Kudos, in particular, to Stalcup. A Ph.D. physicist by background, he has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to exposing what is arguably the most flagrant government cover-up in American peacetime history.

Borjesson has likewise been involved from the beginning. As a producer at CBS in 1996 when TWA 800 was destroyed, she sacrificed her future at CBS to get at the truth. Together, they have produced a documentary that is compelling, convincing and, finally, deeply moving.

Jack Cashill and James Sanders exposed the corrupt TWA 800 investigation in their book “First Strike” — get it now at WND’s Superstore

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.

By removing politics from the equation, Stalcup, who appeared in “Silenced,” and Borjesson have attracted a fair share of major media attention.

In their well-researched recreation of the plane’s final minutes, they wisely refrain from saying who pulled the trigger. But the evidence that someone fired missiles at the plane overwhelms the dispassionate observer.

Through file footage and commentary, the producers do an unerring job of showing how the forces of government –particularly Jim Kallstrom of the FBI and certain actors at the NTSB – conspired to misdirect the investigation.

The video closes with names and images of those who refused to be interviewed. Several, including Kallstrom, appeared in the video in news footage. The final refusenik is Bill Clinton. He had a lot to hide.

In a confidential taped interview with historian Taylor Branch on Aug. 2, 1996, Clinton laid the blame for TWA 800’s destruction on Iran. “They want war,” he told Branch.

Clinton may or may not have been lying, but he did not want to mess with Iran, at least not right before an election he already had in the bag.

To control the post-crash narrative, the White House allowed the FBI to talk only to The New York Times. Four weeks after the disaster, the Times would report, “Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane.”

A missile attack was too obvious and ominous. So a week later, likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI shifted its storyline fully away from a missile to a bomb.

“Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800,” reported the Times above the fold on Aug. 23, just a few days before the Democratic National Convention.

The Times reached this conclusion by interviewing exactly none of the 270 FBI eyewitnesses to a likely missile strike. Sanders and I interviewed scores of them, as do Stalcup and Borjesson.

But even this scenario threatened the peace and prosperity message to be promoted at the Democratic National Convention just days away. And so the story was allowed to die. For the next three weeks, there was no meaningful reporting at all.

In mid-September, two months after the crash, the FBI shifted the narrative once again from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion, a possibility that had been ruled out a month earlier. The other media unquestioningly followed the Times. They too had a president to re-elect.

Without ever raising its voice, “TWA Flight 800” makes mincemeat out of the mechanical failure explanation. Stalcup walks the viewer knowingly through one set of evidence after another.

In an emotional sequence towards the documentary’s end, a young female family member of one of the deceased sums up the anguish that she and so many others close to the investigation have felt: “It’s very frustrating that nobody gives a sh** anymore.”

One suspects that Hillary “What difference does it make” Clinton would have only confirmed this woman’s worst suspicions.

In the Zimmerman case, the evidence in question is the allegedly scientific audio analysis of just who was desperately screaming help for 40 seconds before a single gunshot ended the screaming – Zimmerman, the shooter, or Trayvon Martin, the young man who was shot.

The state of Florida wants its own audio experts to testify. Zimmerman’s attorneys think the science is very nearly bogus and thus inadmissible, but both sides have to know that it was Zimmerman who was doing the screaming.

By insisting on expert testimony, the prosecutors are doing what defense attorneys do when they have a weak case, namely muddying the waters and hoping to plant the seed of reasonable doubt.

For a defense attorney this is standard practice. For a prosecutor, it is unethical, perhaps even criminal. All evidence points to Zimmerman as the man who screamed “help” or “help me” at least 14 times as recorded on one of the 9-1-1 calls.

The best witness is George Zimmerman himself. On the night of the shooting, he told the Sanford police, “As I looked and tried to find my phone to dial 9-1-1 the suspect punched me in the face. I fell backward onto my back. The suspect [Martin] got on top of me.”

“I yelled ‘Help’ several times. The suspect told me, ‘Shut the f— up.’ As I tried to sit upright, the suspect grabbed my head and slammed it into the concrete sidewalk several times. I continued to yell, ‘Help.’”

“Each time I attempted to sit up, the suspect slammed my head into the sidewalk. My head felt like it was going to explode. I tried to slide out from under the suspect and continue to yell, ‘Help.’”

At the time he wrote this, Zimmerman had no way of knowing that a 9-1-1 call would record his screams exactly as he described them. The screams ended abruptly with a gunshot.

And then there were the witnesses. Zimmerman made eye contact with two of them while he was being beaten and while he was yelling for help.

Witness No. 6 told the Sanford PD that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help.”

According to No. 6, the black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”

Witness No. 13 waited until the fighting ended, went outside, and saw Zimmerman walking towards him. “Am I bleeding?” Zimmerman asked. Witness No. 13 answered affirmatively. He also noticed “blood on the back of his head” and took a picture of it.

