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Dick Clarke's unprofessional behavior, in not providing the MAAR to the incoming administration, i.e., in obstructing the Bush Administration's anti-terror precautions, is just one of countless matters that Clarke forgot to mention in his book.

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.

(Same thread, post #2.)
On Aug. 22, 1996, just before the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.