I won't get my hopes up.
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Posted on 01/29/2008 12:45:23 PM PST by OESY
...Tonight's "The Final Report: Investigation of TWA Flight 800" on National Geographic Channel presents a brilliant, well-researched look into what the investigators found - and what they didn't find.
The show details the animosity that existed from day one between the NTSB and the FBI.
The NTSB is usually the final word in all air crashes. But because a number of eyewitnesses on the ground saw streaks flying towards the aircraft right before it exploded, and air traffic controllers reporting blips around the aircraft, the FBI came in and took over the investigation, calling it a possible crime.
There were immediately three prevailing theories. One was friendly fire. The US Navy runs weapons training exercises in a 300-mile-wide swath near the flight path.
The second held that it could have been terrorists with ground-to-air missiles.
The third was that there had been a bomb on board.
The producers interview most of the players in the investigation including eyewitnesses; Robert Francis, the former chairman of the NTSB who was not happy to have the FBI crawling over his investigation; James Kallstrom of the FBI, who knew that 747s just don't randomly blow up; Leon Panetta, then-White House Chief of Staff; as well as cops who dove for the wreckage, like Vincente Termine.
After this show, you may trust the government even less than you do now. Or you may think they are as honest as they possibly could be in simply admitting that they just don't know.
Whatever you conclude, you won't conclude that National Geographic didn't do a very thorough job. Great reporting.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Jack O’Hara, his wife and I believe one of his kids was on that flight. Jack was the executive producer of Monday Night Football and a Marquette University graduate.
RIP
I think it was a shoulder fired missile, and it was covered up in the interest of national security.
Dozens of people in the Hamptons saw a brilliant missile rise from the ocean and hit the plane. Many of these folks were told by the FBI that they must of have been mistaken.
People who live in the Hamptons are not used to police bureaucrats telling them what they have or have not seen.
This is another coverup by the Clinton administration. Bill and Hillary did not want a war.
Unless the documentary says a terrorists brought the plane down, a good number of freepers are going claim a coverup.
People here have pretty much made their mind up about what happened. If the facts don’t bear this out, they will claim the Clinton administration hid the facts.
I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories, but TWA 800 didn’t randomly explode. I’m in the missile theory myself. Still haven’t decided if terrorist or accidental friendly fire.
Dozens of people spread over hundreds of square miles, saw a bright light trailing smoke rise from the ocean and hit the plane. Period. Whether it was friendly fire or a terrorist, we don’t know.
Presented both sides of the argument evenly, was fun and suspenseful.
His latest book "Wildfire" is awful though.
By the time TWA 800 came up, we knew we had a corrupt president on our hands. We had good reason to believe other investigations had been compromised. Somewhere in all this, you throw in Vince Foster and any credibility the FBI ever had was destroyed in about the span of a decade.
When Clinton called the FBI in on TWA 800, it was like hearing a record needle skip across the LP.
As I watched Kalhstrom obfuscate, watching the head of the NTSP practically burn a hole in him with his looks, I couldn’t buy into the official line. And then that cartoon...
When the CIA supplied a plane for testing, my ears perked up. And when I found out the identity of a person standing behind Kahlstrom during just about every interview, it didn’t help. He was CIA.
FBI, you may rebuild your credibility one day. Good luck with that. I know I’ll never have much confidence in an official FBI statement again.
Was Jamie Gorelic employed by the Clinton Admin. at this time?
“Night Fall” is one of my favorite books....I highly recommend reading it.
It happened on the weekend the Lewinsky story broke, if I remember correctly.
I’ve seen a number of these shows. Like you said, they don’t reveal much. Some do a better job than others touching on the important issues and players.
I may have already seen this one too.
In a court of law, supposedly eye witnesses are not a valid source of fact(s). However, when that many people have such similar accounts of what they saw, and considering that several of the witnesses were current and ex-military with appropriate training, and considering this was smack dab in the middle of Clinton's reign and any explanation of almost anything from people associated with that administration is suspect, I am much more included to believe that the witnesses saw what they saw and that their testimony was disregarded as not fitting what Clinton, Inc. wanted. We, the sheeple, are supposed to just get over it and move on. What a stain on our nation the Clinton Crime family made on our great nation.
They admit they don’t know?
Hmmm...
Good book. I enjoyed the fiction/non-fiction blend not to mention DeMille’s characters.
Well, this doesn’t mean jack to me what people claimed they saw. These people were interviewed by the FBI.
The people who claim a cover up, do so because they dislike Clinton. I dislike Clinton too, a lot, but we aren’t going to win any election by sounding like a bunch of 9110truthers.
