Posted on 04/20/2004 10:48:07 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Did OKC bombers join TWA 800 plot?
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
In light of what we know now we need to look back at a whole bunch of things that happened in the 1990s to see if there might be an al-Qaida connection and that would include the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA 800 flight. There may be no connection to terrorism, but boy do we need to take a second look at it.
– Herbert Meyer, Reagan-era special assistant to CIA director, on "Fox and Friends," April 15, 2004
In this generation, no single reporter has done more resourceful legwork than Jayna Davis, the author of "The Third Terrorist." For those who have followed the fate of TWA Flight 800, one of Davis' adventures has particular relevance.
In the summer of 1996, more than a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, the intrepid KFOR-TV reporter received a tip on her unlisted home phone line to check out a certain garage, International Auto Mechanics, located a mile or so north of the Murrah Building site in Oklahoma City.
"The Iraqi soldiers had been seen hanging out at the garage," the caller told Davis, referring here to the suspects that Davis had fingered as helping Timothy McVeigh deliver the fatal bomb. The caller's boyfriend, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who worked at the garage, had started noticing a heavy influx of calls from Iran and London in early 1995.
Then, in February 1995, the new owners shut down the garage unexpectedly and let all the workers go, only to rehire them a few months later, "after the big boom downtown."
The new owners, Davis learned, were a pair of Pakistani nationals, one a full-time student and the other, a New York cab driver. The pair had shown up in November 1994 with $25,000 in cash, bought the garage, and prepaid the lease through August 1995. Before the lease was up, the pair abandoned the business and gave it back to its original Iranian owner, himself a questionable character.
On July 14, 1996, Davis, accompanied by her husband Drew, found her way to the Pakistani student. Unprepared for the interview, he dissembled his way through Davis' questions. He gave no good explanation as to why he would absorb a $25,000 loss and then hand the keys back to the original owner, a man the student claimed had tricked him into buying the shop in the first place. When Davis asked about his partner, the New York City cab driver, the Pakistani student told her that she had better catch him soon as he was heading back to New York.
To her surprise, Davis found the cab driver's name in the phone book. This time, she had Drew, a trained U.S. Army linguist and Gulf War vet with a knack for accents, make a phone call. When the Pakistani cab driver answered, Drew identified himself as "Mohammed" and ascertained that the Pakistani cab driver was indeed leaving for New York City.
In a stunning bit of chutzpah, Drew managed to solicit from the unsuspecting cab driver his New York phone number. When the cab driver started growing suspicious, Drew terminated the call, called the number in New York and asked for the cab driver by name. "He will be here on Tuesday," a man answered with a thick Arab accent. This man, too, grew quickly wary, and Drew hung up.
At 1:17 a.m. on Tuesday morning, July 16, 1996, Jayna Davis got a phone call on her unlisted line. "Jayna, don't try to run away. You're not going to get away with this," the caller growled in his foreign accent. "See you in hell." This was Davis' first and only death threat.
Later on that same day, the Islamic Change Movement issued a threat, this one received at the highest levels in Washington. The group's communique promised an attack of great "magnitude" to embarrass "the foolish American president." The threatened time was "morning dawn."
The next day, July 17, as morning dawned on the Arabian peninsula, and the sun set on Long Island, hundreds of Long Islanders – pilots, fishermen, surfers, vacationers – watched helplessly as flare-like objects ascended off the horizon, zigzagged upward, made last second course corrections and exploded violently in a bright white light. The Serbo-Croatian word for such a blast is "bojinka." Some endless seconds later, TWA Flight 800 erupted in an orange fireball of great magnitude and fell immediately into the sea
That very day, National Liberation Day in Saddam's Iraq, Ramzi Yousef had been standing trial in a New York City federal court. Evidence strongly suggests that Yousef had conspired with Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols in the Philippines in the months prior to the Murrah Building bombing. "We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay," writes Richard Clarke in "Against All Enemies," "and were deadly when he returned."
Although Yousef also oversaw the first World Trade Center bombing, he was being tried in July 1996 for his role in Operation Bojinka, a plot both to blow up American airliners with bombs and to use planes as missiles to attack American targets.
The independent analysts who have looked at the fate of TWA Flight 800 – and this includes scores of airline pilots, safety investigators, munitions experts, physicists, TWA mechanics, FAA investigators, Boeing engineers and retired military through the ranks of admiral – agree almost to a person that missiles were indeed fired, and that those missiles resulted in the destruction of the aircraft.
Given the restraints on evidence gathering, these independent investigators differ on the details. One school holds that terrorists launched the attack, most likely from the sea and with missiles likely more powerful than the much-discussed Stingers. In "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America," James Sanders and I advance the theory that U.S. Navy missiles fired at and struck an explosive-packed terrorist plane in close proximity to TWA 800.
Either of these terrorist scenarios would demand a support team. When Jayna Davis heard of the TWA 800 disaster on July 17, she connected it immediately to her death threat and the cab driver's arrival in New York, both on July 16. Horrified at the implications, she had to wonder whether she had actually called the team's safe house.
This connection needs to be explored. If former CIA honcho Herbert Meyer believes that it is worth a "second look," perhaps the 9-11 Commission should oblige him.
Archy, you're suggesting that Jihad Fedayeen Kerry and/or She Who Must Be Oyveyyed might sweep into power in November with another 747 center fuel tank Kabukiboom in October involving attack on principal?
