FROM A WORLD NET DAILY ARTICLE IN 2003:
Kenneth Timmerman, author of the eye-opening new book "Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America" (Crown Forum), reported that sources (sic) "contacted him with a warning. He told Timmerman that the intelligence service of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps was planning an attack on an American airliner. The source, who was living in exile, was himself a former member of the Iranian military with access to Iranian intelligence circles. He had been vetted by several U.S, intelligence agencies and found credible."
THE ACCOUNT CONTINUES:
Two weeks later, the source repeated the warning. Although his information was not precise, he believed that the targeted flight would originate in Athens – as TWA Flight 800 actually did – but he made no mention of missiles and implied that a bomb would be planted on board.
For his part, Timmerman was concerned enough to contact a friend who worked in counter-terrorism at the State Department, and the friend was concerned enough to bring in the FAA. As far as Timmerman knows, nothing came of this warning.
About a week later, or about a week before the destruction of TWA Flight 800, Timmerman's source contacted him with an "urgent" warning. This time, he said, the attack was "imminent." Timmerman alerted a well-placed friend who set up an emergency meeting with a deputy director of operations for the CIA. On this occasion, Timmerman provided the CIA with a written summary of the warnings to date.
Timmerman believes that his warnings were ignored. Indeed, within a week of the meeting, TWA Flight 800 was blown out of the sky. After that tragic event, another Timmerman source – this one from inside the American intelligence community – confirmed that Timmerman's report to the CIA "jibed completely" with what the source and his colleagues had been hearing as well, namely an imminent "Iranian attack on an American airliner."
Timmerman was dismayed to hear the Clinton administration claim that it had received "no warning" prior to the plane's destruction. It had likely received several, some possibly more specific than the one he offered.
As I told Timmerman, I am not sure his warnings were ignored. In our book "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America," James Sanders and I document at least six highly credible sightings of a U.S. Navy cruiser or cruisers prowling up and down the coast of Long Island on that fateful July 17. Even those who had been vacationing on Long Island for years had never seen anything like this before. It has been argued that these cruisers were on some sort of training exercise, but "training" may well have provided the cover for a more substantive mission, just two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics.
In "First Strike," Sanders and I make the case that the mode of attack was a small plane, perhaps a business-class jet, filled with explosives. If we are correct in this deduction, it might explain why missile-bearing cruisers and U.S. Navy submarines were tracking the JFK flight path off the south coast of Long Island. As Timmerman allowed, "Maybe they did take my warnings seriously."
If Iranian intelligence planned the attack, there is still some question as to who executed it. The fact that the plane was destroyed on July 17 adds a rogue variable to the equation. This past July 17 the major media made no mention of the Flight 800 anniversary, but they did call attention to the fact that the date was posted prominently in public places throughout Iraq. It was – I should say "had been" – Iraq's National Liberation Day, the day the Baath Party took power 35 years earlier, and these are a date-conscious people...."
Were Mecca to be bombed on the 4th of July, the disinterested observer would logically conclude that either the USA was responsible or that some provocateur did it to implicate the U.S. The same holds true with the destruction of TWA Flight 800 on July 17. The odds are strong that either Iraq was involved or that the Iranians timed the attack to shift the blame to Iraq. In either case, the timing is not likely to have been coincidental....
-- Source: Iran Responsible for TWA 800 Tragedy?, by Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily.com, November 15, 2003
http://www.worldthreats.com/middle_east/Iran%20Responsible%20for%20TWA%20800.htm
NOTE: I also recall that a group of Iranians claimed credit after the downing, which cite I am still working on.
Meanwhile, here's an interview between Peter Jennings and Former CIA Director Adm. James Woolsey
ABC News Special Report: America Under Attack, 9/11/01
Also, check out this timeline summary:
Strike One - Khobar Towers, Strike Two - TWA 800
Finally,
Another look at Flight 800, By Ken Hamblin, June 09, 2002,
which concludes:
And according to a recent Associated Press article:
"On the heels of the release of Accuracy in Media's award-winning documentary, 'TWA 800: The Search for the Truth,' FIRO, the TWA Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization, has petitioned the National Transportation Safety Board to reconsider its decision on what caused the plane to crash."
Attachment II of the FIRO's lengthy petition to the NTSB notes an analysis of radar data by an FBI consultant - who concluded that a component of the plane was blown out of its right side as soon as electric power was lost.
That component was the first part of the aircraft to hit the water, a quarter of a mile closer to the shore than the next closest part.
FIRO concluded: "This cannot be explained by the NTSB's fuel-tank explosion theory."
Another point made by those senior Iranian sources in 1996 was how the missiles in question arrived in the United States reportedly seven months prior to the attack on Flight 800. The sources said they were shipped via Rotterdam and on to the Canadian port of Halifax from Karachi, Pakistan, our new ally.
The Iranians said an Egyptian fundamentalist group backed by Iran was responsible for smuggling the weapons across the Canadian border into the United States.
Just maybe my initial instincts after the crash of TWA 800 weren't so far off, after all.
And just maybe our perceived meekness and seeming willingness to negotiate with the radical Muslims who hate us even when a loaded gun is held to our heads may, in fact, be the shortest path to our own destruction.