The Downing of TWA 800
On the pleasant summer evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York bound for Paris. Twelve minutes after takeoff, about ten miles south of the popular south shore of Long Island, at least two surface-to-air missiles blew the 747 out of the sky, killing all 230 people on board.
I write the above with 100 percent confidence. I owe that confidence to the efforts of a small corps of committed individuals — eyewitnesses, independent researchers, whistleblowers from within the investigation, and family members who have turned their grief into action. In attempting to get at the truth, at least three of these people were arrested, several others were thrown off the TWA 800 investigation, and every one of them was ridiculed.
In TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5), I get to tell their story, an epic one. What makes the story so compelling is that these everyday citizens have struggled against a Goliath that could not have been more powerful. The opposition includes, among other powers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the FBI, and the CIA.
In a totalitarian country, authorities can suppress information at will. In America, the media have to collaborate in that suppression, and this they did, closing their eyes to the obvious and accepting without evidence the government’s unproven theory of a spontaneous fuel tank explosion.
The fact that TWA 800 went down during the reelection campaign of a popular Democrat contributed mightily to the ensuing psychosis. This was less a media conspiracy than a collective pathology, as unwitting as it was unhealthy. So locked were the media into their delusions they quickly came to mock those who did not share them.
Whatever its flaws, America is not the Soviet Union. Thanks to the various sunshine laws, the U.S. government proved surprisingly helpful to researchers. Once the NTSB wrapped up its case in August 2000, citizens had access to a wealth of data, much of it visual. This included an animation of the crash created by the CIA, NTSB animations, hours and hours of video from the NTSB hearing, all seven hundred or so of the FBI witness interviews, scores of eyewitness drawings, and a vast library of charts and photos and technical data.
Working through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), researchers have kept the pressure on ever since. This past year, either through indifference or carelessness, authorities released two distinct items that remove virtually all doubt as to what happened on that July night in 1996 and in the months that followed.
One is the video of a missile test in the waters south of Long Island shot five days before TWA 800 was destroyed. The second and more comprehensive is a mother lode of CIA documents. These memoranda spell out in detail how the CIA covertly assumed control of the investigation and corrupted it. They also point to a scandal within the scandal, one whose implications are no less than historic.
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