The scientific evidence does not bear out a missile. If it does in the end, I will go along with it. But people who make claims of missile, have not examined the evidence nor are most people are qualified to do so. They cannot site any thing other than kook websites and coast-to-coast am.
Show me the science!
If it were a missile and covered up, it was in the interests of Clinton’s poll ratings at the time, not our nation’s security.
Maybe I’m dense, but I just don’t get why anyone would cover up an attack. What would be the point of that?
If it were an attack wouldn’t there be a strong probability that the perps would do it again, seeing how easy it was and successful they were at carrying it out and avoiding capture?
It it had been a deliberate attack and by a foreign power, not some yahoo with a shoulder rpg being an idiot (like the dopes aiming laser lights at commercial airplanes from their yards) what would the Clinton administration, or any administration for that matter, have to gain by hiding it?
They all have loved ones traveling by commercial aircraft.
I just don’t get the conspiracy angle.
As for the so called eye-witnesses, I just don’t put much stock in them. Ever hear the conflicting eyewitness accounts of a shooting, or accident or other traumatic event? Not that reliable at a close distance, much less miles away.
You memory is wrong. The Lewinskey story broke in January of 1998, flight 800 occured in July of 1996.
I’ve always thought that if it had been friendly fire, we would have known right away, because Clinton hated the military and would have done anything to make our military look bad.
This, combined with the fact that Saddam (who was a great funder of low-budget terrorist attacks) was building up to some kind of celebration and announced his people should expect a great message at dawn that day (which it would have been in Iraq at the hour that the flight was shot down here) affirming the glories of his Islamic regime...
In addition, there was normally an El-Al flight to Israel that left at that time, but it had been delayed that evening and the TWA flight had taken its place in the line.
I’ve often wondered if this was one of the reasons that Iraq was one of our first objectives.
OK, time to take off the tinfoil hat...
I keep my 19MAR96 TW0800 ticket stub on my office wall. I had taken that flight numerous times.
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The final proof that it was a short circuit in the center fuel tank is that they NTSB grounded all 747’s to inspect the wiring...
Uhoh...tinfoil alert.
I don’t understand your post. With all due respect, Mr. O’Hara doesn’t know for sure where his son is? He (the son) was either on the flight or not, right?
Color me unimpressed. Anything that mentions the Center Fuel Tank, and/or anything associated with it is disinformation.
ML/NJ
Clinton was into the “why can’t we all just get along” theory, where the US was always wrong and our hated military was not to be relied on, and any threat was just an alarmist illusion. Look at all the foreign terrorist attacks he completely ignored; if we were lucky and one of the planners lived here, there’d be trials in US courts, but there was never any serious retaliation for any of them.
It was very important to him to avoid challenges from other countries and to court our enemies; why do you think we were on the side of the Muslims in the Balkans?
I spent hundreds of hours as a kid at the beach watching aircraft land and takeoff at JFK, and to me this is a personal thing, not a political thing.
About 5 years ago I knew a man who was (still is) employed by Boeing to inspect crashes. I asked him about TWA 800.
He said it was a missile.
“Maybe I’m dense, but I just don’t get why anyone would cover up an attack. What would be the point of that?”
I’m not sure what the point is, but if you remember the first WTC attack, the administration played it down as much as they could.
For many hours, the “official line” was that there had been a transformer explosion!
In later press conferences the president kept referring the first major attack on the continental United States by foreigners as a “police matter” or words to that effect.
And the perps, or buds of the perps, did attack again.
... regarding my previous post - he was not personally involved in the TWA 800 investigation. He was just speaking from his knowledge of the details and his personal experience with crash investigations.
The explosion occurred almost exactly where Richard Reid was sitting with his shoe bomb. I believe the same thing happened. Interior bomb set off center fuel tank. There has never been a reported spontaneous center fuel tank explosion in history.
You are confusing TWA800 with the crash of the plane in Yugoslavia which Ron Brown was aboard. Just before the Monica story broke it had been revealed that there was a bullet hole in Ron Brown's head. People were asking questions. But a blow job from a fat groupie is much more important than the questionable circumstances of the Ron Brown plane crash, and so we all talked about Monica.
ML/NJ
Anyone who watched television during the days after the crash had to notice the FBI's James Kalstrom, who, in the early days, held the theory it was a missile, was visibly uncomfortable when, in the later stages of the investigation, he stated that there was no external force, and the explosion was most likely fumes the center fuel tank.
Someone made Kalstrom toe the line.....I believed then, and still believe, it was Bill Clinton!
