Posted on 09/20/2001 11:12:53 AM PDT by Magician
Over five years have passed since the crash of TWA Flight 800 killed 230 people, and now, at long last, two former high-ranking government officials speaking on television have implicitly disavowed the claim that a fuel-tank explosion caused the destruction of that airplane.
The government's $40 million investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800 ended up with the National Transportation Safety Board, the FBI and the CIA all agreeing that an explosion in the center-wing fuel tank caused it to crash. They said that after the explosion broke off the entire front end of the plane, its tail dropped and it shot up like a rocket, trailing burning fuel behind it. They said that was what hundreds of eyewitnesses saw, mistaking it for a missile. The CIA actually produced a video showing the huge noseless jet ascending like a rocket, an aeronautical impossibility.
They got away with it because our establishment media in the Clinton era had the bad habit of believing nearly everything government agencies told them, even if it was patently ridiculous. But now, a former White House official, George Stephanopoulos, who was a senior adviser to President Clinton, has made a statement on television that indicates that the claim that a fuel-tank explosion caused the TWA 800 crash was false. On September 11, the unforgettable day of disaster, Stephanopoulos, who is now an ABC News correspondent, was talking to ABC's Peter Jennings on camera about President Bush being flown to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and taken to the situation room on the base where he could keep in touch with Washington by teleconferencing.
Stephanopoulos, implying that this was unnecessary, made this surprising statement: "There are facilities in the White House, not the normal situation room, which everyone has seen in the past, has seen pictures of. There is a second situation room, behind the primary situation room, which has video conferencing capabilities. The director of the Pentagon, the defense chief, can speak from a national military command center at the Pentagon. The Secretary of State can speak from the State Department, the president from wherever he is, and they'll have this capability for video conferencing throughout this crisis. In my time at the White House it was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon."
The TWA Flight 800 bombing? Peter Jennings, the anchorman for ABC's "World News Tonight," didn't bat an eyelash. Instead of asking his colleague to explain his use of the word "bombing" and why there was a special meeting in the White House situation room to discuss it, Jennings asked a question about the president taking orders from the Secret Service.
Efforts to reach Mr. Stephanopoulos to find out if he has information that the plane was destroyed by a bomb have been unsuccessful, and no one at ABC News recognized that Stephanopoulos had revealed that he was privy to what might be a very important change in the story about TWA 800. When informed of this, Brian Ross, who heads ABC News's investigative unit, promised to look into it.
There had to be something special about the TWA 800 crash to justify holding a meeting in the White House situation room to discuss it. That surely is not done every time one of our planes crashes. Stephanopoulos said that it was held in the "aftermath of the bombing," but the precise date and time are important.
In his book, "The Downing of TWA Flight 800," James Sanders says that there was a meeting in the White House situation room on the night of July 17, 1996, that began before the crash. Sanders says that he was told by a confidential source that high officials gathered there to watch in real time a video transmission of a Navy demonstration of its ability to shoot down a missile off the shore of Long Island. They were horrified when something went wrong and they saw the missile shoot down TWA Flight 800. What Stephanopoulos should tell us is whether the meeting he described began before or after the plane crashed. If he won't reveal that, the White House should.
The fuel-tank theory of the crash was also disavowed by James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation. He said on CNN on September 11 that the attack that day was "the first act of terrorism in the U.S. since TWA 800." He has yet to explain when he discovered that TWA 800 was brought down by terrorists.
#2. If Saunders' story is accurate, then Streptococus would have said "the shoot-down of TWA 800" not "the bombing..."
One starts to think the missile theory is a canard, perhaps like the fringe right theory that the government planted additional bombs in the Murrah building.
However, if Kalstrom really did say what was quoted, then this theory may have some credibility.
There's enough contradictory evidence and a pattern of behavior by several key players that would lend credence to the skepticism of the fuel-tank theory. I'm not convinced yet, but open.
But trust me, if TWA800 was a terrorist act, sooner or later someone is going to leak enough proof. My guess would be within the next year or two, once most of the "Holdovers" have been weeded out or isolated enough so as to be unable to do major damage. But there also may be no there there.
Diddle, come on...I don't want to have to correct you again. It is SnufflelufuNgus.
Similar thougts. The tragety of 9-11-01 could have been called a horrific series of accedental events.
2200 hrs S/MEL/S Comm/Inst/CFII.... and 1.2 hours dual in the Goodyear Blimp America!
July 19, 1996 New York Times.
A specific warning about the flight had been sent by an extremist Saudi organization called the Movement of Islamic Change, the organization that claimed responsibility for blowing up US military personnel in Saudi Arabia last November. "Late this morning we got a copy of a letter in Arabic that we then had translated, and got it to the FBI" said a State Department spokesman ... "It's a ... statement that seems aimed at the Saudi regime or the American presence in Saudi Arabia"......... Officials said they were reviewing a telephone call placed to a Tampa, Florida television station yesterday morning from a man who identified himself as a member of a jihad and claimed responsibility for the crash.
