“What in the world is going on?” asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Has the Biden administration just dialed the sensitivity of our radars all the way up? If so, what are the objects that we are just now noticing for the very first time?”
As refreshing as it is to hear McConnell ask an obvious question, he has been around Washington long enough not to expect an answer, at least not an honest one.
The unfortunate truth is that when the United States national security apparatus makes a mistake with political consequences, no one talks.
The political mistake in this case was the Biden administration’s embarrassing failure to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon until after it traversed the length of the United States.
My suspicion is that the U.S. commenced to shooting down these other objects, quite possibly all benign, quite possibly our own, to change the conversation from unmanly failure to manly success.
If I am right, we cannot expect anyone to tell us. The national security state has little tolerance for whistleblowers. I know this from experience. In all the years I have been investigating TWA Flight 800, I have had only one sailor involved in the fatal exercise go public, and he had a limited perspective.
In fact, I am often asked why the people with real knowledge of the U.S. Navy’s accidental shoot down of that doomed Paris-bound aircraft in July 1996 don’t come forward. The question is a good one.
The answer is complicated, but the simplest answer is that there is almost no incentive to do so. If the officer who gave the “fire” order walked into the New York Times newsroom tomorrow and fessed up, he would not get a hearing.
The Times was instrumental in the cover-up. Of the confirmed 258 FBI eyewitnesses to a likely missile strike, Times reporters interviewed exactly none of them. They had a president to reelect.
In November 1996, days after President Bill Clinton secured reelection, legendary JFK press secretary and former U.S. Sen. Pierre Salinger held a press conference in France. There, in cooperation with the French, Salinger, a loyal Democrat, laid out a plausible theory of a Naval misfire.
Although the actual cause of the aircraft’s destruction remained a mystery, at least publicly, the Times ran four articles just that month of November mocking Salinger as a conspiracy theorist.
On Nov. 24, 1996, for instance, the Times ran an article headlined “Pierre, Is That a Masonic Flag on the Moon?” In the first sentence, reporter George Johnson blamed the internet with its “throbbing, fevered brain” for Salinger’s apparent confusion.
I have talked to any number of insiders who said something along the lines of, “If they can make a laughing stock out of Pierre Salinger, think what they could do to me?”
Then, too, there was Executive Order 13039. On March 11, 1997, Clinton quietly signed this order removing all federal whistleblower protection from anyone, civilian or military, associated with U.S. Navy “special warfare” operations. This would include any Navy divers charged with removing and replacing the crash site’s “black boxes.”
On that same day, it just so happened that the Riverside Press-Enterprise broke the first real exposé of the crash and the cover-up based on the work of investigative reporter James Sanders.
On the following day, March 12, the Times reported that government officials had “unleashed a preemptive strike” to neutralize an upcoming 57-page article in the Paris Match. That article explored in depth the Navy’s role in the destruction of TWA 800.
Having cause to fear the collapse of the cover-up, Clinton for the first time left his fingerprints on the investigation with the executive order. The media failed to notice.
Independent journalists like myself can offer no protection to truth tellers. The major media could, but they won’t. Anyone bold enough to come forward knows that he puts his pension at risk, and the pension is the feds’ version of omerta.
Mitch McConnell could have offered protection. He was a U.S. senator in 1996, the year TWA was shot down, and he was a U.S. senator in 2000, the year the NTSB concluded its sham investigation.
During that time period, I could find no evidence that McConnell ever expressed interest in the cause of the plane’s crash or in the status of the families of the 230 killed when the plane was shot down.
I have no reason to believe that his questioning of the recent shoot-downs is any less of a charade than the government’s Potemkin reconstruction of TWA 800’s fuselage.
I would like to be proved wrong. Smart money says I won’t be.
To learn more see Jack Cashill’s 2016 book “TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy.”
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