Sanford PD’s lead investigator, Chris Serino, was hesitant to press charges against Zimmerman, and one reason why he made clear in a report two weeks after the shooting: “Zimmerman can be heard in the background frantically yelling for help.”

Three weeks after the February 2012 shooting, the Orlando Sentinel quoted Serino on whose screams the 9-1-1 call recorded.

“It was Zimmerman, Serino said. He said he is certain of that because he played a recording of that voice for Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, and the Miami man said the voice was not his son’s.”

Serino’s comments have added weight in that he was openly sympathetic to Martin’s plight and critical of Zimmerman. Tracy Martin would later deny that he ever said the screams were not his son’s, but three other officers heard him say that and swore to the same in depositions.

The Martin family attorney, Benjamin Crump, also insisted the screams were Martin’s. “Logically, it makes sense that Trayvon Martin was the voice you heard crying on that tape,” Crump insisted at a press conference weeks after the shooting.

As to why those screams should be Martin’s, Crump would have been better off saying nothing. Instead, he volunteered, in his reliably mangled syntax, “You can conclude who is the person crying out for help presumably when they see a gun.”

Crump wanted the media to believe that Zimmerman chased Martin down, held him at gunpoint, caused him to wail like a banshee for 40 seconds at the sight of the gun, and then shot him down in cold blood knowing the police – whom he himself had summoned – were minutes away.

That sounded good to the media. It must have sounded good to the prosecution as well. They had nothing else to go on.

The Frye hearing will resume after the jury is selected.

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

In it, Robert openly challenged the media spin that has controlled the case since the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at George Zimmerman’s hand in February 2012.

Among the first questions Robert received was whether he would continue to send tweets that the media consider provocative or worse. He defended the practice vigorously.

“It’s important to a lot of people who support the family that they have a front row seat,” said Zimmerman. “They don’t trust the media and, I think, rightfully so.”

Zimmerman has a point.

In the first month after the shooting, ABC was caught doctoring a police surveillance video. NBC was caught doctoring the audio of George Zimmerman’s initial call to the police.

And CNN tried to convince the public that an indecipherable word on that call was the unlikely and archaic “coons.”

This was too much even for prosecutors. In their probable cause affidavit, issued soon after the CNN scoop, investigators settled on “punks” for the garbled word.

Zimmerman challenged the state of Florida as well as the media. He said that the family remains “very confident in the outcome of the case and very confident that the state will not be able to meets its burden.”

As Zimmerman explained, prosecutors must prove not just that his brother murdered Martin but that he did not do so in self-defense.

“It’s my suggestion,” said Zimmerman, “that the state does not have a case.”

When questioned, Zimmerman explained that the decision to prosecute did not emerge out of the facts of the case. As hard as they looked, the Sanford police and the local prosecutor could not find probable cause to arrest George.

When the locals failed, the state took over.

“A political calculation was made centered around the politics of race,” said Zimmerman, “and the law was defiled.”

“You don’t charge in this country simply to assuage the concerns of masses,” added Zimmerman. “You charge when there is probable cause.”

On the question of whether George Zimmerman would take the stand in his own defense, Robert refused to commit. He observed that George has already made his own case on numerous different occasions.

George endured five hours of police questioning on the night of the shooting and provided a written version of events that same evening. The following day he did a videotaped walk-through of the crime scene and submitted to more questioning over the following days, all without an attorney.

“As I headed back to my vehicle the suspect emerged from the darkness and said, ‘You got a problem?’” a rattled and bloody George Zimmerman wrote in longhand that first night. When Zimmerman answered “No,” Martin said, “You do now.”

“As I looked and tried to find my phone to dial 911,” George continued, “the suspect punched me in the face. I fell backwards onto my back. The suspect got on top of me. I yelled ‘Help’ several times.”

When George wrote this he had no idea that a 911 call from a neighbor would record someone desperately yelling “help” or “help me” 14 times in 40 seconds before the screams ended with a gunshot.

As part of its “burden,” the state must prove that Martin was the one yelling for help. The impossibility of that task is just one reason why Robert Zimmerman remains confident.

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, is facing trial on allegations he murdered Martin while on patrol.

The trial got under way Monday, with Circuit Judge Debra Nelson rejecting a request for a delay.

Lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara told the judge the problem was that prosecutors delayed in turning over evidence in the case.

The shooting happened Feb. 12, 2012, and sparked a national debate about constitutional gun rights, the desire to suppress that right, justice and race.

Zimmerman has stated the teen attacked him, punching him in the face and slamming the back of his head into the sidewalk.

Local authorities investigated and found no basis for charges, which weren’t filed until after a prominent civil rights attorney got involved and attracted the attention of personalities, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who have lobbied on behalf of the black teen who was shot.

Jack Cashill, who has authored “Deconstructing Obama,” “First Strike,” “Hoodwinked,” “Officer’s Oath” and others, currently is writing a book on the Zimmerman case, called “If I Had A Son,” to be released after the trial.