THERE WAS VIDEO OF THIS EXPLOSION
IT WAS SHOWN ON TV AT LEAST ONCE - I KNOW BECAUSE I SAW IT
(others here on FR have said they saw it to)
THERE WAS AT LEAST ONE STREAK OF LIGHT SHOOTING STRAIGHT UP AND THEN THE EXPLOSION
Why watch if they don’t know what happened and they’re trying to discredit the gov’t. We all know it was Bush’s fault..
."One of the most disturbing facts revealed is the true cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 which killed 230 people. The evidence linking Al Qaeda member Ramzi Yousef (architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) to the crash of Flight 800 appears indisputable. So, to me, the key question here is: why hasn't the American public been told that Al Qaeda blew up a U.S. airliner in 1996, killing 230 people? If we had known that, surely airline security would have been stepped up considerably in 1996 -- not in 2001?
I have stated that members of the Justice Department covered up the evidence linking al Qaeda to the crash of TWA #800 and Dietrich Snell was a party to that cover up.
Go to http://www.peterlance.com and click #FBI #302’s. Then click on the one for 3/7/96 and you’ll find an internal FBI memo showing that Snell and two other senior Department of Justice officials (Valerie Caproni, chief of the criminal division for the EDNY (Eastern District of New York) and Patrick Fitzgerald, head of terrorism and organized crime in the SDNY (Southern District of New York) knew of the intelligence coming from Yousef, in the spring of 1996.
Their source was Gregory Scarpa, Jr. a Mafia informant at the MCC (federal jail) in Lower Manhattan. Yousef passed Scarpa Jr. notes through a hole in the wall between their cells. In addition to intricate bomb schematics identical to the device Yousef used in the PAL #434 “wet test,” and other details only Yousef could know, the notes offered the high explosive RDX as an alternative to nitro glycerin in the manufacture of one of the “bomb triggers.”
These #302’s repeatedly warn that Yousef was going to get his “people” to put a bomb on a plane to get a mistrial in the Bojinka case. As it turned out, TWA 800 went down on July 17, 1996, the eve of the most damning evidence versus Yousef being admitted at trial; namely Murad’s confession to Colonel Mendoza.
Further, in the weeks that followed, the FBI found RDX, PETN and nitroglycerine in the area of the center fuel tank between rows 17-25 in the plane’s wreckage dredged from Long Island Sound. This was the precise area where Yousef planned to plant devices for Bojinka following his PAL “wet test."big>
From: http://www.readersread.com/features/peterlance.htm
I have never heard this. Seems to me, if true, that should have been a salient fact in the investigation!
Do you have a source for this?? Thanks
Somebody must have a tape of that broadcast somewhere.
I wonder if the documentary will mention that the autopsy xrays of the victims were classified! The presence of shrapnel in the bodies would prove or disprove the detonation of a bomb or ground to air missile!!!
You could read more at the web site of the air traffic accident investigator that was more thorough and honest than the NTSB which was browbeat by The Clowntoon FBI!
If it was a terrorist attack why didn’t they take claim of it?
I think it was a shoulder fired missile, and it was covered up in the interest of national security..... In the interest of Clinton, I think you mean.
Please! I admit I dislike (detest, really) the Clintons. But I've said that Ronald Reagan would have done the same thing as Clinton did. The country just isn't ready to hear that its Navy shot down a 747 full of people.
You want evidence? Eyewitness reports are evidence. Debris field maps are evidence. Whatever James Sanders presented was evidence. ATC radar is evidence. The activation of the Military Warning Area is evidence. Usw.
But you don't want to see, so nothing happened.
ML/NJ
One thing to keep in mind, and I’m not saying it was an attack just pointing out possibilities, is that after Somalia Clinton developed a serious case of bodybagphobia. Notice that while he did many military interventions during his presidency most of them were bombings and other plane/ missile oriented missions, stuff that’s low risk for the US military and when something bad does happen it usually leaves no body. There’s no way Clinton was going to get into a real war after the Blackhawk Down situation, he was afraid of the bad press that comes with bodybags.
Some years ago I was watching This Week on Sunday morning. George Stephanopolus was on. Don’t remember the topic but a discussion of the Situation Room at the WH and it’s uses came up. Stephie described some of his meetings in there and said, and this is a quote, “We were in there when TWA800 was shot down.” George Will looked like he was going to have a heart attack. They cut to a commercial virtually immediately and went to a different topic upon return. I’ll never forget that. I’ve kind of leaned towards friendly fire since then.
Interesting that the CIA was dogging him. We now know it was Clinton's CIA, and unfortunately, it still is!
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