How Newsweek can rewrite the history of TWA Flight 800

World Net Daily ^ | 2/28/2003 | Jack Cashill

[Swordmaker]

As I last reported, virtually everyone in the major media has treated Team "First Strike" respectfully in our attempt to arouse interest about the fate of TWA Flight 800. The one exception was Newsweek's Mark Hosenball. Indeed, Hosenball treated us with all the tact and diplomacy his fellow countryman, "Simon," reserves for off-key warblers on "American Idol."

Hosenball's defensiveness, however, may have less to do with some idiosyncrasy of British behavior than with the fact that he has much to be defensive about. It was Hosenball, after all, who penned the media's most stirring defense of the CIA's now notorious animation, the one that depicts the transformation of a noseless jumbo jet into a soaring rocket, an animation that instantly discredited all eyewitness testimony and ended any real investigation into the plane's destruction. Indeed, had Hosenball been on the CIA payroll he could not have done more to legitimize the agency's crude rewrite of history.

In the Newsweek piece, dated Dec. 1, 1997, Hosenball uses a series of nine full color "CIA PHOTOS" to make the CIA case. The photos show TWA Flight 800's flaming passenger cabin climbing more than 3,000 feet to 17,000 feet, "creating the streak many witnesses mistake for a missile." Hosenball acknowledges that the unlikely CIA involvement "has already intensified talk of a government cover-up," but such talk, he suggests, belongs to the shadowy realm of "the Internet" and "talk radio." The respectable media would not be so easily distracted.

At the time, one can understand how Hosenball would have been misled. The video does seem authoritative, and not much information about the flight had been released publicly. Today, however, there is no excuse. Contrary information is easily accessed and utterly damning. Given Hosenball's unwitting role as a CIA propagandist, who better than he to undo the damage and in the process write the story of his career. If he chooses to do so, here are some questions Mark Hosenball might ask his sources at the CIA.

• Why was I led to believe that only "some of the 244 witnesses" had seen streaks in the sky when, in fact, 244 of the roughly 750 official witnesses had reported seeing streaks?

• What happened to the images captured by the "spy satellites" your agency allegedly used to create this video? Why did neither the National Transportation Safety Board or the Federal Bureau of Investigation make any mention of the satellites in their final reports? Why were family members told the satellites were broken? Why is the satellite imagery still classified?

• How is it that none of the 750 eyewitnesses reported seeing the plane ascend? Why, in fact, did even "model" FBI witness Mike Russell admit that the plane "seemed to fall straight down?"

• Why did David McCLaine, the pilot of an Eastwinds airliner flying south at 16,000 feet toward Flight 800's path, tell the NTSB that he had watched the explosion from the beginning and saw no part of the plane ascend?

• How could the rocketing plane have left a "trailing cascade of flames" visible 10 miles away when there were only 50 gallons of fuel in the center wing tank – most of which would have rushed backward into the now vertical tank?

• Why did the NTSB create its own animation, one in which the plane only ascends 1,700 feet, half the distance claimed by your agency?

• Why, despite many Freedom of Information Act requests, does the NTSB continue to stonewall aviation professionals who wish to see the data used to create either zoom-climb scenario?

• Why did you not reveal to the media what your analysts would later tell the NTSB, "There's maybe one witness that saw [the ascending plane], this guy on the bridge?" Maybe one ? That's all?

• Why, most egregiously, did your agency fully fabricate the single most critical interview in the entire investigation, the one in which "the man on the bridge," Mike Wire, allegedly changed his story to fit the CIA scenario? I repeat, how could you have dared to enter into the official record an interview that never took place?

• Why does this later interview with Wire not appear with the other FBI witness statements posted by the NTSB? And why did the NTSB quietly eliminate this "interview" from the official record in its final hearing?

In talking with us, Hosenball dismissed the problems with the CIA animation and relied instead on his conversation with Boeing executives. As he tells it, they assured him that the Boeing 747 fuel tank was a veritable accident waiting to happen.

Presuming the accuracy of Hosenball's memory, one has to wonder why any executive anywhere would make such incriminating statements to a Newsweek reporter. Might it possibly be because Boeing had to? Five months after the downing of TWA Flight 800, Boeing announced plans to merge with McDonnell Douglas, its only real competitor in the American commercial airliner market. An administration that would soon reject as monopolistic a merger between Office Depot and Staples – a combination that would have captured only 6 percent of the less-than-crucial office-supply market – would approve the Boeing merger. Ralph Nader rightly called this approval "a new and dangerous benchmark for permitted mergers."

Yet for all its dependence on the largesse of the Clinton administration, even Boeing could not stomach the CIA animation. "Boeing was not involved in the production of the video shown today, nor have we had the opportunity to obtain a copy or fully understand the data used to create it," said the company in its immediate response to the animation. "The video's explanation of the eyewitness observations can be best assessed by the eyewitnesses themselves."

How did the eyewitnesses feel about the CIA animation? "That's what I call the cartoon," said helicopter pilot Maj. Fritz Meyer, "It was totally ludicrous. When that airplane blew up, it immediately began falling. It came right out of the sky. From the first moment, it was going down."

If Mark Hosenball has a serious interest in the truth, he could turn his attention to the Rosetta Stone of the investigation, the April 1999 interview of the CIA analysts by five industry members of the NTSB witness group. (National Transportation Safety Board Docket Materials for Investigation DCA96MA070, TWA Flight 800, July 17, 1996, Appendix FF.) The NTSB brass may have been indifferent to the facts, but the rank-and-file asked all the right questions and could have broken the case open then and there if their bosses had let them.

It's time to call those bosses on the carpet. And Mark, your publication has the clout to do it.

[Swordmaker]

In talking with us, Hosenball dismissed the problems with the CIA animation and relied instead on his conversation with Boeing executives. As he tells it, they assured him that the Boeing 747 fuel tank was a veritable accident waiting to happen.

Why hasn't Boeing done anything to defuse those "veritable accidents" before another CWT explodes and kills even more people??? Could it be because they are not a danger?

[eno_]

Hey, you mix some of that deadly "domestic anthrax" with jet A and it will blow up real good!

[Swordmaker]

What has "domestic antrhax" have to do with ANYTHING in this article, eno_?

Your purpose is obvious...

Obfuscation.

[JohnnyP]

This sounds series.

[ALOHA RONNIE]

TIMING =

TWA FLIGHT 800 Downing =

Downing of HILLARY-Hired CRAIG LIVINGSTONE's Senate Testimony naming HILLARY on National TV as the one who hired him to get her those FBI Files on Congressional Republicans or Pleading the 5th instead.

"It's the TV, Stupid, no matter WHO pays for it" =

Lifetime RODHAM-CLINTON M.O. 4-SURE

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[al baby]

WHAT ABOUT THE DOD GIVING TWA A 747 TO REPLACE IT? REMEMBER THAT? DOES ALAMO GIRL HAVE IT ?

[Fred Mertz]

BTTT

[Swordmaker]

WHAT ABOUT THE DOD GIVING TWA A 747 TO REPLACE IT? REMEMBER THAT? DOES ALAMO GIRL HAVE IT ?

As far as I know that didn't happen.

[eno_]

Dood! Chill! My "purpose" is to say that "domestic anthrax," spontaneously exploding 747s, and the Easter Bunny have a lot in common.

[SSN558]

In the aftermath of TWA flight 800, the clinton adminstration formed the White House Commission on airline security. It consisted of a very uncooperative effort of close to a dozen alaphabet agencies, that spent hundreds of millions of dollars and came up with no solutions. It turned into a corporate welfare plan that awarded contracts for R&D on detection technologies to scores of companies. They were critized in GAO reports as being unable to agree on standards for detection methods.

[Swordmaker]

Dood! Chill! My "purpose" is to say that "domestic anthrax," spontaneously exploding 747s, and the Easter Bunny have a lot in common.

Oh. Sorry. Chilled. 32 degrees.