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[FreeFall]

Times Continues to Avoid TWA 800 Connection

Yesterday, August 17, The New York Times reported that
State Department analysts had warned the Clinton
administration in July 1996 about the dangers of Osama
bin Laden's impending move to Afghanistan.

Deep in the article, the Times reports that the State
Department assessment was "written July 18, 1996."
Nowhere in the article does The Times mention what
happened the day before.

What happened on July 17, 1996 TWA Flight is that TWA
Flight 800 exploded on a beautiful summer night only
12 minutes out of JFK along the affluent
well-populated south shore of Long Island. By all
accounts, this crash threw Washington into a virtual
war footing.

A State Department assessment produced on July 18,
1996 was as likely to have been routine as one
produced on September 12, 2001.

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 missiles. 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 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.

As it happens, the Atlanta Olympics opened on July 19,
the day the above stories were reported. Were the
White House to acknowledge that an attack from outside
the plane had caused its destruction, the FAA might
well have been compelled to shut down aviation on the
east coast. Accordingly, all missile talk ceased on
that day. The investigation was forced into a false
dialectic between bomb and mechanical. And the
government, especially the FBI, would make the Times
its unwitting messenger.

The day of the president's visit to Long Island eight
days after the crash would prove to be something of a
milestone. On that same day, for the first time,
unnamed "law enforcement officials," most assuredly
the FBI, told The New York Times that they "supported
the theory that the plane was destroyed by a bomb." At
a separate briefing that day, FBI honcho James
Kallstrom reinforced the theory. "We know there was a
catastrophic explosion," he admitted, "It was caused
by some kind of bomb, obviously explosion." Yet,
there was never any evidence of the same then, nor
would there ever be, at least not a conventional bomb
within the plane.

Besides, by this time the FBI had already interviewed
hundreds of eyewitnesses—pilots, vacationers,
fishermen, surfers—and they were all telling the same
story. A typical sighting came from a Westhampton
school parking lot, where school principal Joseph
Delgado saw an object like "a firework" ascend almost
vertically. The object had a "bright white light with
a reddish pink aura surrounding it." The tail, gray
in color, "moved in a squiggly pattern." From
Delgado's perspective, the object "arced off to the
right in a south westerly direction."

Delgado saw a second object "glitter" in the sky and
the first object move up towards it. He thought at
first it was "going to slightly miss" the glittering
object, TWA 800, but it appeared to make "a dramatic
correction at the last second." Then Delgado saw a
"white puff." Delgado and at least 750 other
people—and probably thousands--watched as the plane's
fuel tanks exploded, and Flight 800 morphed into what
Delgado described as a "firebox" and others as a
"fireball." Amazingly, The New York Times would only
speak to one eyewitness, and not one of the 270 who
saw the object's ascent.

To its credit, the FBI pushed to the terrorist side of
the equation and pulled the Times with it. The
Times' article on August 14—"Fuel Tank's Condition
Makes Malfunction Seem Less Likely"—was the most
provocative yet.

According to the Times, investigators "concluded that
the center fuel tank caught fire as many as 24 seconds
after the initial blast that split apart the plane, a
finding that deals a serious blow to the already
remote possibility that a mechanical accident caused
the crash." One official was quoted as saying that
parts of the tank were in ''pristine condition.''
Said another official who insisted on anonymity, ''It
is clear that whatever set off the tank did not
severely damage the tank. Something else, most likely
later, blew up the tank.''

There was more. Investigators told the Times that the
pattern of the debris "persuaded them that a
mechanical malfunction is highly unlikely." From
their analysis of the debris field, these
investigators concluded the following, a summary that
still has all the appearance of unvarnished truth:

The blast's force decapitated the plane, severing the
cockpit and first-class cabin, which then fell into
the Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the plane flew on,
descending rapidly, and as it did thousands of gallons
of jet fuel spilled out of the wings and the center
fuel tank between them. At 8,000 feet, about 24
seconds after the initial blast, the fuel caught fire,
engulfing the remainder of the jetliner into a giant
fireball.

"Now that investigators say they think the center fuel
tank did not explode," read the Times account, "they
say the only good explanations remaining are that a
bomb or a missile brought down the plane."

And then Richard Clarke got involved. About four weeks
after the crash, based on his own rough timeline,
Clarke visited the site of the investigation on Long
Island. There he casually stopped to talk to a
technician. Their presumed conversation, reported in
Clarke's Against All Enemies, is so utterly
disingenuous it needs to be repeated in full:

"So this is where the bomb exploded?" I asked. "Where
on the plane was it?"

"The explosion was just forward of the middle, below
the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23.
But it wasn't a bomb," he added. "See the pitting
pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous
eruption, from inside."

"What's below row 23?" I asked, slowly sensing that
this was not what I thought it was.

"The center line fuel tank. It was only half full,
might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas
cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit . . .
. " He indicated an explosion with his hands.

The technician goes on to tell Clarke that these "old
747s" have an "electrical pump inside the center line
fuel tank" and lays the blame on the pump. In fact,
almost everything about the conversation is wrong.
The tank was not half full but virtually empty. The
evening was a cool 71 degrees. The plane's pumps were
all recovered and found blameless, and the fuel pump
wiring is not even inside the tank. The NTSB
admittedly never did find the alleged ignition source.


But pride goeth before the fall. In this one chance
encounter Clarke manages to sum up the essence of the
"exit strategy" months if not years before the NTSB
does, and he takes all credit for it. That same day,
Clarke tells us that he returned to Washington and
shared his exploding fuel tank theory with chief of
staff Leon Panetta and NSA director Tony Lake, even
sketching the 747 design.

"Does the NTSB agree with you," Lake reportedly asked
Clarke. Clarke's purported response speaks to the
priority politics would take over truth in this
investigation--"Not yet."

Jamie Gorelick took the ball and ran. On August 22,
1996, the Deputy Attorney General called the FBI's Jim
Kallstrom to Washington and effectively put the TWA
Flight 800 investigation to bed. Now, it was just a
question of how best to explain away the explosive
residue and the eyewitnesses

Jack Cashill

World Net Daily

Hyperlink added by Admin (Lew). Please include urls or hyperlinks when posting articles that not an original.

[becca1223]

Was TWA 800 Shot Down By a Military Missile?

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/TWA/twa.html