Today is the anniversary of one of the largest coverups ever in American history. 29 years ago, TWA Flight 800, a 747, blew up off the South Shore of Long Island on its way to Paris. 230 souls were lost.
To this date, much of the country (but not airline pilots) believe that an explosion in a center fuel tank on the airliner was the cause of the crash. Supposedly this was a result of an electrical fire in the tank. This was the result of the “investigation” after four years. This is still the officially-stated cause of the crash. However, they were never able to replicate the act. No 747 was ever taken out of service worldwide to “correct” the problem. Why?
Let’s be reminded of the details. According to Richard Clarke, who was chairman of the Coordinating Security Group (CSG) on terrorism at the time:
“The FAA was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft.”
If this were true, the FAA would most likely have contacted the NTSB. The CSG was brought into the arena because the FAA had radar data that showed an unknown object approaching TWA 800 just before it blew up. And while Clarke attributed the “17,000 feet” reference to the FAA, the FAA knew that the plane had climbed no higher than 13,800 when it was destroyed.
Keep in mind this was a presidential election year. Slick Willy was making a comeback after the debacle of the 1994 mid-terms. The idea that possibly a missile had been fired from just offshore by some terrorist group would have proved to be unsettling to his chances to keep the White House.
Although the NTSB would normally be in charge of the investigation, the FBI was brought in immediately and took over ostensibly because of the fact that terrorism may have been involved in the downing of the airliner.
Enter the NYTimes who would be spoon fed almost all information by the FBI as it was released.
July 17, 1996 was a warm summer evening on the South Shore of Long Island. Many witnesses had seen the plane blow up. Many of these certified witnesses had reported seeing a rocket ascend from the horizon and merge with the plane. The agents on the FBI missile team had found the evidence for a missile strike “overwhelming.”
On July 19, the Times’ David Johnston introduced the possibility of a missile strike. “In public,” Johnston wrote, investigators were talking about an “accident,” but “in private,” they hinted at a “terrorist’s missile.” As it turns out, the truth was much worse. And the Clinton administration was desperate to suppress the real story.
The NYTimes was more than willing to be uncritical in their reporting. After all, the NYTimes was almost the only place where new information was being released. The story was probably the biggest news story of 1996.
So, the idea of a missile strike was suppressed and a bomb going off in the cabin became the story being pushed. This was buttressed by the fact that evidence of bomb residue had been found in the cabin of the downed aircraft. On August 23, the NYTimes went all in on this story with a front-page headline that read, “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800.”
Four weeks later on September 19th, the government changed direction and the NYTimes dutifully followed. “Convinced that none of the physical evidence recovered from T.W.A. Flight 800 proves that a bomb brought down the plane,” Matthew Wald wrote in the lead of his Times article, the NTSB was now planning tests “to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone.”
How would they explain away the bomb residue that had been reported? They would smear a St Louis patrolman and his bomb-sniffing dog. Jack Cashill notes:
On Friday, September 20, the FBI released a statement claiming that the TWA 800 aircraft had “previously been used in a law enforcement training exercise for bomb-detection dogs.” On September 21, the Times Matthew Purdy filled in the details. Reportedly, on June 10, 1996, the St. Louis police used the TWA 800 plane to train a bomb-sniffing dog and left explosive residue all over the plane.
The FBI must have searched world-wide to find a situation that would allow for the fake narrative. St Louis turned out to be the best they could come up with. If anyone in the media had followed up on the story with the patrolmen involved, the story would have collapsed. No reporter or FBI agent ever spoke with the patrolman in question before the story was released.
Cashill notes:
Six years after the incident I caught up Burnett. As he told me, I was the first person in the media to call him. Burnett had a story to tell. In fact, the FBI had no proof he had ever done a training exercise on the plane that would become TWA 800—because he didn’t.
