8 years later, TWA 800 case just heating up!

Last July 17, the major media made no comment that seven years prior, on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board.

If the media took note of the date "July 17" at all last year, it was only to observe that American soldiers had found it scrawled on walls throughout Iraq. July 17, after all, was Iraq's national liberation day, the day Saddam helped lead the Baath Party to power in 1968, the day he seized the presidency in 1979, and not impossibly, the day he took his revenge on the United States in 1996.

This year, as every year, thousands of TWA Flight 800 family members and other interested parties will honor the date. Among them is Capt. Ray Lahr. Just last week, the retired United Airline pilot learned that his case against the National Transportation Safety Board and the Central Intelligence Agency is still on track. On Monday, Aug. 2, Lahr and his attorney, John Clarke of Washington, will square off against the NTSB and the CIA at the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Lahr is hoping to force the NTSB and CIA to disclose the data upon which they based what Lahr calls "the impossible zoom-climb." As the agencies and Lahr both understand, the zoom-climb is the Achilles heel of the TWA Flight 800 investigation.

The FBI first publicly advanced the zoom-climb scenario when it bowed out of the case in November 1997. Its agents did so to negate the stubborn testimony of the hundreds of eyewitnesses who had sworn they saw a flaming, smoke-trailing, zigzagging object destroy TWA Flight 800.

To make its case, the FBI presented a video prepared by the CIA. A key animation sequence in that video showed an internal fuel tank explosion blowing the nose off the aircraft, which then "pitched up abruptly and climbed several thousand feet from its last recorded altitude of about 13,800 feet to a maximum altitude of about 17,000 feet." This rocketing aircraft, claimed the video, looked like a missile and confused the eyewitnesses.

This animation was essential to close the investigation. Without it, there was no way to explain what these hundreds of eyewitnesses – many of them highly credible – had actually seen. A veteran safety investigator and a serious researcher in the field of gravity, Ray Lahr watched this animation in utter disbelief. He knew this scenario to be impossible, and he set out to prove it. When he learned that not a single eyewitness had seen the plane ascend, including airline pilots who had watched it from above, he redoubled his efforts to discover the basic physics behind the alleged zoom-climb. For the last several years, however, despite numerous FOIA requests, the NTSB has refused to cooperate. The impressively stubborn Lahr finally took the agency to court.

Lahr has done an excellent job pulling the sometimes-fractious TWA 800 community together to assist him. Many key people have filed sworn affidavits with Lahr, including retired Rear Adm. Clarence Hill, and their collective commentary has to impress even the most skeptical of observers. All of this evidence, including the court papers, can be found at RayLahr.com, as well as in past articles on WorldNetDaily.

One question that has never been resolved is just how the CIA animation project came to pass. Two recent books, however, do shed light on the dynamics of the video's creation. One is the much-discussed "Against All Enemies," by Richard Clarke, then chairman of the Clinton administration's Coordinating Security Group on terrorism. The second is Murray Weiss's recent and highly readable book, "The Man Who Warned America," on the subject of John O'Neill, a terrorist expert with the FBI who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Within 30 minutes of TWA Flight 800's destruction, Clarke relates in his book, he had convened a meeting of the CSG in the White House situation room. "The FAA," Clarke reports, "was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft."

Clarke here serves up two significant untruths in a book replete with them. The first is that the Federal Aviation Administration was at "a total loss" for an explanation. In fact, it was the FAA that prompted the meeting and did so for a very specific and frightening reason: Its personnel believed the aircraft had been attacked. As NTSB Chairman Jim Hall would report in a confidential November 1996 report, "Top intelligence and security officials were told in a video conference from the White House Situation Room that radar tapes showed an object headed at the plane before it exploded."

Clarke also deceives the reader about altitude. The FAA never reported an altitude of 17.000 feet – nothing close. The FAA knew that the last recorded altitude of TWA Flight 800 was "about 13,800 feet" as even the CIA animation later admits. In the retelling, Clarke pads in the zoom-climb differential on the night of the crash and attributes it falsely to the FAA.

Weiss, who had excellent access to O'Neill's FBI colleagues, gets much closer to the truth as to the motive behind the emergency White House meeting. "The FAA," he writes, "initially reported spotting a radar blip on their tapes that indicated there was another plane or projectile near TWA Flight 800 when it exploded." This much is true. Weiss, however, is misled on his next point, namely that the FAA told the FBI one day later that "there was no blip. There were no missiles picked up on the JFK scanners." The sighting was an "anomaly."

