What does Leon Panetta know about TWA 800?
by Jack Cashill
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Posted: January 08, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009
Last week, I received an e-mail from a former 747 pilot named Thomas Young.
In early August 1996, Young explained, he was laid up in a Hong Kong hospital with a back injury. His employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew his wife, Barbara, out to join him. They had little else to do but watch TV. Here is what they saw.
The videotape began with people milling about on a deck facing a body of water. In the background, a streak of light can be seen leaving a point below the edge of the deck, accelerating as it climbed; it passed behind what appeared to me to be a thin cloud layer and continued upward out of the frame, from right to left. As the streak of light disappeared beyond the edge of the frame, after a slight pause, there is a generalized, dim flash on the upper left side of the screen, followed by a brighter and more pronounced flash.
Some 270 eyewitnesses on Long Island would give formal accounts to the FBI of the same event – an apparent missile attack on TWA Flight 800 on the night of July 17,1996. Scores of them would provide detailed drawings.
Young – and Barbara confirms his story – saw the video of the event roughly four times an hour for some two weeks.
(Column continues below)
"The TWA 800 story was big news," Young explains, "and was getting top billing in the Asian press."
Young had a distinct perspective on what he was seeing. For six years in the 1980s he had worked at Boeing, much of that time in its Space and Strategic Missile Systems Division.
There he had reviewed scores of videotapes of missile launches, covering a wide range of missile types. Given the TV reception in his Hong Kong hospital, Young could not identify the type of missile that took out TWA Flight 800, but he was confident he was seeing a missile.
"If this was a Navy missile," Barbara recalls her husband telling her at the time, "there goes Clinton's re-election."
I have heard from at least a hundred individuals who saw the same video as Young. None of them could provide this level of detail, and not just because they lacked Young's experience. The video was pulled from American TV within hours of its being first aired.
Best evidence is that MSNBC, which had gone on the air just two days prior to the TWA 800 disaster, won a bidding war for the amateur video.
According to an MSNBC editor, who refuses to talk on the record, "three men in suits" came to the station's editing suites the night of the crash, removed the tape and threatened the editors with serious consequences if they ever revealed its contents.
At Leon Panetta's confirmation hearing, some bold senator just might want to ask the presumptive CIA chief what happened to the videotape. As Bill Clinton's chief of staff at the time, Panetta was in a position to know.
Panetta first enters the TWA 800 public record on July 25, 1996, the day the president visited the victims' families on Long Island and the day after the fortuitous retrieval of the black boxes – an improbable week after the crash.
Panetta publicly formalized what had been quietly true from the beginning. "All coordinated information will be done through Bob Francis," said Panetta at a press conference held at JFK.
Oddly, Panetta described Francis as "head of the National Transportation Safety Board." He was not. A Clinton appointee, Francis was vice chairman, but he served as something of a "political officer" for the NTSB, the "eyes and ears" of the president.
By coordinating the information flow through Francis, the White House was able to make all the frightening talk of a missile scenario disappear within that first week.
Instead, unnamed "law enforcement officials" were now telling the New York Times that they "supported the theory that the plane was destroyed by a bomb."
Panetta was among those reinforcing the less scary bomb theory. CNN quoted him as saying that "chemical residues had been found on some of the bodies and plane parts."
When, however, the White House decided that it could make even a bomb go away, Panetta was there to help flush the chemical residue down the memory hole.
Panetta had ample assistance, most notably from Richard Clarke, Clinton's anti-terror czar. In fact, Clarke takes credit for what he calls "the exit strategy," the way out of the pre-election political mess that TWA Flight 800 had caused the president.
An early Obama supporter, the blowhard Clarke may have cost himself the CIA job by being insufficiently discreet about his own contribution to the TWA 800 misdirection.
Clarke talks about his role in some detail in his preposterously self-serving best-seller "Against All Enemies." As he tells it, he was wandering through the tightly guarded investigation site some time in August 1996 when he happened upon an equally indiscreet technician:
"So this is where the bomb exploded?" I [Clarke] asked. "Where on the plane was it?"
"The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb," he [the technician] added. "See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside."
"What's below row 23?" I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I thought it was.
