Posted on 02/15/2005 1:19:18 AM PST by JohnHuang2
On April 20, 2001, a Peruvian military jet pilot confused a small plane carrying missionaries for one carrying drug runners and shot it down. In the last two weeks, MSNBC has been leading the charge to bring this case to closure.
Its on-air personnel – Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough in particular – have been asking hard questions about why no charges have been brought against CIA agents who may have lied about the nature of this crash. The MSNBC website invites citizens to communicate their concerns about this presumed cover-up through MSNBC to the U.S. government.
This would be all well and good were it not for the likely role that MSNBC played in the cover-up of TWA Flight 800. On July 18, 1996, about 12 hours after TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, a military officer – off the record – told a very tired Fox News senior reporter that "a major screw-up" had occurred and that the "White House" had ordered the military to "stand down" for 48 hours until policy decisions were reached.
This did not surprise the Fox journalist. For hours the previous evening, Fox News had reportedly been involved in a bidding war for an amateur video tape of the 747 being destroyed by what appeared to be missile fire. When the electronic bidding war reached $50,000, Fox was eliminated from the process.
The high bidder seems to have been NBC and/or its new sister network, MSNBC. This makes market sense in that MSNBC had been launched just two days prior, and the publicity would have been well worth the cost. Still, I say "seems" because my sources here will not speak on record, nor will MSNBC follow up on queries. Here is exactly what I know, no more, no less.
In the summer of 2001, my partner James Sanders, and I were negotiating with Broadcast Network News (BNN) – the world's largest independent news producer – to distribute our documentary on the subject of TWA Flight 800, "Silenced." These were serious negotiations. The person with whom we were communicating was BNN's chief executive officer, Steve Rosenbaum.
One day that summer, Rosenbaum called me in a state of high excitement. "Jack," he said, "you will not believe the conversation I just had." Although Rosenbaum thought our video had market potential, he was not at all convinced of our thesis, namely that missiles had been fired at TWA Flight 800. The conversation in question eliminated just about all doubt.
As Rosenbaum explained, he had been interviewing a candidate for a position as BNN's technical director at a rooftop cafe when an airplane passed overhead. The conversation moved naturally to airplanes and then, with Rosenbaum taking the lead, to TWA Flight 800.
"I've seen the video," said the candidate, who had until recently been working at MSNBC.
"You mean 'Silenced'?" said Rosenbaum, a little surprised.
"No," the candidate answered, "the video, the actual video of the plane being shot down."
As the candidate told Rosenbaum, late on the night of the crash, editors at MSNBC had the tape on their monitors when "three men in suits" came to their editing suites, removed the tape, and threatened the editors with serious consequences if they ever revealed its contents.
The threats worked all too well. Despite my repeated requests, Rosenbaum could not get the technical director, whom he hired, to go on record. Over the years, I have asked various producers at MSNBC to follow up, but if they did, they kept what they learned to themselves.
Earlier in his research, Sanders had been approached by a technician at another station who had monitoring the competition's feeds from Long Island and made a bootleg copy of that same amateur video. What is more, he withheld a copy from the FBI when its agents came to confiscate whatever relevant tapes his station might have. Despite a series of phone calls, Sanders could not persuade the technician to hand over the tape. His fear was palpable enough, however, to convince Sanders that he was telling the truth.
Although I have not seen the video myself, I have heard from scores, if not hundreds, of credible people who swear they saw it on television in the first hours after the crash. That at least one among the hundreds of eyewitnesses would have had a video camera handy during a beautiful summer sunset evening makes perfect sense. The FBI admits to having confiscated two still photos and predictably writes off the images to dirt or scratches on the lens. A video would have been much harder to dismiss.
Nelson DeMille has obviously heard these stories as well – and perhaps more. In his best-selling novel, "Night Falls," a confiscated amateur video drives the plot. Although he spices the video up a bit in the retelling, DeMille is not just spinning fantasy. His insider details have the ring of authenticity about them.
What makes the MSNBC involvement all the more ironic is that the CIA was responsible for producing the 15-minute animated video used successfully to discredit the eyewitness testimony. If the MSNBC producers are interested in exposing not just a routine CIA cover-up, but the most consequential cover-up in American history, my fellow investigators and I will be happy to lead them right to the source.
There is admittedly much we still do not know about the explosion of TWA Flight 800, but we know enough about the CIA cover-up to bring indictments. Before turning on the CIA, however, MSNBC might want to look inward. The CIA at least had the excuse of national security. If MSNBC had reasons for betraying its journalistic ethics, I am not sure I know what they are. Indeed, had its new executives stuck to their guns that night, they might very well have prevented Sept. 11.