In truth, to its credit, the FAA refused to change its story despite the pressure to do so. When in November 1996, the NTSB leaned on the FAA to "agree that there is no evidence that would suggest a high speed target merged with TWA 800," the FAA refused.

"We cannot comply with your request," the FAA's David Thomas responded. "By alerting law-enforcement agencies, air-traffic control personnel simply did what was prudent at the time and reported what appeared to them to be a suspicious event. To do less would have been irresponsible."

To set the record straight on this issue, Ray Lahr persuaded one key witness, James Holtsclaw, to go public for the first time. In 1996, Holtsclaw was serving as the deputy assistant for the Western Region of the Air Transport Association. Within a week of the crash, Holtsclaw received the radar tape directly from an NTSB investigator frustrated by its suppression. "The tape shows a primary target at 1200 knots converging with TWA 800, during the climb out phase of TWA 800," swears Holtsclaw on the Lahr affidavit.

In fact, before the investigation was through, authorities would introduce five different explanations to rationalize away that "blip." This obvious dissembling may explain why investigators felt the need to smuggle out evidence. Holtsclaw's informant would be the first of several – at least four of whom would be either suspended from the investigation or arrested.

Within weeks of the crash, the FBI would interview more than 700 eyewitnesses. By its own count, 270 of them saw lights streaking upward toward the plane. Defense Department analysts also debriefed some of these witnesses, 34 of whom, according to the FBI, described events "consistent with the characteristics of the flight of [anti-aircraft] missiles." There were also scores of witness drawings, some so accurate and vivid they could chill the blood.

About four weeks after the crash, Clarke reports in "Against All Enemies," he met with O'Neill, who told him that the eyewitness interviews "were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger." Given what the FBI knew at the time, this much seems credible.

"[TWA 800] was at 15,000 feet," Clarke allegedly responds. "No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high." One would think that on so sensitive and contentious a point, Clarke would have made an effort to get the altitude of TWA 800 right or even consistently wrong. He does neither. In his scarily sloppy book, the boastful Clarke finesses credit for the zoom-climb and, in a stunning revelation, seizes full credit for deducing the exploding fuel tank part of that scenario even before the NTSB did.

Clarke, however, has had a hard time keeping his story straight. In an earlier New Yorker article on O'Neill soon after Sept. 11, Clarke tells reporter Lawrence Wright that it was O'Neill who insisted that TWA Flight 800 was out of the range of the Stinger, and O'Neill who believed that the "ascending flare" that the witnesses saw must have been something else, like "the ignition of leaking fuel from the aircraft."

Weiss likewise gives all credit to O'Neill for the zoom-climb scenario, thinking that it is indeed "credit" O'Neill deserves. Weiss contends that O'Neill not only conceived the zoom-climb scenario, but that he also "persuaded the CIA to do a video simulation of his scenario." Under an eight-panel recreation of the zoom-climb in the photo section of his book, Weiss writes that O'Neill used the CIA video simulation "to quash any fears that the disaster was a terrorist event." This last point is tellingly true.

Clarke and O'Neill have not been the only two agents angling for credit. The best-documented claim, in fact, comes from "CIA Analyst 1" during his April 1999 grilling by a few honest, rank-and-file NTSB investigators. As the CIA analyst relates, the zoom-climb insight came to him like an epiphany. He traced the moment of awareness to the precise hour of 10 p.m. on Dec. 30, 1996.

Said the analyst, "There was a realization, having all the data laid out in front of me, that you can explain what the eyewitnesses are seeing with only the burning aircraft." The analyst came to his startling conclusion after reviewing only about 12 percent of the interview statements. The CIA did no interviews of its own.

What puzzled the NTSB guys was just how many eyewitnesses actually saw a plane with a ruptured center fuel tank rocketing upward with burning fuel spewing behind it (especially with the center fuel tank being essentially empty at take-off). The CIA cited only 21 witnesses. But as the questioning of CIA Analyst 1 wore on, it became clear there were fewer still. An NTSB investigator finally sighed in frustration, "If it's only one or two of [the eyewitnesses], it's not representative of all of them."

