Israel Matzav

Was TWA 800 shot down?

On Sunday, July 14, 1996, Mrs. Carl and I and our five eldest children (the only ones we had then) flew on TWA 880 non-stop from New York - Kennedy to Tel Aviv. The flight was due to take off at 9:00, and we had left our suitcases by friends in Queens earlier in the day. But we discovered that two adults, five kids and 14 suitcases would not all fit in a rented Plymouth Voyager. So I drove Mrs. Carl and the suitcases to the airport and she stayed there and tried to check us all in despite the fact that she was the only one there. I then drove back to Queens to get the kids. But it had taken Mrs. Carl and I over an hour to get to the airport because of horrific traffic and huge thunderstorms, and we actually thought about asking our friends to send the kids to the airport by themselves in a taxi (the oldest was just short of 13 at the time). I drove back to Queens in the end, got the kids, raced back to the airport and dropped off our rental car. Mrs. Carl was waiting outside the terminal. Everything was okay. She managed to check in and the flight was going to be late - very late - anyway. There were mechanical problems with the plane.

Our flight was totally full, and when TWA realized that they could not repair our plane in time, they canceled Flight 800 to Paris and gave us the Paris flight's plane. The Paris flight was supposed to take off at 10:00 if I recall correctly. We took off close to midnight. That might even be the same plane in the picture. Three nights later, Flight 800 mysteriously crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK, killing all 230 people on board.

Because of that story, I have always been fascinated with the TWA 800 crash. For many years, investigators have insisted that there was a fuel explosion in the air. But there were always rumors that someone shot a missile at the flight. Now, some of the crash's investigator's are going public with a story that hints that TWA 800 was shot down.

Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996, en route to Paris when it exploded and crashed off the coast of nearby East Moriches, Long Island, killing everyone on the plane.

“..This team of investigators who actually handled the wreckage and victims’ bodies, prove that the officially proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash,” reads a statement by the producers of the film, which will debut on cable network EPIX next month. “They also provide radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordnance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash.” However, the statement said they did not speculate about the source or sources of any ordnance explosions.

The whistle-blower team, which includes investigators -- at the time -- from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), TWA, and the Airline Pilots Association, have since retired from their positions. They claim that at the time, they were placed under a gag order by the NTSB, which they charged falsified the official conclusion of the cause of the crash. They indicated they would elaborate more in a Wednesday media briefing.

The NTSB report, the culmination of a four-year investigation, suggested the cause of the explosion was due to an explosion in the gas tank caused by a short circuit.

With conspiracy theories immediately swirling around the crash -- one being that it was caused by a terrorist missile strike -- the FBI conducted  a 16-month investigation and concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that any criminal act occurred.

The producers made two strategic moves to force the media to look seriously at their conclusions. One was to rely heavily on the testimony of a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation.

The second was to avoid politics. When James Sanders and I produced the video documentary “Silenced” on this subject 12 years ago and the book “First Strike” two years after that, we made the marketing mistake of identifying the logic of the cover-up.

That logic led to the White House. Sixteen years ago, in the home stretch of a difficult re-election campaign, Bill Clinton faced a problem very similar to one that Barack Obama would face in 2012. This is something the media did not want to know, let alone share.
An event took place that threatened the “peace and prosperity” theme of his campaign – specifically, the shoot-down of this doomed airliner with 230 people on board 12 minutes out of JFK.

Although the word was not used back then, the Clinton White House, with the help of a complicit media, rewrote the event’s “narrative” to assure re-election. Again, as with Benghazi, that narrative was clumsily improvised almost on a daily basis.

Knowing the media had his back, Clinton responded much as Obama did: deny, obfuscate and kick the investigatory can down the road until after the election.

One central figure appeared in each drama: Hillary Clinton. She stood by Obama’s side in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12 as he spun reality into confection.

Throughout that long night of July 17, 1996, she holed up with Bill and Sandy Berger in the White House family quarters, assessing their narrative options much as Obama did on Sept. 11, 2012.

Read the whole thing. 

Let's go to the videotape.



Hmmm.

Labels: Iran, Islamic terrorism, JFK Airport, Paris

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:54 PM