September 1997 The American Spectator
Letter from John B. Roberts II in reply to an earlier one from James Hall - Chairman of the NTSB Early this summer Hall testified before Congress that a meteorite may have blown up TWA, an event about as likely as an attack by a UFO. Apparently, Mr. Hall is prepared to got to any length to avoid confronting evidence of terrorism in the crash of TWA 800..... minute traces of PETN and RDX were found in TWA 800. Hall would have us believe they came from a bomb-sniffing dog test. But the St. Louis Police Department test record says only that a "wide-bodied jet" was used in the test, and provides no serial number for the aircraft......As TWA's 800's debris was being hauled ashore, it was being tested by the EGIS high-tech explosives detection system operated by FBI technicians and BATF bomb experts. Within five days of the crash, EGIS registered the first of more than a dozen "hits" for PETN on the aircraft. The FBI laboratory--whose work, even before it was subsequently criticized by the Justice Departments's inspector general, was questioned by FBI agents working on EGIS--confirmed only two findings. Do the EGIS findings mean that there was once much more explosive residue .... Whether there were two positive findings or a dozen, the dog-test explanation is almost as zany as Hall's meteorite theory..... Hall states that the U.S. lacks intelligence leads, but at least one terrorist has claimed credit for the TWA 800 bombing. World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef told authorities his group is responsible. Yousef's claim has not been made public, but it is in the FBI file.
November 8, 1998 CNN Two sons of an Egyptian cleric convicted of plotting terrorist attacks in New York City have joined the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden, which is suspected of carrying out deadly bombings against two U.S. embassies in east Africa, CNN has learned. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, serving a life sentence in a federal prison, also has written a will calling on his sons to seek revenge against the United States, according to sources who have seen it. .... Abdel-Rahman's two sons, Omar and Asim, both in their late 20s, were among those present when bin Laden held a press conference near Khost, Afghanistan, in May. It was at that press conference that bin Laden publicly unveiled his International Islamic Front and talked about an edict he issued in February, calling for a jihad, or holy war, against American civilians anywhere in the world. A person who spoke to one of Abdel-Rahman's sons told "NewsStand" that "he said that he would follow into the footprints of his father and he would continue the jihad."
The American Spectator's claim was backed up in writing by two individuals who tried to bomb a Brooklyn subway ....
July 12, 1998, NY Times No Flight 800 Connection Abu Maizar and Khalil, 23, were arrested last July when the police raided an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and found what they described as a pipe bomb "fully rigged and ready to be detonated," along with a rambling note that threatened attacks against Jewish and American interests if various demands were not met. The demands included the release of imprisoned Islamic militants including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Lawyers for Abu Maizar have suggested that he did not intend to set off the bomb but rather planned to use it as a prop in some hazy plot to defraud a government anti-terrorism program of reward money. Khalil's lawyer has not yet addressed the jury, but Khalil insisted after his arrest that he had not known about the bomb's existence. The note -- it was typed on lined yellow paper and rife with grammatical and spelling and punctuation errors -- not only warned that Islamic militants were "ready to hit everywhere" with suicide bombs, but also claimed responsibility for the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 in July 1996, in which 230 people died. Whether Abu Maizar and Khalil are guilty of plotting a subway calamity will be decided by the jury at their trial, but the note's claim of responsibility for the Flight 800 catastrophe will not require a trial, an FBI spokesman indicated. The claim was one of the "thousands of leads" the bureau pursued in its investigation of the TWA crash, the spokesman, Joseph Valiquette, said on Friday. "We are comfortable with our announcement last November that we have found no evidence that a criminal act was responsible for the plane going down," he said.
I appreciate your comments. What is the overall opinion of all the other 747 pilots that you may know? Just curious.
Only if you dismiss all the eyewitnesses who saw the ascending streak...or maybe someone projected a hologram of an ascending streak at the time to throw people off the trail of the bomb.
My guess is that Clintoon & Co. decided they could cover this up so that American citizens would not be afraid to fly and cause the bankruptcy of all the airlines. Remember, for eight years it was The Economy, Stupid!
I would think some folks at the FBI might want to go back over the manifest from this flight, and try to find out who may have been working food service. A bomb could have been assembled, or even carried on, the plane by a suicide bomber, or hidden in a food tray. You do not have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to believe that Flight 800 may have been a terrorist bombing by the same people that tried to bomb the WTC in 1993 and succeeded in 2001. It is tremendously important to get to the bottom of this. If Clintoon knew this was a terrorist bombing and covered it up to save the airlines and the economy, he truly has the blood of thousands on his hands today.
That's Investigating 101 stuff.
Not necessarily. Even in the kookiest MR conspiracy threads, cooler, more educated heads speculated whether TWA800 was infested with suicidal terrorists with bombs or biological weapons, and was thus shot down intentionally. The news that flight 93 over PA would have been shot down if it hadn't crashed has refueled this discussion. Although I'd rather not see a wave of new threads discussing the topic, I don't find the speculation offensive.
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