Thanks for the links. One of the few times I truly believe there has been a cover-up.
On July 17, 1996 – Liberation Day in Saddam's Iraq and two days before the Atlanta Olympics – at least 270 people see streaking objects zigzagging off the horizon and culminating in the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the south coast of Long Island.
At the time of the crash, Richard Clarke is serving as chairman of the Coordinating Security Group on terrorism. Within 30 minutes of the plane's crash, Clarke tells us, he convenes a meeting of the CSG in the White House situation room.
"The FAA," Clarke reports, is "at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft."
In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration does have an explanation. Its radar operators in New York saw on their screens an unknown object "merging" with TWA 800 in the seconds before the crash and rushed the radar data to Washington. For reasons that will become clear later, Clarke also deceives the reader about the altitude of TWA 800. The last altitude the FAA actually recorded was about 13,700 feet. This is easily verified and beyond debate...
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The summer of 1996 was a time fraught with fraught for the American counter-terrorist community. The Summer Olympics was to open in Atlanta on July 19. The presidential conventions for both the national parties would take place in August. Late June had seen the attack at where Mughniyah added almost a score of new victims, this time members of the US Air Force.
Things really got tense when, on July 17, TWA Flight 800 fell from the sky in the waters south of Long Island, minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. For days there was little doubt that terrorists had killed the 230 ill-fated victims on the Boeing 747. (A year later, in a July 10, 1997, hearing, the Subcommittee on Aviation of the Transportation Committee of the House of Representatives, stated, "A missile, a bomb and a mechanical failure have emerged as possible causes.")...