The court overturned Judge Debra Nelson’s decision and ruled unanimously that Zimmerman’s attorneys were entitled to depose Benjamin Crump, the civil attorney for the family of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old shot by Zimmerman in February 2012.

At question was Crump’s phone interview in March 2012 with Dee Dee, the mystery 16-year-old phone friend of Trayvon Martin who would later morph into the 18-year-old State Witness No. 8.

Little about this witness added up. She spelled trouble for the prosecution because she and/or Crump were lying about her age and her hospitalization from day one.

On March 21, 2012, for instance, Crump told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show, “She is a 16-year-old teenager who just lost a friend very special to her.”

His colleagues on Team Trayvon repeated the same canard.

When HLN’s Nancy Grace asked attorney Daryl Parks why this witness had still not talked to the police five weeks after Martin’s death, he answered, “She’s a minor. So it’s a very delicate situation.”

For his part, State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda played along with the charade. It was not until November 2012 that the defense learned, through the witness’ affidavit, that she was 18 years old when interviewed by Crump and ABC’s Matt Gutman in March 2012.

During that same March interview, Crump had asked her about being hospitalized as a result of Martin’s death. “And that’s when you realized that the day of his wake that you were the last person talking to him and it just made you physically sick?” She answered in the affirmative.

In April 2012, de la Rionda formally interviewed this witness on the same point with similarly leading questions.

de la Rionda: OK what happened?

Witness 8: I didn’t feel good.

de la Rionda: OK, did you end up going to the hospital or somewhere?

Witness 8: Yeah. I had like, um, high blood pressure.

As early as August 2012, Zimmerman attorney Mark O’Mara asked the prosecution about the witness’ hospital records via email, but he got no response.

He sent a letter Sept. 19 on the same subject, but he got no response to that either. O’Mara also spoke to the prosecutors about these records repeatedly but without results.

In February 2013, he filed a motion to subpoena the medical records. Finally, two weeks later, Assistant State Attorney John Guy explained that there would be no need to move forward with subpoena as “no hospitalization records existed for Witness No. 8.”

There were no records for the simple reason that Witness No. 8 had not gone to the hospital. O’Mara accused the state attorney’s office of being “fully aware” of her lie since August 2012.

In addition, O’Mara chastised the state for its decision to conduct the formal April 2012 interview in the living room of the home of Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother, in Fulton’s presence.

“Mr. de la Rionda had to know the potential influence that could occur,” said O’Mara, adding that this arrangement put “the legitimacy and veracity of the entire statement at issue.”

O’Mara also noted that de la Rionda had learned that the witness was an 18-year-old and kept that information from the defense as well.

As to why this lie was permitted to fester so long, O’Mara did not speculate, but it was likely to keep the media away from the witness. Other witnesses have spoken to the media.

The media went along with the ruse too, but only to a point. They were beginning to feel used. “Chief witness in Trayvon Martin case lied under oath,” read the CNN headline after O’Mara went public with his concerns in March.

Given the importance of this witness to the case and the dubiousness of her very identity, Zimmerman’s attorneys asked Judge Debra Nelson to compel Crump’s deposition.

Crump’s attorney denied that his client’s role in the affair was either relevant or crucial, and Nelson agreed. In her final three-sentence ruling, she offered no explanation as to why she did agree. Motion denied. Move on.

The appellate judges came down hard on Nelson. They dismissed her contention that Crump was an “opposing counsel” given that he was not acting as a lawyer for the state or the defendant.

As to “work product privilege,” they ruled that Crump abandoned any pretense he had to that privilege when he interviewed his witness in the presence of “two media representatives” who promptly shared excerpts on ABC News.

“The trial court erred in denying Zimmerman an opportunity to depose Crump,” said the Court of Appeal bluntly. This had to sting. The ruling also put Nelson on notice that she was not trying this case in a legal vacuum.

O’Mara will likely ask Crump just how he managed to find this witness more than two weeks after the shooting, why she refused to speak to prosecutors for weeks after that, and who was responsible for her manufactured cover story.

Witness No. 8, by the way, is the state’s key witness. She has already been caught in two lies. The state has to be losing sleep over how many others she will be caught in before the trial is through.

Among other rulings, Nelson ruled Martin’s texts in the months leading up to his death inadmissible. These were damning.

The text messages and photos from Martin’s cell phone showed a troubled young man whose life was increasingly consumed with drugs, guns and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) style fighting.

In late November 2011, he would tell a friend that an opponent in an MMA-style fight “got mo hits cause in da 1st round he had me on da ground nd I couldn’t do ntn.”

As his girlfriend complained, Martin was “always” fighting. He was also something of a sadist. He complained that he did not make his opponent in the MMA fight “breed nuff,” translated, “bleed enough.”

This was particularly relevant because Witness No. 6, the best of the eyewitnesses to the shooting, told the Sanford PD that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help,” and that black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”

On Nov. 22, the day after the MMA-style fight, Martin told a friend that his mother “just kicked me out” and that he had to move in with his father. When the friend asked why, Martin answered, “Da police caught me outta skool.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

Said the friend, “U a hoodlum.” “Naw,” said Martin. “I’m a gangsta.” Incredibly, death would transform this troubled and increasingly violent young man into what Florida State Attorney Angela Corey called a “precious victim.”