The FBI eventually admitted that Burnett “made no notations regarding the tail number of the aircraft, as it was not his policy to do so.” Nor was it Burnett’s policy to note the gate number. What Burnett did list on the form were specific start and stop times, the date, and the notation “wide body.” That was all the information anyone had to go on.
…
Yes, a 747 bearing TWA #17119, the number for the Flight 800 plane, was parked at gate 50 that day. According to the FBI, the plane was there “from shortly before 700 hours [7 AM] until approximately 1230 hours [12:30 PM] on that date.” No one disputes this. The FBI also acknowledged that Burnett “began the placement of the explosives at 10:45 AM.” No one disputes this either, but these time details undercut the whole FBI construct.
On that June day, as usual, Burnett placed the training aids throughout the passenger cabin in a “zigzag” pattern. He let the explosives sit for a while, as FAA regulations dictate, and then returned to his car to retrieve Carlo, his dog. “At 11:45 AM,” again according to the FBI, “the patrolman began the exercise by bringing the dog into the aircraft. The exercise lasted 15 minutes, and the dog located all the explosives.”
Carlo’s mission accomplished, Burnett led him out of the plane and back to the car. Burnett then returned to the plane to retrieve the scattered training aids. He placed each aid on the galley counter and carted them all back out. Burnett estimated this activity to have taken fifteen minutes. Based on the FBI’s own timetable, Burnett could not have left the plane earlier than 12:15 p.m. Yes, the Flight 800 plane was at gate 50 until 12:30 as the FBI indicated.
There was a reason the plane left the gate. As clearly documented in several places including Captain Vance Weir’s “Pilot Activity Sheet,” Weir and his passengers took off for Honolulu in that very same 747 at 12:35 p.m. Burnett did not leave the plane until 12:15 p.m. at the earliest and saw no one. To clean the plane, stock it, check out the mechanics, and board several hundred passengers would have taken more than the 15-minute window of opportunity offered in the FBI’s own timetable. Hours more.
As it happened, another 747, a veritable clone, was parked at Gate 51. This second plane—bound for JFK International as TWA Flight 844—would not leave the gate until 2:00 p.m. This later departure would have allowed Burnett and Carlo plenty of time to execute the training undisturbed.
So, 258 highly credible witnesses out of a total of 755 witnesses to a missile strike were silenced. However, that did not end the story. A significant percentage of Americans had access to the Internet and the witnesses were talking among themselves. Enter the CIA.
Actually, the CIA had been involved from the beginning. Supposedly this was because international terrorism had been suspected. Actually the CIA had directed the investigation away from the idea of a missile strike because the CIA almost certainly knew the real cause of the crash. And that was a US Navy training exercise that went horribly wrong.
The fact that there was an AEGIS missile cruiser in the area is undisputed. There were also three Navy subs. And an Orion P-3 aircraft. All left the area as soon as the plane was destroyed. The obvious question is why. The answer is obvious as well.
Will the truth ever be told? That is hard to say. Perhaps when the principals in this story are no longer with us.
The NYTimes has been on the wrong side of the news for at least 30 years. In 1996 they had to re-elect Slick Willy to the White House. This was certainly a significant point in the evolving nature of how the NYTimes handled news stories.
The NYTimes appears to be a sucker for a good hoax story. On January 8, 2021, the Times reported that “pro-Trump rioters” struck Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with a fire extinguisher, causing Sicknick to be “rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.” This was a lie.
On October 23, 2020, the Times told its readers that the Hunter Biden laptop “prompted concerns about Russian disinformation.” The 51 “intelligence experts” who signed off on this story were lying. The Times sold this story to the public.
In 2018, the NYTimes won a Pulitzer for its “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
The Pulitzer story was based on lies put forth by the Clinton campaign and furthered by individuals now under investigation for conspiracy.
Will the NYTimes ever stand up for the American people? We will see how they cover the campaign of the Communist running for NYC mayor.
One can get Jack Cashill’s definitive book on this subject by clicking the link below.