by Richard Baehr
On July 17, 1996, two days before the start of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, TWA Flight 800, bound for Paris, exploded in the air
at 8:30 p.m., just 12 minutes after takeoff from Kennedy Airport in New
York. All 230 people on board died. The explosion was witnessed by many
residents and visitors that summer evening on Long Island, New York.
Many of the eyewitnesses described seeing what looked like a rising
column of light just before the explosion, suggesting the plane may have
been hit before it exploded.
The explosion occurred
slightly less than six weeks before the Democratic Party's convention,
at which President Bill Clinton was certain to be re-nominated to run
for a second term. At the time of the TWA explosion, Clinton held a
substantial lead over his Republican opponent, Kansas Senator Bob Dole.
Clinton expected to coast to victory on a platform of peace and
prosperity.
Clearly, if a terror
attack had brought down a commercial airliner in the skies over New
York, the president would have had been under enormous pressure to
respond forcefully against the nation or group deemed responsible for
the attack. Such a military response, with the risk of American
casualties, might have endangered the president's smooth sailing to the
November election. If, on the other hand, the commercial jetliner was
brought down by U.S. military forces, in some kind of awful accidental
misfiring, the embarrassment would have also taken a political toll.
On the night of the TWA
explosion, the president, his wife Hillary Clinton and Deputy National
Security Adviser Sandy Berger huddled in the White House, after hearing
the news. Exactly what they discussed, or decided, is of course, not
known. The National Transportation Safety Board eventually determined
that the plane was not hit by a missile and there was no bomb on board
that detonated in flight.
Rather, the plane
exploded because of sparks that ignited in an empty center fuel tank, a
first of its kind as a cause for a major commercial airline disaster.
That explanation had been considered and ruled out in the first weeks of
the investigation, but investigators later came back to it after ruling
out other more politically freighted explanations.
When explosive residue
was found among the ruins of the plane that were brought to shore from
the Atlantic Ocean, in an attempt to reconstruct the plane in a hangar,
the explanation offered for their appearance was that a test had
occurred a week before the doomed flight with dogs trained to spot
explosives at a TWA base in Saint Louis. Oddly, the investigation of the
TWA disaster received a large and immediate assist from the FBI,
usually brought in for criminal investigations but not for accidents.
The FBI chose to provide reports during the investigation to only one
news organization, The New York Times. Neither the FBI, nor the Times,
ever chose to interview any of the 270 eyewitnesses who came forward.
The TWA story largely
faded from view and public consciousness. Until now, 17 years later,
when a significant new development occurred last week. Six of the
individuals involved in the original investigation broke their silence
and agreed to talk to two film producers about the investigation,
alleging that there was a cover-up of the real cause of the explosion
and that the final results of the investigation were falsified.
The announcement of the new documentary received attention from some mainstream media
and was ignored by others. Next month, the documentary containing the
new allegations, including a demand for the National Transportation
Safety Board to reopen the investigation, will air on a TV network that
is available on very few satellite or cable systems, EPIX. One writer,
Jack Cashill, who has been covering the TWA story for its entirety, has
seen the documentary, and argues that it is very credible.
The new charges of a
cover-up over what happened to TWA 800 come amid a growing sense of
national unease relating to scandals and actions of the current
administration of President Barack Obama. The web of current scandals
involve everything from the Internal Revenue Service targeting applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups, pro-Israel organizations and pro-life groups; snooping and harassing journalists at Fox News Channel, The Associated Press, and perhaps CBS (Sharyl Atkinson);
and finally whistle-blower Edward Snowden, revealing to Guardian
columnist Glenn Greenwald the details of a vast program of domestic
surveillance of Americans conducted by the NSA. The official defense of
the surveillance was that it was necessary for national security and had
helped government officials pre-empt a few dozen terror attacks in the
United States and against U.S. targets abroad. While Snowden may be an
unappealing figure, the story itself, combined with the other recent
news, put the administration in a bad light.
Then there are the
parallels between the new story alleging a cover-up of the cause TWA
800's destruction, and the situation Obama faced on the day of the
attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012. The
Benghazi story has faded from view a bit, after the IRS and NSA stories
overwhelmed it. The Benghazi attacks occurred only a week after the
Democratic Convention had re-nominated Obama to run for a second term
against Republican Mitt Romney.
On Sept. 11, the
president held a small but solid lead in most polls of three to five
points. Obama and his team at the White House created an explanation for
the Benghazi attacks that would be least damaging to the president's
re-election narrative. That re-election narrative included several
themes -- that al-Qaida was on the run, especially after Osama Bin
Laden's execution by U.S. special forces in Pakistan, and that Libya had
been a successful intervention by the U.S., as opposed, say, to
President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
The explanation that
was offered up after the attack in Benghazi was false, and the
administration knew it was false. But they repeated it for weeks in
forums around the world. The official line was that a spontaneous
demonstration by locals, angered by an anti-Muslim video created by a
Coptic Christian in the U.S., ignited the demonstration in Benghazi,
which eventually turned violent.
In truth, there was
advance planning for the attack (was Sept. 11 the only day available,
and do spontaneous demonstrations often involve the types of weapons
used in the assault on the consulate?). The assault involved al-Qaida
affiliates, the U.S. military chose not to attempt an operation to
defend the consulate in Benghazi that night (were they instructed not to
by the White House?), and Ambassador Christopher Stevens may have been
involved in a gun-running operation. And the president left town for a
fundraiser.
The U.S. government
went so far as to repeatedly apologize to Muslims in specific countries
and around the world for the terrible ("disgusting") video, which of
course had zero to do with what happened in Benghazi. Hillary Clinton
told the family members of the four Americans killed in Benghazi that
the administration would make sure the filmmaker would go to jail for
his actions, which he soon did.
For two months running
up to Election Day, the national media attacked Mitt Romney for his
unhappiness with the administration's apologies to Muslim nations for
Americans practicing First Amendment free speech rights (which includes
making political videos critical of Islam), or for bringing up Benghazi.
The national media accepted the president's fake story about what
transpired in Benghazi in the crucial first weeks after the attacks as
gospel. It did so again when the White House changed its story and
admitted the video had nothing to do with what happened. CNN's Candy
Crowley went so far as to intervene in the second presidential debate to
announce that the president had in fact labeled the Benghazi attack as a
terrorist operation from the start, when in fact the exact opposite was
true.
If the new TWA 800 documentary
gets a wide audience at some point, the person most at risk may be
Hillary Clinton. Famous now for participating in the Benghazi false
narrative, and then arguing before a congressional committee
that at this point it makes no difference what actually happened in
Benghazi, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2016 may have
also have played a part in the earlier cover-up of TWA 800. If she did,
it really does make a difference, I think.
Richard Baehr
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4771
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment