With the release this week of TWA800: The Full Story—A Navy Whistleblower Comes Forward, filmmaker Brian Lerch has shown the power of AI to penetrate the shroud of secrecy around the July 17, 1996 destruction of flight TWA 800.
Central to Lerch’s documentary is the testimony of Navy vet, William Teele. Teele’s account of the events of that day were included in Jack Cashill’s 2016 book TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-up, The Conspiracy.
However, a few paragraphs in a book does not do justice to Teele’s testimony. Lerch dramatized Teele’s 15-minute narration by recreating the environment in which Teele operated. In the first 45 minutes of the video Lerch also laid out the details of the investigation into the crash, including its many failings.
Let’s be reminded that TWA 800 was a flight that took off from JFK airport on Long Island headed for Paris on the evening of July 17, 1996. It was destroyed off the South Shore of Long Island.
As Lerch notes in his presentation, the crash was witnessed by hundreds of people enjoying a warm summer evening outdoors. In all, the FBI interviewed more than 700 witnesses. The FBI determined that more than 100 witnesses were considered excellent.
This year Judicial Watch produced a new documentary on this subject. That documentary started from a point of disbelief in the government’s report. The difference here is that Lerch’s documentary is so balanced and apolitical the few reviewers will be able to criticize it for being biased toward a specific conclusion.
This enhances Teele’s credibility. And Teele is a great witness because he is honest about himself as well as about what he does or does not know.
Jack Cashill notes:
On July 17, 1996, Teele and other sailors spent the afternoon qualifying on small arms fire while the USS Carr, a frigate, cruised the W-105 operating area south of Long Island.
That evening found Teele in Carr’s Combat Information Center (CIC). The ambitious young sailor spent considerable time there trying to absorb as much as he could about on-board communications. As Teele describes it, there was “a lot more Khaki”—meaning officers—than usual in the CIC that night.
The brass were there to observe the evening exercise. It involved a Lear jet towing a “target” and a simulated missile attack on that target. Says Carr, “No live missile was supposed to leave the rail.” The job of the men in Carr’s CIC was to build a radar picture and convey that imagery to the other ships and subs in the battle group.
Teele was sitting close enough to the action to hear the response from the other ships in the group. “Birds away,” he heard, nothing unusual in that, then “splash.” Only when Teele heard an anxious “wait a minute” did he sense something amiss. How seriously amiss he learned a moment later when he heard, “We hit an airbus!” At the time, he had to ask what an airbus was. In fact, the missiles had hit TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 with 230 people on board bound for Paris.
The atmosphere in the CIC changed abruptly. Capt. Keith Wray called for radio silence and ordered the men to stop talking. Teele listened to one end of a conversation between Wray and an unknown officer on another ship. “How could anyone make this mistake?” he heard a frustrated Wray lament. Wray then left the CIC for the more restricted Radio Central.
Teele’s testimony was corroborated by a shipmate to the extent that he could who contacted Jack Cashill.
Teele’s narrative touched on one question that has been brought up over and over about the TWA-800 coverup. With the number of sailors on board each of the ships involved, how is it that there have been no other whistleblowers? As Teele explained, functions on the ships are highly compartmentalized. On the USS Carr, only a few other sailors knew what he knew. Even on the ship and/or sub that fired the missile, he added, not many would have known enough to be a reliable witness, and, just as he was, these men would have been threatened into silence.
Regarding non-military witnesses, perhaps the best was a man named Tom Young. Young was nowhere near Long Island. As Young told the president in a recent letter, he was recovering in a Hong Kong hospital bed, his back in traction. For eight days following the disaster, he and his wife watched British and Chinese TV news. What they saw, roughly four times an hour, was a video of “what appeared to be a missile being launched, curving to the left as it accelerated and climbed, followed by two flashes, the first being small and brief—and a subsequent, secondary explosion, much greater in power.”
What happened to this video? Incidentally this video did get broadcast in this country a limited number of times before it disappeared.
Slowly but surely the truth about TWA-800 is surfacing. When will the coverup collapse?