- Cashill, Jack and James Sanders.
First Strike.
Nashville: WND Books, 2003.
ISBN 978-0-7852-6354-8.
-
On July 17, 1996, just 12 minutes after takeoff,
TWA Flight 800
from New York to Paris exploded in mid-air off the coast of Long
Island and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. All 230 passengers
and crew on board were killed. The disaster occurred on a summer
evening in perfect weather, and was witnessed by hundreds of people
from land, sea, and air—the FBI interviewed more than seven
hundred eyewitnesses in the aftermath of the crash.
There was something “off” about the accident investigation
from the very start. Many witnesses, including some highly credible
people with military and/or aviation backgrounds, reported seeing a
streak of light flying up and reaching the airliner, followed by a
bright flash like that produced by a high-velocity explosive. Only
later did a fireball from burning fuel appear and begin to
fall to the ocean. In total disregard of the stautory requirements
for an air accident investigation, which designate the National
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as the lead agency, the FBI was
given prime responsibility and excluded NTSB personnel from
interviews with eyewitnesses, restricted access to interview
transcripts and physical evidence, and denied NTSB laboratories
the opportunity to test debris recovered from the crash field.
NTSB investigations involve “partners”: representatives
from the airline, aircraft manufacturer, the pilots' and aerospace
workers' unions, and others. These individuals observed and remarked
pointedly upon how different this investigation was from the others
in which they had participated. Further, and more disturbingly,
some saw what appeared to be FBI tampering with the evidence,
falsifying records such as the location at which debris had
been recovered, altering flight recorder data, and making
key evidence as varied as the scavenge pump which was proposed
as the ignition source for the fuel tank explosion advanced as
the cause of the crash, seats in the area contaminated with a residue
some thought indicative of missile propellant or a warhead explosion,
and dozens of eyewitness sketches disappear.
Captain Terrell Stacey was the TWA representive in the investigation.
He was in charge of all 747 pilot operations for the airline and
had flown the Flight 800 aircraft into New York the night before
its final flight. After observing these irregularities in the
investigation, he got in touch with author Sanders, a former police
officer turned investigative reporter, and arranged for Sanders to
obtain samples of the residue on the seats for laboratory testing.
The tests found an elemental composition consistent with missile
propellant or explosive, which was reported on the front page of a
Southern California newspaper on March 10th, 1997. The result: the
FBI seized Sanders's phone records, tracked down Stacey, and arrested
and perp-walked Sanders and his wife (a TWA trainer and former
flight attendant). They were hauled into court and convicted of
a federal charge intended to prosecute souvenir hunters disturbing crash
sites. The government denied Sanders was a journalist (despite his
work having been published in mainstream venues for years) and
disallowed a First Amendment defence.
This is just a small part of what stinks to high heaven about
this investigation. So shoddy was control of the chain of
custody of the evidence and so blatant the disregard of
testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses, that
alternative
theories
of the crash have flourished since shortly after the event until the
present day. It is difficult to imagine what might have been the
motives behind a cover-up of a missile attack against a U.S.
airliner, but as the author notes, only a few months remained before
the 1996 U.S. presidential election, in which Clinton was running on
a platform of peace and prosperity. A major terrorist attack might
subvert this narrative, so perhaps the well-documented high-level
meetings which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the crash
might have decided to direct a finding of a mechanical failure of
a kind which had occurred
only once before
in the eighty-year history
of aviation, with that incident being sometimes attributed to
terrorism. What might have been seen as a wild conspiracy theory in
the 1990s seems substantially more plausible in light of the
Benghazi attack
in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and its treatment by
the supine legacy media.
A Kindle edition is available. If you are
interested in this independent investigation of Flight 800,
be sure to see the documentary
Silenced
which was produced by the authors and includes interviews with many of
the key eyewitnesses and original documents and data. Finally, if this
was just an extremely rare mechanical malfunction, why do so many
of the documents from the investigation remain classified and
inaccessible to Freedom of Information Act requests seventeen years
thereafter?
July 2013 