"Into the Buzzsaw"--TWA flight 800 and 9/11 parallels

[spooked911]

Hvae any of you read this book, "Into the Buzzsaw", edited by Kristina Borjesson, that has various essays about how the media is censored?

If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it. This was a book I read, back in mid-2002 (before I read "The New Pearl Harbor") that first got me going on the idea that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

The book doesn't talk about 9/11 in any significant way, but a few of the essays are highly relevant.

The most relevant essays to 9/11 are the two chapters on the TWA flight 800 crash that happened in 1996. One of the chapters is by Kristina Borjesson herself, who was a CBS news producer before getting fired for pushing the flight 800 story the wrong way.

The template for the flight 800 crash story has amazing parallels with 9/11. Particularly, the cover-up by the FBI and CIA, the selling of a false story to the American public and self-imposed media censorship on questioning the government's story. Most eerie was the fact that military exercises were taking place next to where flight 800 blew out of the sky, and that scores of witnesses saw what looked like a missile hit the plane. Yet this was completely suppressed. Even though there was also some speculation about the plane being brought down by terrorists, this was also supressed, and instead the public was sold some unlikely story about the center fuel tank generating a spark that ignited fuel vapors (this is reminiscient of the pancake collapse theory).

It's not clear what exactly happened to flight 800, but I wonder if it was some early attempt by the military to stage a "terror attack" in order to spur the administration to war in the middle east-- but the Clinton administration didn't want to have anything to do with it and quashed the plan. Lately, there have even been some hints that Ramzi Yousef was tied into the flight 800 crash, suggesting a primordial linking of a known terrorist to this incident. I have to wonder whether this crash was some early form of 9/11.

There are other important essays by Gary Wills, that deals with how the corporate media killed his findings on he relationship between the CIA and drug dealing, and by John Kelly, who also has very interesting things to say about the CIA.

[Kevin Fenton]

1. TWA 800

It's highly unlikely it was a terrorist missile. When it was shot down it was probably out of range for a stinger and possibly out of range for even a somewhat larger ground-air missile (in addition, for some reason it was lower than most planes are at that point). If a terrorist group had wanted to down a plane they could easily have gone nearer the airport, where they would have had an easier shot.

As for the navy missile theory, explosives were found on the crash debris, so it's highly likely that, if it was a navy missile, it was loaded, rather than having just some sort of dummy warhead. I don't really know, but I doubt the navy tests live warheads off Long Island.

The most popular proponent of the bomb theory now is Peter Lance, about half of whose Cover Up is about it. Lance points out that Ramzi Yousef was on trial during the event. One of the things Yousef was tried for was an attack on PAL 434 on its way to Tokyo in the early nineties. The bomb on PAL 434 was highly innovative in that it was very small (Ramzi got it aboard the plane in his shoe) and was basically just a blasting cap. The bomb could not destroy the plane but Ramzi tried to place it above one of the fuel tanks, which he thought would then explode, downing the plane. In the event, Ramzi was a few feet out, the tank didn't explode and only one person was killed.
Lance got hold of a bunch of FBI documents and found that the FBI was conducting some sort of operation using an informant in the cell next door and that Ramzi was able to make a few phone calls. Ramzi apparently told this informant he was planning to blow up a plane out of NY so that he could file for a mistrial (he did file, but the application was rejected). Lance says that putting Yousef on trial would have meant using the informant, who the powers-that-be needed to put away for a long time (he was involved in lots of other mafia-related cases in which his credibility had to be destroyed to put away a bunch of mafioso; if they built his credibility up in a Yousef trial, they couldn't then turn round and destroy in the mafia trials). The decision that TWA 800 wasn't going to become a criminal investigation was taken after a meeting with some lawyers and Lance simply thinks it's an ends/means decision. They'd rather put the mafioso away than Yousef et al. Yousef got life plus twice anyway.

The NTSB reconstruction of the plane proved (definitively in Lance's and my opinion) that the center wing fuel tank exploded - they can somehow tell by the way the metal is bent. Lance merely says that the cause was the blasting cap bomb, whereas the NTSB explanation is basically that the plane spontaneously combusted. For various reasons Lance thinks the FBI wasn't playing straight with the NTSB (it was a joint investigation) and I even read the transcript of an interview where he beat an NTSB guy on this point. The FBI explained the explosives found on the plane by saying that they were left there by a sloppy bomb-sniffer dog test a couple of weeks before. However, the test used smokeless powder, water gel, C-4, det cord and ammonia dynamite, whereas the explosives actually found aboard were RDX, PETN and nitroglycerine.

My explanation is different (you knew it was going to be, didn't you?). I think it can be actually pretty hard to prove that an aircraft has been blown up by a bomb, because the clinching piece of evidence is an actual piece of the bomb (which obviously blew up). Given that the bomb was real small - the timer for PAL 434 was a casio watch with a couple of components soldered into it (for the actual trial they recovered a bit of the watch and proved that the solder was not of the type usually used by Casio) and the plane exploded over water, I find it hard to believe that any piece of the bomb was recovered. All the defence attorney has to do is point out that they didn't actually find a bomb ("They didn't find a single piece of a bomb. The reason they didn't find a single piece of a bomb was because there wasn't a bomb.") and then put an NTSB guy on the stand and ask him if there might be another explanation (there might be, but I don't like it). Yousef was the ringleader and he was in jail anyway. Why risk your reputation trying such a risky case? I have no idea what happened to the other guys, I guess there either dead in a ditch or at Gitmo having their sleep "managed" (don't know which is worse).

