TWA Flight 800 was attacked by terrorists, not by a spontaneously exploding center fuel tank as the government claimed, charges a new book by two investigative reporters.
Yet, that’s only half the story, say the authors of “First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America,” to be released tomorrow by WND Books.
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While the government has claimed the explosion of the airplane July 17, 1996, off the coast of Long Island was an accident – a mechanical failure never before experienced by such an aircraft – independent investigators have argued Flight 800 was downed either by terrorists or U.S. military missiles.
Jack Cashill and James Sanders, author of the new book, say, in fact, those two warring independent theories are both right.
They say a small terrorist plane filled with high-energy explosives set out on a suicide mission to take the airliner down. However, when it became clear the small plane was on a collision course with the commercial airliner, the military attempted to shoot it down.
Only such a combination of events could have created the explosion that destroyed the airliner in midair and shook bridges some 10 miles away, the book says.
“This is a complex story, one that would have been difficult to explain to the American people in 1996 – or now,” says Cashill. “According to the FBI, 270 people – several of them in the military – saw flare-like objects with smoke trails converging on TWA 800 in the seconds before it exploded. FAA radar technicians saw an object merging with TWA 800 at the moment of the first explosion. These facts are indisputable.”
Yet the government has attempted to explain away these credible eyewitness reports and radar readings as anomalies – optical illusions or computer glitches, say the authors. The government instead has asked American citizens to believe that “for the first time in the 75-year history of commercial aviation, without a word from the cockpit, an airplane spontaneously self-destructed in mid-air because of a fuel tank explosion.”
The entire matter was hushed up by the Clinton administration as a matter of national security, the book charges.
“The few military who really knew what happened followed legitimate orders not to disclose any information, even to the FBI,” says Cashill. “The eyewitnesses have been eager and willing to talk from day one, but no one would listen, even the media, and that in itself is scandalous.”
The truth of what happened that night was immediately known to the White House. But, for political reasons, on the eve of the 1996 presidential elections, the truth was withheld from the American people, the book asserts.
“After two desperate years of raising money to keep the presidency, Clinton knew that telling the truth would have meant the end of peace and the end of prosperity,” explains Cashill. “We would have had to impose the kind of air restrictions we did after Sept. 11. Clinton was also famous for his indecision, and once he hesitated, it would have been highly problematic to explain the delay.”
The authors contend the cover-up led eventually to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“The authorities would have been alert to other air-terror schemes, and the American people would have been motivated and prepared,” Cashill says. In addition, the book makes the case that Islamic terrorists, who actually claimed responsibility for the downing of the plane, were forced to up the ante on dramatic terror strikes against the U.S. so they could not be denied the credit they sought.
Cashill and Sanders have uncovered startling new evidence about the crash, including a critical Islamic terrorist connection covered up by federal investigators to give America a false sense of peace leading to the presidential elections three months later.
Ordinary Americans never realized it, but on July 17, 1996, the U.S. was on the highest state of alert since the Cuban Missile crisis, “First Strike” shows. It was two days before the Atlanta Olympics and three weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
While some have questioned the terrorist connection to TWA Flight 800 because, they say, no terrorists ever took responsibility for attacking the plane, the authors show just the opposite. Not only did terrorists – the Islamic Change Movement – take responsibility for the attack, they predicted such an attack in advance. This is the same group that had taken responsibility for Khobar Towers, now widely blamed on al-Qaida.
“The mujahedin will deliver the ultimate response to the threats of the foolish American president,” the communique predicted earlier July 17. “Everyone will be amazed at the size of that response. … Their time is at the morning-dawn. Is not the morning-dawn near?”
Dawn in Afghanistan, the authors point out, corresponded almost exactly to dusk in New York.
The next day, the Islamic Change Movement issued another communique: “We carried out our promise with the plane attack of yesterday,” it read in part.
Here’s how terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky analyzed this in 1999 – two years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: “The case of TWA 800 served as a turning point because of Washington’s determination and to a great extent ability to suppress terrorist explanations and ‘float’ mechanical failure theories. To avoid such suppression after future strikes, terrorism-sponsoring states would raise the ante so that the West cannot ignore them.”
Cashill and Sanders chronicle the way news reports in the immediate aftermath of the explosion all focused on the likelihood of a bomb or missile destroying the plane. Dozens of witnesses reported seeing a bright object streak toward the plane just before the explosion. The trail of an apparent missile streak was caught on radar – and apparently on video.
All of this evidence would be deliberately spiked by investigators reporting to political operatives in the White House.
Cashill and Sanders discredit the official version of events told by the National Transportation Safety Board and FBI – documenting myriad cases of malfeasance, lies and cover-ups inside the investigation and, perhaps worse for the nation, outside, as the fraudulent information was filtered to reporters and a credulous American people.
“You want a smoking gun?” asks Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily and cofounder of WND Books, the publisher of “First Strike.” “This is the smoking gun. This is the book that will help you understand why we were all shocked on Sept. 11, 2001, when, in fact, our government had many warnings – when there were previous, major, unacknowledged terrorist attacks like the one on TWA Flight 800.”
“First Strike,” the fourth release from Thomas Nelson imprint WND Books, takes readers step by step through the deception, explaining the motives and methods of a cover-up designed to make Americans believe that 230 fellow citizens hadn’t died at the hands of Islamic terrorists.
Readers can order “First Strike” today at WND’s online store, ShopNetDaily.
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