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For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction ... it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in. George Orwell, "1984" On Aug. 14, 1996, four weeks after the crash of TWA Flight 800, the New York Times confirmed what the White House feared, namely that America had suffered the most lethal attack on its homeland ever. "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode," wrote the Times, "they say the only good explanations remaining are...

Of all the mainstream reporters writing today on the terror front, none has the cojones of five-time Emmy Award winner Peter Lance, author of the new book, "Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI – and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him." Lance sets out his thesis in the subtitle of this sprawling, daring epic, but as Lance knows, the most explosive part of his book deals not with Ali Mohamed, the master spy in question, but with the fate of TWA Flight 800. This is the Boeing 747 that...

This week I received a communication from retired United Airline Capt. Ray Lahr. It contained two items of great interest – one dollop of good legal news and one unexpected and truly incredible report. The legal news concerned Ray's success in Los Angeles District Court after years of "long and lonely and expensive" effort. Judge Howard Matz had succinctly mandated that "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) shall produce to plaintiff the material set forth in Exhibit A and the National Transportation Safety Board shall produce to plaintiff the material set forth in Exhibit B." Significantly, the judge also authorized Lahr attorney...

Serious movement in D.C. – and if I hadn't been there, I would not have believed it. For several months Joan Wire and her daughter have been trying to secure an appointment with a highly effective government official we'll simply call Mr. Washington. Joan Wire is the stalwart wife of Mike Wire. Mike is the storied "man on the bridge," the single most critical eyewitness in the saga of TWA Flight 800, the 747 that was inexplicably blown out of the sky on the night of July 17, 1996. The CIA built its notorious zoom-climb animation around Mike's position on...

The tenth anniversary of the destruction of TWA Flight 800 shows that government and media cover-ups do succeed. The prevailing myth is that the fuel-tank somehow exploded, causing the plane to crash. But the evidence shows it was destroyed by missiles. The possibility of a terrorist attack, which would have been a huge embarrassment for the Clinton Administration, cannot be ruled out. It is an event that should be treated as an ongoing investigation, and it's still not too late to determine the truth of what happened. What is not in dispute is that at 8:19 p.m. on July 17,...

Cape man buoys theory missile downed jet By Joe Dwinell A Bay State physicist is taking on the National Transportation Safety Board in federal court in Boston to help bolster his theory a missile is to blame for taking down TWA Flight 800 a decade ago. “I don’t want this 10-year anniversary to go by without paying attention to this plausible theory,” said Tom Stalcup, a Falmouth resident who holds a doctorate in physics and heads up the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization. Flight 800 exploded and crashed in the sea south of Long Island, N.Y., at 3 p.m. on...

No Survivors This two-hour "CNN Presents" documentary looks at the disaster and reveals why government officials say similar catastrophes are "virtually certain to occur" if changes aren't made. "No Survivors: Why TWA 800 Could Happen Again" airs this Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET.

NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Andy Krukar boarded TWA Flight 800 with a diamond ring in his pocket, planning to place it on his fiancee's finger at the Eiffel Tower during a weekend of romantic dinners and strolls through the streets of Paris. The fiancee, Julie Stuart, was going to follow him to Paris the next day to celebrate their formal engagement. AUDIO: TWA 800 Series Part One But Krukar was killed when Flight 800 exploded into a spectacular fireball over the Atlantic Ocean just minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport — a disaster that claimed the lives...

A Massachusetts group has filed a lawsuit to force federal officials to release information about a piece of debris from Flight 800 that it hopes will show that a missile downed the plane. Federal investigators have dismissed that explanation as the cause of the 1996 explosion that killed all 230 people aboard. Instead they concluded that a spark ignited fuel tank vapors. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston, demands that the National Transportation Safety Board respond to numerous freedom of information act requests made since 2004. Tom Stalcup, who heads the East Falmouth, Mass.-based Flight 800...

President Bill Clinton's national security adviser says the administration prepared to strike in the Middle East after the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Anthony Lake told CNN officials thought terrorists might have brought the plane down a few minutes after it took off from Kennedy International Airport. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that vapors in the fuel tank exploded, and found the crash accidental. "We especially wanted to look for an Iranian connection," Lake told "CNN Presents." Bombs placed by terrorists were blamed for two earlier crashes of Boeing 747s on trans-Atlantic routes. They were the 1985 crash...