Judge Nelson did rule that Martin’s history of fighting and his school records could be brought up during trial. The problem, of course, is that the best evidence of that history has been excluded. This information also had to be kept out of opening statements.

The text messages and photos in question gave ample evidence of Martin’s drug use. Indeed, a friend casually referred to him as “weedhead,” and Martin made multiple references to his own use in his texts and in his social-media commentary.

Martin’s phone also contained loving photos of marijuana plants growing in pots and a hand, likely Martin’s own, on a pistol.

All that evidence will be excluded. Nelson said she might allow expert testimony on marijuana found in Martin’s system, but the state experts will surely try to undermine the defense experts on technical aspects of the drug’s effect. In addition, none of this can be mentioned in an opening statement.

This is all relevant because Martin caught Zimmerman’s eye precisely because of his behavior, not his race. As Zimmerman told the dispatcher, he “looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.” He almost assuredly was.

Neither side can mention social-media information in its opening statements – not that the state would want to – and it must pass authentication to be admissible in court.

It is unlikely that the the jury will learn of Martin’s online identity as “No_Limit_Nigga.” Among other trivialities, Nelson ruled that Martin’s fake gold teeth cannot be mentioned.

Tellingly, Nelson denied the defense’s motion to postpone the trial. Defense attorney Mark O’Mara wanted more time to challenge the state audio expert who reportedly is prepared to say that Martin could be heard begging for his life on one of the 911 calls.

“It won’t suffice,” famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz said of the state’s case when first presented. “Most affidavits of probable cause are very thin; this is so thin that it won’t make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge.”

Dershowitz underestimated the political pressures on the state of Florida. The probable-cause affidavit said that Zimmerman “disregarded” the dispatcher’s request that he stopped following Martin.

Instead, he “continued to follow Martin who was trying to return to his home.” More specifically, according to Martin’s alleged girlfriend, Witness No. 8, Martin “attempted to run home.”

Despite the rigging of the evidence, the state will still have to prove that Zimmerman – despite being four inches shorter and 50 pounds heavier—managed to overcome Martin’s 40-second head start to a destination no more than 20 seconds away, run him down, confront him and shoot him.

The state apparently is prepared to make this case. The jurors, however, will not be allowed to see for themselves the difficulty of Zimmerman’s task. Judge Nelson also ruled against a site visit.

Jack Cashill’s book on this case, “If I Had A Son,” will be available soon after the trial.

One critical question was how Obama spent that long night of Sept. 11, 2012, while his charges were busy dying in Benghazi.

“With all due respect,” asked Wallace, “you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?” This was a good question and one that prompts a careful look at the time line.

At 3:40 p.m. Washington time on Sept. 11, 2012, U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens in Benghazi called his No. 2 man, Greg Hicks, and told him, “We’re under attack.”

(All times cited will be EDT, six hours earlier than Libyan time).

At 4:05 p.m. the State Department Operations Center issued an alert to all relevant agencies, “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack.”

At 4:25 p.m. a six-member CIA team headed by Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods arrived at Stevens’ compound from the nearby annex.

Under heavy fire, Woods’ team recovered the body of Foreign Service IT specialist Sean Smith but could not find Stevens’ body in the burning building.

At 5 p.m. President Barack Obama had a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who briefed him on the Benghazi situation.

At 6 p.m. Woods and his CIA team arrived back at the annex, which they would defend Alamo-style for the next six hours. They would kill an estimated 60 Libyans before the night was through.

At 6:07 p.m. the State Department Operations Center shared a report from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack. The terror group also called for an attack on the Embassy in Tripoli.

At 7:30 p.m. or thereabouts Obama engaged in an hour-long phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama hoped to mend fences with Netanyahu to help secure the Jewish vote in the upcoming election.

After roughly 8:30 p.m., there is no known accounting of Obama’s time or whereabouts.

At 11:15 p.m. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, another former SEAL, were killed in a mortar assault at the annex. Doherty had just arrived as part of a six-man team from Tripoli.

At 1:40 a.m., having evacuated the annex, the first group of Americans flew out of Benghazi bound for Tripoli. They saw Stevens’ body at the airport and confirmed his death.

Said Pfeiffer to Wallace when asked about Obama’s evening, “He was in constant touch with his national security team and kept up to date with the events as they were happening.”

Wallace then listed all the critical people with whom Obama had little or no conversation – the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs.

Pfeiffer clarified, “He was talking to his national security staff, his National Security Council – people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”

“Was he in the situation room?” Wallace asked.

“I don’t remember what room he was in that night,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a largely irrelevant fact.” No, it is not irrelevant at all.

I cannot say for sure where Obama was that evening, but if the night of July 17, 1996, set a precedent, Obama was likely in the White House family quarters.

