conference announcing the suspension of its criminal probe and never showed it again. That was enough for the media. As to the 258 eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike, they obviously could not tell right from left or up from down. So why bother talking to them? |
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trueblue
Joined: 15 Jun 2014
Location: In between the lines
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2016 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/twa_800_breaking__air_traffic_controller_tells_all.html
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June 13, 2016
TWA 800: Breaking -- Air Traffic Controller Tells All
By Jack Cashill
As I hoped would happen, American Thinker’s series on TWA Flight 800 has prompted individuals with first hand knowledge to come forward. “Mark Johnson” is one. An air traffic controller (ATC), he worked the night of July 17, 1996 -- the night TWA Flight 800 was destroyed -- at the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) located in Westbury, New York.
Johnson has provided me with his real name, and I have confirmed that he was in a position to know what he says he knows. He requested that I use an alias because he has children who depend on him. The federal government, he believes, “will seek revenge, retribution and/or any other remedy they feel like. I would be fearful my pension would be at risk.” I have heard this sentiment voiced by many people involved in this incident.
Although Johnson was not responsible for tracking TWA Flight 800, he spoke directly with the ATC who did. In fact, he asked him “plenty of questions to prepare myself for the ‘suits’ who were beginning to arrive.” Along with several other ATCs, he viewed the radar tape of the incident. According to Johnson, “A primary radar return (ASR-9) indicated vertical movement intersecting TWA 800.”
An advanced radar system, the Northrop Grumman ASR-9 is able to detect a “target” in severe clutter even when the target has no transponder. The absence of a transponder is what distinguishes a “primary radar return” from a “secondary” one. In others words, the radar picked up a small, unidentified, ascending object intersecting TWA 800 in the second before the 747 “disappeared from radar.”
After Johnson and his supervisor watched the video tape replay with audio, they turned to each other and said in unison, “What the f***!" Asked by his supervisor if he had ever seen anything like this before, Johnson said yes -- while in the Navy days doing missile test fires at sea.
A day later, now knowing the full scope of the tragedy, Johnson asked if he could take another look at the radar tape. “Can’t, it’s gone,” said his supervisor. “We had better say nothing,” said Johnson, “or the f***ing government will make us disappear.” The supervisor agreed.
I asked Johnson what he and his colleagues thought in the days and weeks to follow. He answered in one word, “cover-up.” As he explained, in incidents involving fatalities, the FAA demands that the tapes be preserved as evidence of fault or no fault. “So -- no tape, no fault. What a sham!”
Word spread quickly from TRACON. Within a half hour of the crash, Clinton anti-terror czar Richard Clarke was summoning a high level meeting at the White House. A civilian plane crash never before prompted this kind of response. The eyewitness accounts had yet to come in. The radar tape had set the wheels in motion.
CNN’s Christine Negroni provided the most detailed account of the radar’s reception in Washington in her book Deadly Departure, an otherwise predictable rehashing of the government position. Negroni’s primary source was Ron Schleede, then a deputy director of aviation safety at the NTSB. On the morning after the crash, July 18, an FAA official showed him a radar plot that got his complete attention. “Holy Christ, it looks bad,” he said at the time. He told Negroni, “It showed this track that suggested something fast made a turn and took the airplane.”
That same morning, said Schleede, “The FAA was working with people at the top secret level. They were in a crisis room with intelligence people and everybody else.” That same day, before the story could be suppressed, authorities were telling the New York Times about “a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion.”
Enter the CIA. Its analysts were tasked with explaining away not only the eyewitness testimony, but also, apparently, the radar. In a July 20 internal memo, a CIA analyst reported “no evidence of a missile” in the radar data. By July 21, “experts” were telling the Times that the radar blip was actually “an electronic phantom image.”
Not everyone was buying the spin. Jim Holtsclaw, a deputy regional director for the Air Transport Association (ATA), arrived in Washington soon after TWA 800 went down. There, a friend put Holtsclaw in touch with an ATC in New York (not Mark Johnson) who had gotten hold of a copy of the tape. The ATC promised to send it. “You decide what you are seeing,” he told Holtsclaw.
Holtsclaw knew something about radar. He served as LAX Control Tower manager and ATC manager with American Airlines before moving on to the Air Transport Association. As he would later testify under oath, his copy of the radar tape showed “a primary target at the speed of approximately 1200 knots converging with TWA 800, during the climb out phase of TWA 800.”
About a month after the TWA 800 disaster, retired United Airline pilot and accident investigator Dick Russell received a phone call from Holtsclaw. Russell wrote down what Holtsclaw had to tell him verbatim,
the gist of which was that “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from the word go.”
Russell emailed this information to some select friends in the industry.
Although recipients had vowed to keep the information among them, one of them posted the information on the Internet, and it somehow found its way through French intelligence on to Pierre Salinger.
Although a former U.S Senator and press secretary to JFK, Salinger proved no match for the Clinton administration and its friends in the media. In the month of November 1996 alone the New York Times ran four articles with headlines that mocked Salinger.
A year later, the FBI closed its case. Thanks to the “expertise” of the CIA, the FBI’s Jim Kallstrom was able to assure America that the 258 eyewitnesses to a missile strike could not tell up from down and that the “vertical movement” Mark Johnson saw “intersecting TWA 800” was nothing more than “a ghost of Jet Express 18 which was at a different location.”
It is all so easy for the White House that has the New York Times in its pocket. |
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TorontoToronto
Joined: 20 Jun 2016
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 8:05 am Post subject: |
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I have a friend in the US Navy. Test firing of super expensive missiles are pretty rare events. So rare, that any time they test fire one, he says it's a huge event. People turn up on deck with cameras to record it. You would have to silence an awful lot of people, many long out of the navy, to keep this a secret. Like all conspiracies, they collapse under the weight of the number of people you need to keep silent.
He also noted the things are hella loud. If you tried to, say, secretly keep everyone below deck, you couldn't muffle the sound. And these missiles leave the decks in need of a new paint job.
Also, you can't just fire a missile without a huge amount of paper work. There are people all up the line that would know a missile was fired on a certain date and new one needs to be sent out.
Again, you're expecting loads of honorable navy men and women, many devoutly religious people, to engage in a massive conspiracy of silence. |
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