(CNN) -- Ten years after the explosion of TWA Flight 800, the very problem that led to the disaster still has not been fully fixed -- despite a warning from the Federal Aviation Administration that it is "virtually certain to occur" again without additional safeguards. In fact, the FAA predicts that without its recommended safety changes four more TWA-type disasters are likely to happen over the next 50 years. While the FAA has not yet made a final decision, Boeing, which has built nearly three-fourths of the jetliners in use around the world, told CNN it will install a nitrogen...

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Bolstered by eyewitness accounts and the Internet, the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York 10 years ago spawned a slew of sinister conspiracy theories, most notably the belief that a missile from a U.S. Navy ship was responsible. So prevalent were these theories that the term "Pierre Salinger Syndrome" - the belief that everything on the Internet is true - entered the lexicon. For investigators, the conspiracy theories wasted time and diverted valuable resources. Investigators ultimately determined that Flight 800 was the victim of a center fuel tank explosion, most likely...

Ten years ago this month, a Boeing 747 was climbing away from New York, headed for Paris, when an explosion ripped off the front section and sent fiery debris and bodies plunging into the Atlantic Ocean, just off Long Island. Few crashes before or since Trans World Airlines Flight 800 have produced as many conspiracy theories, which included terrorists, stray missiles and meteorites. Hundreds of U.S. agents spent four years chasing down thousands of leads. In the end, they agreed with accident investigators that an exploding fuel tank had caused the disaster, killing 230 people. But a decade later, steps...

Doomed TWA Flight 800 took his daughter, 2 granddaughters Ten years after the rain came, Wayne Rogers is still waiting for answers. He does not question why 17 inches of water fell from the sky, flooding his home in Lakeside of Sans Souci and destroying most of his possessions. Act of God. Mother Nature. Inadequate drainage. End of discussion. But that Flood of 10,000 Years — the anniversary of which is coming up next week — is nothing more than a footnote to the tragedy that forever changed Rogers' life on that awful date. That's because July 17, 1996, is...

From August 1996 until October 1997, the FBI prefaced nearly every Flight 800 news update with the assertion that its agents were intensively scrutinizing the evidence to determine whether the initial explosion was a bomb, a missile or the result of a mechanical failure, specifically in the fuel tank. Six years of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI has now established that the most precise characterization of the explosion was provided by the victims themselves. Because the reports of many witnesses described a missile-like object rising from the surface, the FBI swarmed to Long Island and took...

Washington DC - With the 10th anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800 approaching, the National Transportation Safety Board today released a fact sheet that reviews lessons learned from the accident investigation and the progress toward ensuring that similar tragedies do not happen in the future. The Board's review found that significant safety improvements have been implemented over the past ten years, but that more needs to be done to avoid another accident like TWA 800. TWA 800, a Boeing 747, crashed on July 17, 1996, minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport on a flight to...

WASHINGTON – Are secret meetings being held between the corporate and political elites of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to push North America into a European Union-style merger? Is President Bush's reluctance to control the border and enforce laws requiring deportation of foreigners who enter the country illegally part of a master plan to all but eliminate borders between the U.S., Canada and Mexico? Does the agenda of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America include a common currency that would scrap the dollar in favor of what some are calling the "amero"? It may be the biggest story...

Ten Years Later, Government Safety Experts Warn More Explosions, Loss of Life ‘Virtually Certain’ Twelve minutes into a July 17, 1996, Paris-bound flight from New York’s JFK International Airport with 230 passengers on board, TWA Flight 800 exploded and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. There were no survivors. Ten years later, CNN Presents will air a two-hour documentary on the disaster and reveal why government officials say similar catastrophes are “virtually certain to occur.” CNN Presents: No Survivors – Why TWA 800 Could Happen Again will premiere on Saturday, July 15, at 7 p.m., with a replay at 10 p.m....

In the decade since TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island's South Shore, flying on commercial airlines has grown so much safer that the risk of dying in a plane crash has plunged to its lowest level in history. Improvements in technology and training -- and an added focus on safety spawned by Flight 800 in July 1996 and the ValuJet crash in Florida two months earlier -- have helped usher in an unprecedented period of air safety, experts say. In the past five years, the accident rate "has been brought to the brink of extinction," said Arnold Barnett, a...

SHIRLEY, N.Y. — A little past 8:30 p.m., as the blistering July sun melted in the west, a jumbo jet carrying students, honeymooners, businessmen and others to Paris exploded in a fireball, raining carnage into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. It had been only a dozen minutes since TWA Flight 800 took off from Kennedy Airport. Initially, investigators were not sure whether the calamity that killed all 230 people aboard the flight on July 17, 1996, was caused by a bomb, a missile or mechanical failure. Just two days before the start of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, it...