For the record, at 8:35 p.m. on that turbulent night in the election year of 1996, President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary left a Washington fundraiser and headed back to the White House by motorcade.

At 8:31 p.m., two FAA veterans at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center observed a target arching and intersecting with Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 as it headed east off Long Island’s south shore.

A manager from that center rushed the radar data to the FAA technical center in Atlantic City, and from there it was faxed to FAA headquarters in Washington and rushed “immediately” to the White House situation room.

It was in this room, “in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing,” as Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos unwittingly told Peter Jennings on Sept. 11, 2001, that all key parties converged.

“This looks bad,” said Ron Schleede of the National Transportation Safety Board upon first seeing the data that “suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane.”

Anti-terror czar Richard Clarke got the message too. By 9 p.m., he was driving in to the White House to convene a meeting of his security group, not at all the norm for a plane crash.

“I dreaded what I thought was about to happen,” Clarke wrote in his best-seller “Against All Enemies.” Clarke called it “The Eisenhower option,” a retaliatory strike against Iran.

When President Clinton met with friendly historian Taylor Branch on Aug. 2, 1996, he also traced the TWA 800 disaster to Iran. “They want war,” Branch quoted Clinton as saying.

On the night of July 17, however, the president chose not to join Clarke and the other agency representatives in the situation room.

Clinton remained holed up in the family quarters with Hillary. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson and others have confirmed the president’s location that evening.

Patterson was in a position to know. He carried the nuclear football for the president, and he too was in the White House that night, though purposefully kept out of the loop.

The one person Patterson has tentatively cited as being in the family quarters with the Clintons is Sandy Berger, the deputy director of the NSA and the Clintons’ political consigliere.

As it happened, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, Sandy Berger’ boss, was not invited to the family quarters. Lake was known to excuse himself from meetings when they turned political.

That night Berger and the Clintons gathered information from the FAA radar, from the satellite data and from the eyewitness accounts and translated the data into electoral strategy.

By 3 a.m. Clinton had apparently gathered enough information to call Lake with the following message: “Dust off the contingency plans.”

Dust them off, yes, but let’s not get too serious about them. In late summer 1996, with the election comfortably in the bag, war was the last thing the Clintons wanted or needed.

On Sept. 11, 2012, war was the last thing Obama wanted or needed as well. He had already bagged Osama bin Laden, pacified al-Qaida and liberated Libya.

Or so he repeated endlessly. Foreign policy was alleged to be his electoral strong suit. Given the political dynamics, Obama likely retreated, just as the Clintons had, to the family quarters.

As Pfeiffer said, Obama probably did talk to “people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”

Obama and certain of these people, the political insiders, would have spent the night translating national security data into electoral strategy.

After all, Obama had a big fundraiser the next day in Vegas. That did not allow much time to establish an alibi that would preserve his carefully crafted bin Laden-slayer narrative.

It was a close call, but with a little help from the media – a special shout-out to CNN’s Candy Crowley! – the alibi worked just well enough to get the man re-elected.

History does repeat itself.

Trayvon, of course, is Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth shot and killed by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, 2012, in Sanford, Fla.

The screams in question were picked up on a 911 call from one of the neighbors. They last for 42 seconds. The person on the tape yells “help” over and over. No one can deny the fear and desperation in his voice.

Those screams are George Zimmerman’s. The Sanford Police Department knew it within hours of the shooting and, knowing this, refrained from arresting Zimmerman.

The state prosecutors know it, too. They charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder despite what they knew. In a desperate effort to save face in next month’s trial, they have contracted for some bogus science to bolster an otherwise unwinnable case.

The one team of voice analysts told the state that the voice samples “were not good enough to definitively match either Trayvon or Zimmerman.”

According to these analysts, “Some of the first eight came close to matching Trayvon’s voice,” but others “came close to matching Zimmerman’s.” That was helpful.

The other forensic analyst, Alan Reich by name, wrote that he “believed” the cries came from the younger of the two male speakers due to the “resonant frequency” of the vowel in the last scream.

A year ago, Reich told the Washington Post with a bit more assurance, “The help cries are all Trayvon.” This was nonsense then, and it is nonsense now.

The best refutation of this comes from Zimmerman himself. Just a few hours after the shooting, while at the Sanford police station, he wrote in longhand an account of the incident.

“The dispatcher told me not to follow the suspect & that an officer was on the way,” Zimmerman wrote. “As I headed back to my vehicle the suspect emerged from the darkness and said, ‘You got a problem?’” When Zimmerman answered “No,” the suspect said, “You do now.”

What follows is Zimmerman’s account of the screaming, written long before he knew what the eyewitnesses would report:

As I looked and tried to find my phone to dial 911 the suspect punched me in the face. I fell backwards onto my back. The suspect got on top of me. I yelled “Help” several times. The suspect told me, “Shut the f*** up.”

As I tried to sit upright, the suspect grabbed my head and slammed it into the concrete sidewalk several times. I continued to yell “Help.”

