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.

"Right, two autonomous vehicles, connected by a single cable or data link..."

If it could be done, it would be. There are small navy's all over the world (like Iran) that would love to have shipborne, radar guided SAM systems. Many of them operate systems like the SA-6 from the ground. Don't you think that if you could just bolt one to a ship and employ it, they would?

"If all the sheet metal in the aircraft's vital areas, such as the fuel tank, had been recovered and was available for independent inspection"

98% of the aircraft was recovered. I'm sure you aren't really going to argue that all the fragments of an exploding SAM warhead managed to limit themselves to the 2% that wasn't. Considering NO agency (including Boeing, TWA, ALPA, IAMS, FBI etc) could find any tangible evidence missile or bomb fragments hit any part of the aircraft, I'd say it's a safe bet that none did.

Rather complex and lengthy response.

Since I am relating nothing more than an experience living on the line of sight of a rather powerful microwave running between Naval Weapons Research Lab (formerly at Whiteflint MD) and the Marine base at Quantico, there are a lot of items you mention I simply can't comment on.

However, regarding the device "on top" of that plane, I ran into that when seeing if that model of plane had devices that had been "hardened" against cosmic rays.

It hadn't been and had a rather definite ceiling.

Here's the idea on microwave transmission ~ this DOD operation was very powerful obviously. Further, we have to presume it had the ability to toke up in response to any signal interference, so the more interference the more toking.

The conditions in the vicinity of National Airport that day were incredible. At the top of the stack there was a supercold layer of air. At the bottom of the stack there was a moderately cold, but dry layer of air. In between we had a supersaturated layer of warmer air.

Can you say "ICE"?"

I think the ceiling for this activity was just a few hundred feet. When we got to 14th Street bridge to cross from DC to Virginia we were encountering snowflakes as big as baseballs! I'd never seen anything like it. Although there was negligible wind at ground level, the moist air was rising into the super cold region like it was being heated.

Recalling those conditions, I had gone on a search for just how much power you could pump into a bank of supersaturated moist air with any microwave transmission system. This was to see if we had an engineered accident rather than an accident accident, with the communication system turning up the signal strength to compensate for the increasing volume of ice being created in the rising column of moist air.

You really can't talk to DOD about such things, and I don't mean turning the power up. I suppose we'll never know if that particular microwave beam was the cause of the ice. On the other hand, the computer controller in our building that failed was immediately adjacent to the airshaft to the subway where the electronic controls for the rail switches were housed. Microwave frequencies are reflected by concrete rather like visible light is reflected by mirrors. If the beam was powerful enough, we could have had energy bleeding from it into the shaft.

At the same time folks in office buildings and apartments immediately along the line of sight would be regularly exposed to excess microwave energy and might well suffer injuries associated with overexposure. Brain tumors happen to be one of those things.

Plus, all of the folks affected were housed on the 8th floor. We were able to determine that the center of the beam was parallel to the 8/9th floor junction, and about 12 feet away from the Westernmost wall.

The next year an untended computer printer sitting in a room on the 9th floor at the Westernmost wall burst into flames and gutted the 9th floor.

Gotta' watch those untended computer printers FUR SHUR. This one cost $35,000,000 before everything was back to normal. But, no doubt, the subway wreck and the airplane crash had nothing to do with each other ~ or maybe they did.

Rather complex and lengthy response.

However, regarding the device "on top" of that plane, I ran into that when seeing if that model of plane had devices that had been "hardened" against cosmic rays.

It hadn't been and had a rather definite ceiling.

Can you say "ICE"?"

The next year an untended computer printer sitting in a room on the 9th floor at the Westernmost wall burst into flames and gutted the 9th floor.

"I don't care"

Oh...hit a sore spot.

I need to be shown proof that a jumbo jet in a stall situation and frontal area removed can climb a couple more thousand feet. The AA Simulators in Fort Worth will be fine.

I need to be shown ALL the videos that were taken into evidence that counter independent witnesses, to see this stream of flaming Jet-A.

I need to be told about changes in protocol to prevent evidence tampering that instead hindered the process.

Let's hear from the NG pilots that were witness to the event. One as a civilian works out of Hicks Airport in Saginaw, Texas.

Let's rescind Clinton's EO to the military to keep quiet.

I need quiet a bit more than what's being given, to be convinced either way.

"I saw the missile. I was facing eastward, toward the Hamptons, the ocean on my right, the deck of the house on my left"

-- Lisa Perry

"After work on July 17, 1996, I went to our ocean-front summer rental house to have dinner with my wife and one-year-old son before putting him to bed, so I decided to go to the ocean-side deck to enjoy the view. As I walked thought the sliding doors to the deck, a red phosphorescent object in the sky caught my attention. The object was quite high in the sky (about 50 to 60 degrees) and slightly to the west and off-shore of my position. At first it appeared to be moving slowly, almost hanging and descending, and was leaving a white smoke trail. The smoke trail was short, and the top of the smoke trail had a clockwise, parabolic-shaped hook towards the shore. My first reaction was that I was looking at a marine distress flare that had been fired from a boat. I said to myself, someone must be in trouble."

-- Paul Angelides

"Bilodeau and McBride state that on 7-17-96 at 2045 they were at the Moriches Inlet, South Shore, facing south to southeast. Bilodeau and McBride observed a reddish glowing flare ascend skyward from due east, but they could not tell if from land or water. [The] flare was tight, corkscrew shapes, with even but fast speed. [They] did not see what [the] flare struck, but it exploded in air into a large orange fireball. Two large flaming chunks of debris fell from the fireball. Both recall hearing a deep, thunderous rumble during the explosion."