Analyst 1 then pulled out his trump card, his key witness, the man who had seen everything: "That [zoom-climb] is something that a few eyewitnesses saw. The guy on the bridge saw that." As we have documented on these pages before, the man on the bridge saw no such thing. The CIA or the FBI (or both or Richard Clarke) manufactured an interview with this man, Mike Wire of Philadelphia, out of whole cloth. Wire's "second interview" is the most crucial bit of evidence in the entire investigation, the evidence around which the zoom-climb scenario was created, and it's fully and provably counterfeit.

Whether Clarke or O'Neill or the CIA analyst were responsible for the zoom-climb scenario individually or together is not relevant to technicians like Ray Lahr. Nor has he focused on how an FBI middle manager like O'Neill could have breached the historic wall between the two agencies and enlisted the CIA in a project that would take at least 11 months from conception to execution. No, what most troubles Lahr is how three men with no discernible aviation or engineering experience could possibly have used any science whatsoever to arrive at such critical conclusions.

The truth of the matter proves elusive. The CIA analyst lied shamelessly in his testimony. Richard Clarke lies shamelessly throughout his book. The jury is still out on O'Neill, but the evidence is not encouraging. As Weiss well documents, O'Neill maintained a wife and two children in New Jersey and simultaneously cajoled at least three women in three different cities into thinking that he was going to marry them. What is more, despite maintaining two households, O'Neill somehow managed to live extravagantly on a government salary. In an otherwise flattering profile, Weiss concedes of O'Neill, "He always seemed to be lying about some aspect of his life."

Whether O'Neill helped conceal the demise of TWA Flight 800 remains unclear. Although Weiss attributes both the zoom-climb scenario and the final TWA 800 report to O'Neill, no reporter made this connection while he was alive. In her book on the crash investigation, "Deadly Departure," CNN reporter Christine Negroni does not even mention O'Neill. In her FBI-friendly book, "In The Blink of an Eye," AP reporter Pat Milton pays O'Neill little heed, but she does reveal that upon hearing the news of the crash, John O'Neill's first call went to none other than Richard Clarke, and it is O'Neill, Clarke's best friend in the FBI, who plays the role of tragic hero in "Against All Enemies."

Ray Lahr will leave it to other courts to establish who was the architect of the greatest peacetime deception in American history. His interest is the zoom-climb scenario itself, according to Weiss, "the most significant part" of the final case-closing FBI presentation.

"A little basic physics," adds Weiss naively, "helped explain what witnesses saw and heard in the summer skies off Long Island." Lahr is hoping that the federal courts will finally force the NTSB and CIA to explain finally what those "little basic physics" are.

People should always make copies before they give someone one. One for the LEO's, one for the media and one for yourself (original). If it is important enough to give to a LEO, then it is even greater that you keep one or it NEVER happened.

I remember hearing that the couple that had video and hinted they had a copy hidden were in a mysterious car crash and died. Is that an urban myth or does anyone know more?

That would not explain the explosives residue found all over the aircraft debris. Would the DOJ reopening of this and the Ron Brown files around, say the first week of October be considered a "surprise"?

An Iranian connection is at least as likely as Al Quaeda and/or Iraq but the key point is the obstruction of justice committed by the Clinton administration in this among so many other cases. They and several dozens of their people should be in federal penitentiaries.

I read all the conspiracy theories with an open mind, and their point is that night they were testing the AEGIS system (I think that is what it was called) specifically as some final test to show that it was sophisticated enough to operate in a very busy warfare situation.

You're probably thinking of the stories concerning a Aegis lab in New Jersey, and the claim that they were operating tests that night. They may well have been, but testing Aegis doesn't require firing a missile. I spent nine years on active duty with the Atlantic fleet, all of it on SAM equipped ships. I never once participated in a missile shoot anywhere except the range off Puerto Rico, I never heard of anyone shooting a missile near New York, never participated in a live fire exercise of any kind north of the Virginia cape. The military isn't stupid, regardless of what people think. And conducting a live fire exercise of any kind near the most heavily travelled air corridor in the world would be way past stupid.

"What made this plane so unique?"

It wasn't unique. In fact, almost every Boeing aircraft and some Airbus aircraft use a similar fuel system configuration. Every fuel tank is like a bomb sitting inside the aircraft. Heated, pressurized fuel is very explosive. But it only explodes if it is exposed to a source of ignition. The design philosophy of Boeing is to eliminate the threat of explosion by eliminating all sources of ignition inside the fuel tank. This has proven a relatively safe design philosophy as evidenced by the incredibly small numbers of fuel tank explosions. But there isn't a human engineered system ever created that isn't without flaw. Since the Wright Brothers, aircraft have crashed because in the life of an aircraft, things happen that engineers can't predict. And sometimes, they never figure out what happened. Especially when the aircraft involved is almost completely destroyed and soaked in sea water for several weeks.