"The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit ..." He indicated an explosion with his hands.
In this one supposedly chance encounter. Clarke, who knew next to nothing about aircraft technology, managed to discover the official cause of the crash months, if not years, before the NTSB did.
That same day, Clarke tells us, he returned to Washington and shared his exploding fuel tank theory with Panetta and NSA Director Tony Lake, even sketching the 747 design.
"Does the NTSB agree with you?" Lake reportedly asked Clarke. Clarke's purported response speaks to the priority politics would take over truth in this investigation – "Not yet."
Clarke adds the telling comment, "We were all cautiously encouraged." They were "encouraged" because the political people like Clarke and Panetta did not want to face the consequences of a missile or even a bomb.
To keep the illusion of a real investigation alive, at least through the November election, Panetta authorized a $500,000 expenditure to create a mock-up of the reconstructed plane.
This Potemkin 747 proved nothing, but it provided a complicit media a useful visual for the administration's "Just-so" stories, stories that were quickly hardening into dogma.
America fed on the illusion of mechanical failure until Sept. 11, 2001. Called to account for his failures that day, Clarke asked the 9/11 commission, that he and his colleagues "be forgiven for not thinking about [aviation terrorism] given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."
Thomas Young is not prepared to forgive. He is still "greatly disturbed" that his fellow citizens did not get to see what he had seen.
Young suspects that if we had all been able to see the video, and responded appropriately, we might still think of the 11th as just another day in September.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=85533 [link inserted]
I found a similar article here: http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/TWA/twa.html (click link for complete story)
Was TWA 800 Shot Down
By a Military Missile?
In 1996 TWA Flight 800 was shot down south of Long Island.
The government of the United States, despite the embarrassment of having been caught in court rigging lab tests and lying in its reports, still officially attributes the disaster to a spark in the center fuel tank, while government spokespeople insist that the witnesses who saw a missile hit the jumbo jet are all drunks.
TWA 800 LAWSUIT: THE BURDEN OF PROOF
TWA 800 LAWSUIT GOES TO COURT!
Introduction
The Crash
On the evening of July 17th, 1996, shortly after the sun had set, but while the sky was still light, a Boeing 747-131 jetliner, TWA's flight 800, was taking off from JFK airport on its way to Paris, France. On board were 230 people.
Approximately 11 minutes into the flight, the 747 was flying at an altitude of 13,700 MSL, or 13,700 feet above sea level. Normally higher at 11 minutes, flight 800 had delayed climbing to make room for another jetliner descending into Rhode Island. The plane was over the Atlantic ocean south of Long Island, New York.
Just as flight 800 received clearance to initiate a climb to cruise altitude, the plane exploded without any warning. Thousands of pounds of kerosene, dumped from the center and wing tanks, vaporized and ignited, creating a fireball seen all along the coastline of Long Island. Under the orange glow of the fireball, sections of the 747 tumbled into the ocean. So completely had the plane broken up that weather radar confused the expanding bubble of debris for a cloud.
I also found this one: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/may99/twa11.htm (click link for rest of story)
FBI Probe of TWA Crash Criticized
By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 1999; Page A3
Several federal officials told a Senate subcommittee yesterday that the FBI's role in the investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800 was overbearing and at times inept. According to that testimony, the agency clung to the theory that a bomb or missile had downed the plane months after its own chief scientist on the case had reached the opposite conclusion.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on administrative oversight and the courts is the culmination of a two-year congressional review of the TWA investigation. Witnesses portrayed a probe riddled with sloppy investigative techniques and dominated by a powerful FBI agent-in-charge, who seemed determined to prove that the crash resulted from an act of terrorism.
All 230 people aboard the Boeing 747 died when it plunged into the ocean south of Long Island shortly after taking off from New York on July 17, 1996.
Opening yesterday's hearing, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the subcommittee chairman and a frequent FBI critic, said the crash investigation was "a model of failure, not success." He described the bureau's leadership in the case as "a disaster," adding that the bureau hindered the investigation and "risked public safety" with its alleged attempt to suppress a report on the cause of the crash by another government agency.
To be honest I had forgotten about this but it does make one wonder.