TWA 800 and official lies

Thanks to Mike McNulty, an independent film producer, Attorney
General Reno and the news media have learned that the FBI’s denial that
incendiary devices were used in its assault on the Branch Davidian
compound at Waco was a lie. It was exposed by McNulty’s discovery of a
pyrotechnic tear-gas canister among the evidence gathered after the
compound was burned to the ground. This proof that the government
agencies cover up wrongdoing should have persuaded the media to
re-examine other charges of serious government wrongdoing that they have
dismissed as “conspiracy theories.”

But on the heels of the Waco exposure, the major media ignored hard
evidence in the form of recently released radar data that the government
has been lying big time with respect to the evidence in the crash of TWA
Flight 800. A group called the Flight 800 Independent Research
Organization (FIRO) got the data from the National Transportation Safety
Board in June, after having been stonewalled for two years.

The NTSB had pawned off on the press and the public radar data that
showed only radar targets that at the time of the explosion were within
a circle with a 10-nautical-mile radius, centered on the crash site.
Four of the eight ships in that circle were three to six nautical miles
from the center. When the plane blew up, the ship that was closest
hightailed it out to sea doing 30 knots, not pausing to see if it could
be of assistance. The FBI claims not to know the identity of this ship,
and it refused to identify the other three for privacy reasons. After he
retired, Jim Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation, told me that
those three were “Navy vessels that were on classified maneuvers.”
That’s on tape.

The radar data also showed an additional 25 ships that were 10 to 25
nautical miles from the crash site. Their behavior is startling. Ten of
them were in a military warning zone, W-105, that had been declared off
limits to non-military ships that day. Fourteen of them were on nearly
parallel courses that would soon take them into W-105. Four of the five
that were closest to Long Island were on similar courses that would take
them into W-105. Four of the ships heading for the off-limits zone were
traveling at 30 to 34 knots, speeds characteristic of warships, not
freighters.

All of this suggests that all or nearly all the ships mentioned above
were warships. Eyewitness and forensic evidence indicates that TWA 800
was hit by one or two missiles that might have come from those warships.
The Navy’s defense is to deny that any warships were close enough to
have done that. It took over a month for it to admit that W-105 was
activated at the time of the crash. It then said no ships had “checked
in to use it,” but the radar data show that 10 ships were in the warning
zone at the time of the crash and that another 18 probably entered it
soon after. It is most unlikely that these were private yachts or
freighters bound for Europe.

The radar data showed some aircraft whose presence had not been
disclosed. One was flying back and forth, partly over the warning zone
and partly beyond its northern border. It was making tight U-turns,
slowing down and speeding up. No one has yet explained its strange
behavior.

The new radar data also expose a serious fraud. The FBI got the CIA
to produce a video animation to discredit the many eyewitnesses who saw
something streaking upward, intersecting with TWA 800 and blowing it up.
The CIA video claimed that what they really saw was the plane pitching
up after its nose was blown off and climbing three thousand feet,
trailing burning fuel. The radar proves that this did not happen. It
shows that after the nose was blown off, the speed of the plane
increased sharply because it was plummeting. If it had climbed, it would
have slowed down.

The news media should be demanding that the government identify the
armada revealed by the radar and explain what it was doing. Those with
the most clout didn’t cover the news conference. They haven’t learned
Waco’s important lesson — the bigger the crime, the bigger the
cover-up. C-SPAN covered the three-hour news conference live, showing
the public how the establishment media cheat them by ignoring very
important news.

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Reed Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media, a media watchdog group
based in Washington, D.C.