Each time I attempted to sit up, the suspect slammed my head into the sidewalk. My head felt like it was going to explode. I tried to slide out from under the suspect and continue to yell “Help.”

Witness No. 6, the best of the eyewitnesses, had talked on camera to the local TV station the day after the shooting and told the reporter what he told the Sanford PD the night before.

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books — see them now in WND’s Superstore

According to this witness, there was a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help,” and that black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”

Zimmerman’s broken nose and bloodied head added dramatic confirmation of his and Witness No. 6′s version of events.

The prosecutors knew all of this, and they were obliged to incorporate it into the affidavit for Zimmerman’s arrest on second-degree murder charges in April 2012. They did not.

A day later, America’s pre-eminent defense lawyer, Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, took notice. “It’s irresponsible and unethical in not including the material that favors the defendant,” he told an MSNBC audience that was not happy to be hearing this from a liberal jurist like Dershowitz. “You must put that in the affidavit.”

The state prosecutors were under the enormous pressure generated by the legal/public relations team working ostensibly for Martin’s parents.

A few weeks before Zimmerman’s arrest, Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump produced a chimerical phone witness who seemed to confirm the family’s belief that Zimmerman stalked Martin and shot him.

“Logically, it makes sense that Trayvon Martin was the voice you heard crying on that tape,” Crump insisted at a game-changing March 20 press conference.

As to why those screams should be Martin’s, Crump would have been better off saying nothing. Instead, he volunteered, in his reliably mangled syntax, “You can conclude who is the person crying out for help presumably when they see a gun.”

Crump wanted the media to believe that Zimmerman chased the fitter and fleeter Martin down, held him at gunpoint, caused him to wail like a banshee for 42 seconds at the sight of the gun, and then shot him down “in cold blood” knowing the police – whom Zimmerman himself had summoned – were minutes away.

The state prosecutors ignored the Sanford PD and yielded to the pressure generated by Team Trayvon. According to the arrest affidavit, “Zimmerman disregarded the dispatcher and continued to follow Martin who was trying to return home.”

In this version, “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.” Trayvon’s mother then “identified the voice crying for help as Trayvon Martin’s.” Zimmerman admitted shooting Martin, and that apparently was good enough for the prosecutors to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder.

In another move last week, the prosecutors sought to have all of Martin’s damning disciplinary history and troubling social media commentary excluded from the trial.

To convict an innocent man of murder, the prosecutors will have to deny him a fair trial. Apparently, they are prepared to do just that.

Jack Cashill’s book on this case, “If I Had A Son,” will be available soon after the trial.

But O’Reilly – and everyone who tracks the media – recognized one unfortunate fact: When it comes to Hillary Clinton there is a huge difference between “could be” and “will be.”

Hillary has been lying to the American people since her first major TV appearance in January 1992 on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” At that time, she and Bill were scrambling to save his candidacy in the wake of the steamy Gennifer Flowers revelations.

When Steve Kroft asked Bill if he had an affair with Flowers, he answered, “That allegation is false.” Hillary, her hands lovingly intertwined with Bill’s, nodded in affirmation.

Of course, they were both lying, Bill with much greater skill. Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey would later immortalize Bill as “an unusually good liar.”

At this point in the interview, Hillary tried to explain how these allegations emerged. “When this woman [Flowers] first got caught up in these charges,” she said, “I felt as I’ve felt about all of these women: that they had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor.”

“We reached out to them,” Hillary continued. “I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours.” In the lying days to follow, the media chose not to notice that Hillary had just admitted an active role in silencing Bill’s women.

The silencing often got rough. Among the people the Clintons reached out to that year was Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas and Clinton paramour.

The goon that the Clintons dispatched told Perdue, “There were people in high places who were anxious about me and they wanted me to know that keeping my mouth shut would be worthwhile.”

“Worthwhile” meant a GS-11 or higher job with the federal government. If she turned down the offer and talked to the media, “He couldn’t guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

Perdue was the least of the Clintons’ problems in 1992. More potentially troublesome were the women Clinton had criminally assaulted or humiliated – Juanita Broaddrick, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Paula Jones among others.

Later in the “60 Minutes” interview, Kroft asked Bill if he thought the interview would help quiet the furor. Clinton answered, “That’s up to the American people and to some extent up to the press. This will test the character of the press.”

By Clinton standards, the media would pass the test, ace it even, and at their prompting, so would the public. Clinton had given the media just enough cover to “move on.” This was their turning point.

For the next eight years, Hillary lied as necessary to protect the Clinton brand. At every turn, her co-dependents in the major media enabled her.

Appalled by her performance, the normally restrained William Safire famously designated Hillary “a congenital liar” in a 1996 New York Times op-ed, but Hillary was just learning the art of the lie.

In 1998, she had plenty of opportunity to hone her craft. That year the story of Bill’s sordid sexual history broke into public view despite the major media’s best efforts to conceal it. The emergence of the Internet and sites like the Drudge Report and WND made containment impossible.