I am shocked, shocked.
Looking for some hint that this is a tongue-in-cheek comment, or less obviously sarcastic. Hmmm.... coming from someone with posts generally informative and sensible, I've just gotten goosebumps.
We have a ping list of 65 FReepers who think it's a possibility worthy of very real and serious study and consideration; you're welcome to be added if you wish. But I wish it were just grounds for a flip or throaway comment rather than the reality it appears to be in an age of increasing national polarization.
Please do clarify who would be the Vice-President who would assume power. Hillary ?
A possibility, or worse, one with the cunning and skill to depose or eliminate the competition from a Hillary. But don't assume that the power available would be all that usable, given Newton's Third Law.
BTW, I'm one who considers it likely that the US will break up, or break out in Civil War, sometime during my life. We are as polarized in this nation as we were in the 1850s.
That's one possibility; another is something akin to the city-states of Renaissance Italy, or of the Greek city-states 500 years B.C., metroplexes and uni-gov conglomerates of interlocking communities or urban sprakl.
Take a look at some of the past postings and response comments and see if you figure the further considerations would be of interest to you: Civil War II list post keyword: CWII
BTW: the casualties of the 4-month long Finnish civil war amounted to somewhere between one to three percent of the population of Finland at that time. You are invited to extrapolate those percentages in a nation of 281,421,906, [2000 Census] in which any such bloodlettig that begins is most unlikely to conclude after only 4 months of activity.
Outcome
Lives Lost Whites Reds Other
Killed in action: 3 279 5 324 484 Executed, shot or murdered: 1 321 7 207 392 Concentration Camp deaths: 6 11 785 500 Capital punishment: - 125 - Died after release: - 597 2 Missing: 42 1 818 116 Other causes: 173 695 536 Total: 4 821 27 426 2 030 Source:http://vesta.narc.fi/cgi-bin/db2www/sotasurmaetusivu/stat2
The civil war had ended, but it left the Finnish society divided in two groups. A "Red terror" campaign against the right wing was followed by a "White terror" against supporters of the revolutionary movement. Disease, hunger and maltreatment killed thousands of detained in the concentration camps. The conflict and its immediate aftermath are considered to have killed more than 30,000 out of a population of three million.
In addition, an unknown number of Red children were orphaned or sent to foster homes and institutions, as their parents were either interned (as most 75,000 Red internees) or deemed unfit to raise patriotic children for the independent Finland.
Many Red children suffered from the social stigma of being representatives of the defeated treacherous proletarians, but in particular those children who were separated from their parents.
A lot of Finnish Reds fled to Russia at the end of the Civil War, and in the following years. Most of them were lost in Stalin's "Great Purges". Their number is unknown.
While the Whites celebrated the "War of Independence" against Russia and Bolshevism, the Left refused for many years to participate in commemorations of Finland's pre-Civil War independence. The communist party was out-lawed in 1923 and 1930, while the Social Democrats remained in opposition for most of the inter-war period. Svinhufvud became president 1931 to 1937 on the program to keep the Social Democrats out of the Cabinet, no matter what.
Finland, the first Nordic (and European) country to adopt universal suffrage, became the last to adopt parliamentarism.
The Civil War, and the pre-war polarization, did directly and indirectly lead to Finland developing a mentality more like 19th century Prussia, with the Military forces and Conservative ideologies having earned great prestige for its success, and less akin to her Scandinavian brethren where popular movements and Liberal ideologies had won that prestigious position.
After all, Pakistanis are not Arabs, nor do they speak Arabic as their native tongue.
But a Urdu or Pushtu-speaking Pakistani might well speak to an Arabic-speaking Saudi in heavily accented English.
Many of our well-trained SF guys can speak several languages.
Indeed. And many of them are native speakers of those languages, very capable of determining regional accents or idiom, or other subtleties lost on those not having been born with or otherwise very first-hand knowledgable of such languages.
Ever wonder what SF guys do when there's no other pressing duty, or when broken down into smaller details with those with such abilities around? You'll not only find those in SF with native fluency, but those who've served with such over a decade's career, and have a good working knowledge in a dozen or more languages learned from those teammates.
At one time it was virtually a requirement to speak German if stationed with the 10th SF Group at Bad Toelz; or Spanish if with the 8th Group.
That's the precise reasoning for going after Saddam; we could not rule out a connection with al-Qaeda.
So, he would be supportive of our presidents' inquiry's of a connection between Saddam and 9-11, would he not ? /sarc/
They were then the first country to wage a Civil War and defeat communism. Then they took a RealPolitik turn and implemented what became known as Findlandization in their foreign policy.
Back to CWII. Your scenario of city-states is one that I have also come to, as it fits the real political realities, which are NOT Red state- Blue state, but Urban vs Suburban/Rural. It's just that the coasts have the Big Urban Port Cities, while inland/non-urban areas are quite different politically. This is true in both of my recent places of residence in So Cal where the Inland Empire and Central Valley are different worlds from LA and San Francisco. Philly is the most Democratic large city in the US, while Pennsylvania has a Republican legislature come rain or shine. Even places in the conservative south break down along the urban/nonurban fracture: see Atlanta.
How we will work this out is anyone's guess, but the Culture Wars will be the tipping point, IMHO.
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