"So why didn't Boeing ground all 747s and any other planes with a tank like this?"

That would be the decision of the NTSB, and they generally don't ground fleets of aircraft (its happened only once in the last 30 years). Usually, they just order inspections on all aircraft of the type being investigated. This was done several times during the course of the TWA 800 investigation.

The whole point was a rock streaking in from the horizon following a low trajectory would look like it had risen UP to hit the plane.

That, in fact, is the evidence.

Regarding the probabilities, I posted a story about a meteor that destroyed a Chevy Nova parked in a driveway not far away from this area.

What do you think the probability of a meteor hitting a Chevy Nova might be?

While I know nothing about naval live fire exercises (only army .... I once had a live TOW go 120+ degrees off course at Graf ....that was a bad day), I thought there was a 'range' off of Long Island that was active at the time TWA 800 went down? I also thought that the F-14 was made on Long Island? Your thoughts on a Phoenix or other advanced missile being tested on an F-14?

Kahlstrom was mentioned as a key FBI agent in the investigation of the Mafia. There is no doubt that he has had a distinguished career. If we had jets that blew up so easily, there would be a string of cases, like the Pinto and the police version of the Crown Victoria. I know one other case was cited, but that was not the same thing. (Do you remember the battleship explosion? They were finally able to figure it out, down to the klutz who had trouble doing the right thing with the powder versus the shell. He even got a letter from his girlfriend or wife, advising him that he was not the guy to ride the bicycle. Kaboom.)

We have reached the point where everyone would rather have a factual Valium than the real truth.

The big question here is why did Clinton cover? Grant it I believe he is cahoots with the commies because he is a commie and they are in cahoots the heads of the ME terrorists (the foot soldier terrorists are usefule idiots/nuts). But why the cover? terrorists want the world to know when they do something, that is the whole point of terrorism. I can't buy Slick covering it up because he didn't want to go after the terrorists. Slick would have blamed it on right wing extremists to thwart the movement to the right. No, Flight 800 was a hit on someone on that plane. After the crash I saw a story on a guy that was on the plane, he stayed behind an extra day to wrap up an Indonisian deal. He was then going to meet the rest of his family in Paris. Also I recall rumors that Netanayu was suppose to fly out at that time but left a day before or a day after. That's my theory.

Great analysis. Thanks for the summary and perspective.

So few people on FR actually go to the trouble to look for facts which will lead them to truth; it's easier to look for facts that support your own ideas or just ignore facts and go with your emotions.

Thanks for the time and effort you put into this.

But it only explodes if it is exposed to a source of ignition.

Like a SAM-7?

If all those hundreds of eyewitnesses did not see a missile, what did they see?

Swamp gas?

Or are all people stupid except for representatives of the federal government?

I thought there was a 'range' off of Long Island that was active at the time TWA 800 went down? I also thought that the F-14 was made on Long Island? Your thoughts on a Phoenix or other advanced missile being tested on an F-14?

The range in question was south of the air corridor and was reserved for a P-3 Orion to do some low level training. F-14s were built on Long Island, but the last one build was delivered in 1991 or 1992. Besides, the manufacturer wouldn't be conducting missile tests, that would be done at the squadron or test center level. And never around other traffic.

"Like a SAM-7? "

Heat seeking missiles guide to engines. Not internal fuel tanks.

"If all those hundreds of eyewitnesses did not see a missile, what did they see?"

Ask them. Almost none of them claimed they saw a missile.

"Or are all people stupid except for representatives of the federal government?"

Nope. Only people who make stuff up to support their theories.

I just recall reading that a residue of explosive compounds were found and were officially explained away as leftover from a bomb sniffing test aboard the same aircraft a couple weeks before the "accident".

I actually once saw a daylight meteor entry and the light was blindingly bright and the trajectory was across the sky. It didn't appear at all to have originated from the ground level moving up. I suppose anything is possible but most people would consider the idea that a meteor collision, with the object appearing to rise in a criss cross trajectory into the aircraft, caused this is a bit, shall we say "far fetched". Certainly more so than the possibility of a SAM, terrorist launched or otherwise.

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