Six years and a day after she lied on “60 Minutes” to protect Bill’s candidacy, Hillary lied on the “Today” show to protect his presidency.

“There isn’t any fire,” she told Matt Lauer about the “smoke” surrounding her husband, and Lauer obligingly shifted his inquiry from whether Bill had a sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky to whether independent counsel Ken Starr’s “30 million dollar” investigation had unfairly targeted the president.

This set-up allowed Hillary to establish the media narrative going forward. ”The great story here,” she said for the ages, “is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Hillary would later claim to have learned about Bill’s affair with Monica just before his August 1998 grand jury testimony.

In fact, however, it was Hillary, working through her acolytes, who had Monica booted from the White House before the story went public and branded as a stalker after it did.

The media chose not to know. They savaged the truth tellers – the whistleblowers, the prosecutors, the “bimbos” that erupted – and shifted their protective embrace to Hillary as the future progressive torchbearer.

They allowed the smartest woman in the world to play innocent victim, and this improbable role immunized her from scandal and burnished her political star.

By 2012, the major media had become so comfortable with Clinton lies that not a single one among them pointed out the grotesque irony of having an unrepentant sexual predator keynote a Democratic Convention whose theme was the “Republican war on women.”

So accustomed had Hillary grown to having her lies glossed over that she grew increasingly indignant even at the timid questions Congress threw her way at the January 2013 Benghazi hearing.

When asked by Sen. Ron Johnson about her version of events, Hillary exploded in an outburst destined to be at least as famous as her “vast right wing conspiracy” jeremiad.

Said Hillary, summing up the state of public integrity in 2013, “What difference at this point does it make?” Say what you will, but as recently as January that was a legitimate question.

To be sure, Benghazi will damage Hillary, at least in the short run. But come the Iowa Caucus in 2016, look for the media to champion version 2.0 of the “Comeback Kid.” They have too much emotional equity invested in Hillary to do otherwise.

 
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“We served on a couple of boards together, that was true,” Ayers told the Daily Beast. “He held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true.”

In April 2013 these revelations had little impact. In the fall of 2008, they could have reshaped the election. The New York Times made sure that they did not.

On Oct. 3 of that year, Scott Shane of the Times wrote the authoritative article staking out the claim that “Ayers was never a significant influence on [Obama.]”

Although he conceded that Ayers hosted a coffee for candidate Obama in 1995 – as so many other neighbors surely had – Shane rejected the more serious charge that Ayers “engineered” Obama’s appointment as chair of the influential $150 million educational reform boondoggle called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

Shane suggested that Ayers was first introduced to Obama in the spring of 1995 by two foundation presidents who recruited Obama to preside over the CAC. “In fact,” wrote Shane, “according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.”

During the 2008 election cycle, of course, the Times was not unique in its willful ignorance. Ben Smith, then of Politico, had reported as fact Obama adviser David Axelrod’s claim that the Obama-Ayers relationship went no deeper than the happenstance that their children “attend the same school.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

True, upon learning that Obama’s oldest child was born 18 years after Ayers’ youngest, Smith added a comically circuitous “update,” but the media shied from chasing the story or even chiding Axelrod.

When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos raised the question of the Ayers relationship during an April 2008 presidential debate, he fueled what the L.A. Times called a “storm of criticism.”

That criticism, of course, was aimed at Stephanopoulos. How dare he confront Obama with “such tired tripe,” demanded the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. How dare he ask Obama about an “obscure ’60s radical,” asked Michael Grunwald of Time magazine.

Stephen Diamond, an impeccably credentialed leftist attorney and political scientist, knew then what the media refused to even explore. In 2008, he tried to convince the New York Times of the same, but its reporters and editors refused to listen.

As Diamond notes on a recent blog posting, he had five separate interviews with three different Times reporters. At the time he presented compelling evidence that Ayers alone had the legal power to appoint Obama to the CAC board and that their relationship was deeper than acknowledged.

Since then, as Diamond notes, Obama biographer and New Yorker Editor David Remnick confirmed Ayers’ role in Obama’s ascendancy, including the appointment to the CAC board.

As further testament to the strength of the Ayers-Obama relationship, Diamond also notes that mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen “explained the key role Ayers played in helping Obama finish his memoir,” an assertion I first made on these pages in September 2008. Curiously, this was one “rumor” Ayers chose neither to confirm nor deny in his Daily Beast interview.

Diamond was particularly intrigued by Ayers’ seemingly casual remark that “Michelle and Bernardine were at the law firm together.” That would be the Chicago firm of Sidley Austin.

“The use of the word ‘together’ by Ayers suggests that Dohrn and Michelle knew each other not just that they were employed by the same entity,” writes Diamond.

As Diamond recounts, Dohrn’s criminal association with the Weather Underground prevented her from becoming a lawyer despite her law degree. Sidley hired her in some unspecified capacity likely as a favor to Tom Ayers, Bill’s father and the chairman of Commonwealth Edison.

