Saturday, September 29, 2001

 

I was watching the news yesterday when tape of some kind of "event" came on the screen. One of the anchors was confused, and almost babbling as he stumbled over words to tell us about what was happening. All I really got from him was "civic center" and "no details yet" as I watched video of emergency vehicles, a traffic tie-up and a building.

A media cover-up of some kind? I hate to say it, but what else could it be? I haven't heard anything else about it there, or anywhere. It's not hard to believe the traditional media would cover up such a story. Take the downing of TWA Flight 800 for example.

Although when the plane went down in the summer of 1996 speculation abounded that a missile of some sort was involved, after a lengthy investigation, the "official guess" was that frayed wiring sparked an explosion in the center fuel tank causing the plane to break apart and crash. No official final determination has ever been made.

But remember the first reports?

Former newsman Pierre Salinger insisted ... a Navy missile downed TWA Flight 800, this time offering a 69-page document and a set of radar images to bolster his case. (RE: CNN.)

"We have now reached the point where we are totally sure what we are saying is true," Salinger, a former ABC News correspondent and press secretary to President Kennedy, told a Paris news conference.

The tape "completely confirms a missile fired down TWA 800," Salinger said.

Salinger believes, and says he can confirm, that it was a "super secret" U.S. Navy exercise off Long Island and was meant to target a Tomahawk missile, but hit Flight 800 instead when it "lost its lock on its original target."

But was it really only an exercise?

William Donaldson, a retired navy commander, who has done extensive research into the cause of the crash. He is a graduate of Crash Analysis from the Navy Post Graduate School, with a twenty-five year career in the navy. He had this to say. "...(J)et airliners built by the American aerospace industry have logged at least 150 thousand years of flight time. Not once has there ever been a spontaneous fuel tank explosion on any fuel tank while airborne." Consider that until TWA-800's purported midair fuel tank explosion, the only Boeing 747's that came out of the air in pieces were blown out. In 1978 an Air India jetliner was downed, in 1983 KAL-007, in 1985 another Air India plane, in 1988 Pan Am-103 was blown out of the air. All of these downings were due either to bombings or missile hits.

"Several eyewitness like Mr. Roland Penney and his group of eight not only saw a missile-like object rise up from the haze at sea, leaving a thin gray smoke trail. They distinctly describe a bright white flash, 'like a flashbulb' when it hit TWA Flight 800," Donaldson wrote to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was interviewed by CNN two days after the disaster. His conclusions come after 'various conversations' with government officials.

"'I won't go so far as to say it was terrorism, but there was sabotage here,' Hatch said. 'We're looking at a criminal act. We're looking at somebody who either put a bomb on it or shot a missile, a surface-to-air missile.'" Hatch said, 'the National Transportation Safety Board should now turn the investigation over to the FBI because the crash was not related to an aviation problem.... It's very -- almost 100 percent unlikely that this was a mechanical failure,' Hatch said. 'It looks pretty darn conclusive that it was an explosion caused either internally or externally by a criminal act.' Investigators told CNN that there is no indication that the Boeing 747 suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure." (CNN 7-19-96).

But then what happened. The government ... the Clinton administration ... told us, through the media, what they wanted us to believe. Apparently, however, now that he's not president, Clinton forgot the story he was supposed to tell.

Being interviewed on the street the day he returned from Australia shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on America, former President Clinton referred to the downing of TWA 800 as "an act of terrorism."

But Clinton isn't the only person who likened the downing of Flight 800 and the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks.

Senator John Kerry, on Larry King Live on September 11, 2001, said: "......just as TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a terrorist act."

George Stephanopoulos made a major mistake on ABC in the wake of the recent World Trade Center attack.

"In my time at the White House," he said off-handedly, "(the situation room) was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon."

The fuel-tank theory of the crash was also disavowed by James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation into Flight 800.
He said on CNN on September 11 that the attack that day was "the first act of terrorism in the U.S. since TWA 800."

With that said, I'd like to know why, if in fact there was/is a cover-up, the Clinton administration et al, decided the American people couldn't handle the truth, and why the media went along with it. No, the truth wouldn't have been pleasant to hear. But we could have been preparing, at least in our minds and psyches, for the last five years. Maybe Sept. 11 wouldn't have been quite as shocking. It wouldn't have been any harder to believe, any easier to look at the pictures, any less disturbing when hearing all the stories. But at least we would have been prepared.

posted by Anne 9/29/2001 08:26:00 PM