BTW
In Against All Enemies Richard Clarke includes this at the end of the bit about TWA 800:
"Unfortunately, the public debate over the incident was clouded by conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are a constant in counter-terrorism. Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two contrary beleifs: (a) that the US government is so incompetent that it can miss explanations that the theorists can uncover, and (b) that the US government can keep a big, juicy secret. The first belief has some validity. The second idea is pure fantasy. Dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, however, is dangerous. I learned early on in my government career not to believe that government experts knew it all. The list of major intelligence failures and law enforcement errors is far too long to dismiss alternative views. Because I was personally sceptical about what agencies told me and always intrigued by the possibility of an unlikely explanation, I encouraged my analysts to have an open mind and perform due diligence on every claim."
Funny it's right after the TWA 800 section, eh?

[spooked911]

2. Thanks for the great summary-- now I don't need to read Lance's book!

I don't really know what happened with TWA flight 800 but the funny thing is there was a military exercise that was clearly being kept hush-hush-- much like the 9/11 hijacking exercises.

I've seen that Richard Clarke quote before-- it's quite amusing. Actually, I didn't read his whole book but only skimmed it and I happened to look up what he said about flight 800 since he was working for Clinton then.

[Kevin Fenton]

7. Military exercises

are often kept hush-hush. Just because the plane exploded and a ship left the area, doesn't necessarily mean the ship shot the plane down, it could just mean the ship had something sensitive on it and they didn't want those bozos from the FBI poking about in it, or that the captain was worried by a plane exploding and decided to scat. At times like this I remember all those people barking up the wrong tree about Roswell for decades and take a cold shower.

Obviously, it wouldn't be the only time the navy shot down a civilian plane for no reason, but I go for the bomb here.

Apparently there's supposed to be something wrong with the plane that crashed in New York November 2001 - I read something about there being two explosions aboard before it crashed (I think the official explanation is that the tail just kind of fell off, perhaps the two explosions would explain why the tail fell off). However, I haven't really looked at this closely and I don't really know.

[JackRiddler]

5. Not so fast...

What about 160 witnesses who saw a "streak of of light" approach the plane?

http://www.twa800.com/index.htm

The Navy holds exercises everywhere!

[Kevin Fenton]

6. Eyewitnesses

I'm not very keen on eyewitnesses. The reason is that law enforcement professionals who often deal with eyewitnesses are not very keen on them, because human memory is fairly imperfect. I suppose they must have seen something and I'm not sure it was the crippled plane in flight - one explanation might be that it was debris falling from the plane. However, I can't see that the NTSB have just made the whole thing up - the fuel tank must have exploded.

If it was a dummy missile, then why are there explosives on the plane? I guess the navy does do exercises everywhere, but testing live missiles off Long Island?

Yousef was definitely planning to bomb a plane out of New York, the explosion was in the place he wanted to place his Bojinka bombs and the type of explosives corresponded exactly to the Bojinka bomb.

[Truth__Seeker]

3. Everybody should read this book, it is excellent in every respect.

Several stories about Flight 800 and many others. CIA-drugs, Dupont, FOX news. Great background on the art of the 'cover-up'. It serves as an inspiration to get to bottom of 9-11. Never forget.

[philb]

4. There is a lot of evidence that Fl 800 was brought down by a bomb

And the Gov't study first was prepared to conclude that, could support that, but someone changed their mind.

[HockeyMom]

8. I was a witness to Flight 800

Well, to whatever it was that I saw in the sky. I posted something on a blog a few years later and very surpised to get a phone call from Commander Donaldson. I spoke to him several times on the phone. He wanted to arrange a meeting so I could actually try to draw a picture of what I saw, but we never did and he passed away some months later.

He told me that my description of what I saw was corroborated by many, many other people who were not part of the official investigation. You see, I don't live on the South Shore of Long Island, but on the North Shore of Suffolk County. I was told by Donaldson that there were even people from Bridgeport, Ct. who witnessed the same. The official government report said that what we probably saw was debris from the plane when it exploded. The problem with that is what I saw occurred about 15 minutes before the plane exploded. I am positive of the time because I was at my daughter's softball game, which was in extra innings, and I had just looked at my watch to check the time before I looked up at the sky.

The best I can describe it was that it was a circular white light, with what I can only describe as a short smoky contrail It was much lower in the sky than what you see from jets overhead. It was like nothing I had ever seen before (and I used to live in Queens under flight paths) which is what made me keep watching it in the sky. It traveled the entire length of the ballpark going in a southeast direction until it disappeared over the trees in the distance. It made no sound whatsoever, which is why unless you were actually looking up at the sky, you would not have noticed anything.

Whatever it was, I know one thing. It could not have been plane debris. I am absolutely sure of the time.