The Michelle/Bernardine “together” period at Sidley and Austin lasted from roughly 1988 to 1991 when both left for greener – and in Michelle’s case, easier – pastures. Obama interned at Sidley Austin in summer 1989. It was there that he met Michelle.

As Diamond accurately observes, almost no one has attempted to trace the first connection between the Obamas and Ayers/Dohrn to that Sidley Austin togetherness period. Now Ayers has admitted as much, and the media choose again not to notice.

Diamond himself earlier produced the most credible evidence that Obama and Ayers were associated as early as the 1980s. That was the interview he first conducted with the mailman who remembered meeting Obama when he visited Ayers’ parents’ home in suburban Chicago.

Diamond’s revelations about the relationship between Ayers and Obama take on new a new significance in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.

We see now that it was no more than a decade after Bill Ayers walked away – “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird.” – from his 1970s career as an underground bomber that he became Obama’s mentor, political adviser and literary ghost.

Like the brothers Tsarnaev, Ayers and company had at least four notches on their belt. Although it seems unlikely now, who knows whether the surviving brother, Dzhokhar, will be palling around with a president a decade or so down the road?

Stranger things have happened.

These, after all, were the kind of ideas espoused by child-killer Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“He mentioned about how in the war of Afghanistan and Iraq, most casualties are innocent people gunned down by American soldiers,” said one acquaintance of Tamerlan. “He said America was a colonial power trying to take over the Middle East and Africa.”

Upon hearing this, the watcher of TV news was expected to be shocked and appalled. How could someone raised in America think such things?

“He said the Quran spoke more of the truth then the Bible,” another friend reported of Tamerlan. “He said the Bible was used as an excuse to invade other countries.” More shock, more outrage.

As to where the Tsarnaevs absorbed these horrible ideas, Ramzan Kadyrov, president of the Russian republic of Chechnya, had a good idea. “They grew up in the USA,” he said. “Their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there. You must look for the roots of [their] evil in America.”

The chattering classes did not want to hear this. They refused to entertain the idea that the roots of the Tsarnaevs’ rage were to be found somewhere other than Chechnya or in a rogue subversive mosque.

In all the news I watched that week, and it was a lot, no one ventured the idea that the boys absorbed their rage in the very ether of Cambridge, Mass., their adopted hometown.

They may have even picked it up in their high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a school that has produced homegrown anti-colonialists like the wannabe subversive actor Matt Damon.

In 2010, Damon starred in “Green Zone,” a film set in Iraq. Kyle Smith of the New York Post described the film as “one of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio,” and he was being charitable.

“It’s one thing to make a fantasy film laced with snarky jibes at the United States and its military,” Smith continued. “It’s of another order entirely for an American studio (Universal, a unit of GE) to perpetrate, during an ongoing war, such vicious anti-American lies disguised as cheap entertainment.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books — see them now in WND’s Superstore

One wonders what the Tsarnaev brothers learned from “Green Zone.” One wonders too what they learned from their Cambridge neighbor, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

In July 2009, the reader will recall, Cambridge police officer James Crowley responded to a call that two black men were trying to break into the back door of a Cambridge residence.

This was, in fact, true. Gates had cleverly locked himself out. When Crowley politely attempted to confirm that Gates was the homeowner as claimed, he was repeatedly denounced as a racist. Outside, Gates shouted over and over, ‘This is what happens to black men in America.”

I imagine the Tsarnaevs sympathized. Certainly President Barack Obama did. “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” said Obama at a press conference.

“But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

Obama’s later apologies were pure politics. “I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father.”

When the powerless, presumably people like Gates, strike back, the powerful respond with “a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware.”

By equating Chicago with the Third World, Obama endorsed the link between racism and colonialism, the presumed motive for America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Later in “Dreams,” Obama makes this point more explicitly when he talks about righteous insurrections in “Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta.” For the left, racism at home parallels colonialism abroad, one or both of which must inevitably underwrite the American adventure.

It is not a stretch to imagine Obama and the Tsarnaevs palling around together if he had been their age. He wrote in “Dreams,” “I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

With his new friends, Obama discussed “neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” and flaunted his alienation. The literary influences Obama cited include radical anti-imperialists like Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and Stalin-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois.

In “Dreams,” Obama gave no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moved on to no new school, embraced no new worldview.

At least five of the authors he cited – Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X and James Baldwin – his terrorist pal Bill Ayers cited in his writings as well.

You see, from Obama’s perspective, bombing and killing did not disqualify a fellow anti-colonial warrior from his friendship. Like the Tsarnaevs, Bill Ayers had four notches on his belt, and yet just a dozen or so years after emerging unrepentant from the underground – “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird” – he was serving as Obama’s political godfather and literary muse.

So chill, Dzhokhar. This anti-terror fervor is just a phase. In a few years, the universities will be celebrating you guys the way they now do your fellow Beantown terrorists, Sacco and Vanzetti.

And who knows, you too may get to pal around with an even more “progressive” president.