PING
It is a big club and we are not in it.
There might have been. You could check the transcript and let us know. But you won't find anything like you suggested earlier.
ML/NJ
You seem to be blowing quite a bit of smoke on this thread. Enquiring minds might wonder why.
I'm not speculating when I look at snapshots of the ATC radar and see an extra blip approaching TWA 800 and then both of them disappear. I'm not speculating when I look at 150 plus mostly disparate eyewitness accounts collected by law enforcement that all seem to say the same thing which is they saw a missile rise to TWA 800. And if you triangulate their reports you can reasonably conclude where the missile was launched from. (Think all these reports are bogus? Then why did the Feds come up with that bogus CIA cartoon showing the plane soaring up after it was stricken?) Am I speculating when I say that the Navy did have W-105 reserved at/near the time the accident happened and that such reservation only happens a few times a year? Are those reports of submarines in the area first denied by the Navy, but now acknowledged, speculation? I could go on.
No. I wasn't there. I didn't see it myself. But if we don't have facts about TWA 800, then we don't have facts about Pearl Harbor either.
ML/NJ
Read the book recently while on vacation. I'm a big DeMille fan and have read all of his books, so I would've read this even if it were not a fictionalized TWA 800 story. I found it entirely plausible, though it was far from DeMille's best effort..
Sorry if you don't like the term, under punishment of death, but that is exactly what is involved, and if you had been in the military,you would know.
Bill Clinton (as stupid as you may think he is) has managed to keep many of his perverted acts hidden from most of the public.
He was raping women back when he was governor of Arkansas.
This was kept quiet, yet thousands knew about it.
If you feel safer, denying the facts by assuming that if someone like BC commits an illegal act, that he could not keep it from being totally exposed, therefore it can't be true, go ahead. Bury your head deeper in the sand.
Bill Clinton gave Presidential pardons to drug-criminal friends, in opposition to the intention of Presidential pardons. He gave them to KNOWN and PROVEN CRIMINALS that have no intention of 'going straight'.
THOUSANDS KNEW ABOUT THIS WHEN IT HAPPENED. How long before you knew about it, or did you? and what has been done about it?
John and Jackie Kennedy were being given hypodermic injections of a form of methamphetamine, every day by the WH doctors.
Did you know? How many people did know, at the time, and kept it 'secret'?
Implying it never existed is different than stating that 'it now no longer exists'.
You would think that being in the MSM arena, you would have checked your facts, and would have stated this correctly. Or were you just trying to mislead others?
The person named in the 'quote' you provided, was on the staff of that company.
Are you saying he didn't exist either?
I am not 'depending' on the word of the CEO of a company you state no longer exists.
My knowledge and beliefs of what happened to TWA800 have nothing to do with the supposed videotape that the MIB's are reported to have confiscated.
I think it would be silly to take a position on this based on that alledged piece of video, and a third hand qoute.
The FBI and CIA concocted a video which tried to explain how the public misidentified spilling fuel (which had been ignited) draining down towards the ground.
Uh.......where did the fuel come from? According to the FBI/CIA/NTSB/FAA the CWT was 'empty'.
According to them, the wing tanks were intact until they hit the ocean surface.
Was there not a P-3 in the area?
Was there not a target drone?
These are things that those who wish to accept the CWT theory should look up before making up their minds (oh, I forgot, they have closed minds)
“As a company with a history of technological innovation, we’ve been actively exploring the utility of HDTV field broadcasts,” said BNN CEO Steve Rosenbaum. “Newly rugged High Definition gear and the growing number of HDNet viewers made the War on Terrorism an important one to document in HDTV, so we’re proud to be partnering with Mark Cuban and HDNet, pioneers in the technology, to create the first ever HDTV war coverage ..
Interesting how the divers on those ships were removed from federal whistleblower protection by clinton's executive order at the time of the crash/search. I suppose you think that is a coincidence. (or are you going to try to deny that the whistleblower protection was removed?)
They weren't firing into the traffic pattern.
The anti-missile missile went off course and locked onto the big jet.
And just what would you speculate caused a giant hole in the side of the jetliner, a hole which is nowhere near the CWT????????????????????????????????????
If it was close enough to lock onto an airliner in the traffic pattern, it was clearly effectively in the pattern.
That's a large point. Source?
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