-- Vincent Bilodeau and Joseph McBride

Lots of other eyewitnesses saw similar things, at the same time. Many described the ascending object as a flare or fireworks, something they might be 'familiar' with - but of course these things don't go to 13000 feet and blow up aircraft. So, lets see, a few hundred people from the region coincidentally say they saw a 'flare' launch to blow up an airplane, and really they didn't see anything because they called it a flare... Is that what you think? Clintonesque!

Interesting how you've edited your witness statement excerpts. Here's what else Lisa Perry had to say...

"The object came over the dunes of Fire Island. It was shiny, like a new dime; it looked like a plane without wings. It had no windows. It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner. It was like a silver bullet. It was moving much faster than the plane. The silver object took a left turn, and went up to the plane."

There isn't a SAM in existance that follows that flightpath. And the "missile" was close enough for her to tell it had "no windows", yet her description of its most obvious feature (if it had been a missile) is..."It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner." Are you kidding me? And no mention of smoke. I have no idea what this lady is describing, but it isn't a SAM missile.

Now take a look at Paul Angelides. He observes a descending (started 50-60 degrees above the horizon and descended to 10 degrees above the horizon) red light that resolves into a series of explosions. Sounds a lot what TWA 800 did as it came apart in midair. He goes on to mention he immediately called the Coast Guard and was told "oh, thats the Air National Guard they are firing flares tonight". Interesting that little tidbit never makes it onto TWA 800 conspiracy sites. Do you suppose there is any chance that might explain what people were seeing before TWA 800 blew up, or was the Coast Guard operator already immersed in a massive government cover-up.

Vincent and Mcbride saw a red flare, but didn't report seeing any smoke. That, despite it being light enough to determine the color of an aircraft flying by just 15 minutes earlier.

Your final point is legitimate. People do describe things based on what they are familiar with. But then again, these people living on Long Island were all very familiar with flares, and a SAM launch is significantly different than a flare launch. You would think many of them would have said something along the lines of "it was like a flare, but different in that....". And this statement of yours..."a few hundred people from the region coincidentally say they saw a 'flare' launch to blow up an airplane" is an outright lie. You can't possibly provide evidence to back that up, because the evidence does not exist. If you want to talk Clintonesque, why don't you start by examining your need to at best exaggerate, and at worst lie, to try to support your point.

Your contention was that the eyewitnesses did not say it was a missile. Lisa Perry said she thought it was a missile, my nefarious editing merely was to counter your suggestion that the eyewitnesses didn't think they saw a missile. Your editing of her statement is quite another matter. She also went on to say that she got the impression from the FBI agents who interviewed her, they thought it was a missile, too. And speaking of cover-ups, after the NTSB hearings, she was told that she was too far away to have seen what she believed she had seen.

Here’s what Accuracy in Media's courageous Reed Irvine wrote last week:
"The recently released FBI reports of their interviews of eyewitnesses to the downing of TWA Flight 800 contain enough dynamite to blow the lid off the FBI-NTSB-CIA-DOD cover-up of the cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996. The FBI wouldn't even let the NTSB investigators see these reports for a long time. When they finally sent copies of 756 eyewitness reports to the NTSB, they were in great disarray, causing a further delay in their release to the public. The NTSB recently made them available, together with related documents, on a CD-ROM. These can now be found on Cmdr. William S. Donaldson's web site, www.TWA800.com. This is a treasure trove for anyone interested in getting the truth about the TWA 800 crash.
"Hundreds of eyewitnesses saw TWA Flight 800 crash off the southern coast of Long Island, and what they saw was widely reported by the print and electronic media at the time. The FBI took control of the investigation and refused to let the NTSB interview eyewitnesses. No eyewitnesses were permitted to testify at the NTSB public hearing on the TWA crash in Dec. 1997, and the FBI would not permit any discussion of the 244 eyewitness reports it had shared with the CIA. The CIA used them to produce a video simulation of the crash. James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation, said the questioning of eyewitnesses "would have the unintentional effect of undermining the CIA's work." [In other words, don't let the facts interfere with their conclusions.]

If it is a lie that hundreds of eyewitnesses saw something like a missile rise up and strike TWA800, it is not my lie or exaggeration.

"She also went on to say that she got the impression from the FBI agents who interviewed her, they thought it was a missile, too."

They did think it was a missile. That's why they were there in the first place. The whole event was being investigated on the assumption it was a criminal act. But as the investigation continued, it became quite clear that there was no overt criminal act. On the topic of Lisa Perry's recollection of the evening, here is some other things she claims to have seen...

"Then a moment later there was another explosion, and the plane broke jaggedly in the sky," says Perry. "The nose is continuing to go forward; the left wing is gliding off in its own direction, drifting in an arc gracefully down; the right wing and passenger window are doing the same in their direction out to the right; and the tail with its fireball leaps up and then promptly into the water below. The sounds were a huge BOOM! – then another BOOM!"

This description came from a person who was no closer than 15 miles from the crash site. I've been a professional pilot for the last 15 years. I will tell you without even a reasonable shadow of a doubt that someone 15 miles away from a 747 cannot descern the nose from the tail, nevermind the left wing from the right. Passenger window?!?! Not a chance. This lady is a liar. Plain and simple. She is absolutely not a credible witness to support any theory.

If your quote from the "courageous" Reed Irvine is really only a week old than he is about 2 or 3 years out of date. The NTSB eyewitness data has been available for years.

Finally, if you repeat something you know is not true, you are lying. It doesn't matter where the lie originated from. You don't have to believe me. Read the eyewitness testimonies yourself.

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