Posted on 11/09/2006 9:04:16 AM PST by Hal1950
This week I received a communication from retired United Airline Capt. Ray Lahr. It contained two items of great interest – one dollop of good legal news and one unexpected and truly incredible report.
The legal news concerned Ray's success in Los Angeles District Court after years of "long and lonely and expensive" effort. Judge Howard Matz had succinctly mandated that "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) shall produce to plaintiff the material set forth in Exhibit A and the National Transportation Safety Board shall produce to plaintiff the material set forth in Exhibit B." Significantly, the judge also authorized Lahr attorney John Clarke to file for fees and costs. This is a definite win.
Lahr has been suing for release of the information that the two agencies in question had used to produce their notorious zoom-climb animation subsequent to the 1996 downing of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island – animation that was used to discredit the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses, many of them military and aviation personnel. Lahr sees this animation as the Achilles' heel of a consciously skewed investigation, and in this he is correct.
Lahr also sent me a CD review of the case titled merely "TWA Flight 800 Crash Evidence Review," which I will hereafter refer to as "the Review." Before I finished reading it, I sent Lahr an e-mail, which read in part:
"Brilliant work on your explication. I am only halfway through it, but I am totally impressed. Everything else that has gone before it is the work of amateurs, mine included."
The message I got back from Lahr, however, floored me. He did not write this report. He received it anonymously in the mail. I was stunned. The Review in question is the most sophisticated piece of investigative reporting that I have ever read on this or any other crash. The unknown author likely put years into this work. He surely comes from within the aviation community, which may explain his desire for anonymity. He argues crisply, patiently and comprehensively. He provides ample illustration of his contentions and rarely, if ever, does he exceed his knowledge base.
Most impressive is his knowing synthesis of all the available evidence – radar, eyewitness, physical, audio, GPS, debris field – to recreate in detail the flight taken and damage done by each of the missiles fired at TWA Flight 800. What is more, the author uses only the evidence that was available to the National Transportation Safety Board to reach conclusions that they should have reached with the same data.
The Review author believes that based on the debris field alone, "the administration would have known within the first two weeks after the crash that missiles brought down the aircraft." Although prudent in his accusations, he strongly suspects that the long delay in recovering the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder indicates that the decision to misdirect the investigation "actually occurred the night of the disaster." With this conclusion, I fully concur.
No one who reads this Review can doubt for a moment that the government has engaged in a massive misdirection in the gathering of evidence. Every major media outlet owes it to its audience to assign its best technical writer to read and review this work. The one CD includes the entire NTSB report as well.
To make things simple, I will happily provide a copy of the entire Review to any interested major media party. The author asked that the information be shared. Interested observers, who are willing to identify themselves, can obtain a pdf copy of Part I of the Review by contacting me through my website, .
In the weeks to come, I will break down the information into manageable chunks. For now, allow me to summarize the author's approach. The Review is divided into four parts. Each of the first three parts is dedicated to the destructive path of one given missile.
In the way of example, the author argues that the first of the three was a large surface-to-air missile launched from 16 to 22 miles west of the crash site. The missile approached the aircraft on a descending track from the rear and struck it without exploding. The author is very specific in his detail, to wit, "This impact broke the horizontal stabilizer pitch trim jackscrew in tension and caused the aircraft to pitch upward." Not all the writing is this technical, but where specifics are needed, the author does not shy from providing them.
The fourth part, and the one least supported by existing evidence, is dedicated to other unidentified objects in the sky that night. The author makes the public relations mistake of calling them UFOs. What he means are unidentified aircraft. They do not come from outer space. I will call them UACs.
In the book "First Strike," James Sanders and I argue that a UAC may very well have been in the mix, and that UAC may have been a terrorist plane. The author, too, believes that a UAC was in the mix as well as three missiles, but he does not believe that the UAC was a manned aircraft. He makes a compelling argument that the UAC information that the FBI gathered was so hot that it was simply not allowed in to the official record. Every now and then, however, some information bled in accidentally. The most obvious example of the same was a photo taken by Linda Kabot that seemed to show a slender cylindrical object flying away from the scene of the crash.
Wisely, the author refrains from saying who fired the missiles or launched the aircraft, although the evidence strongly leads away from anything but a highly sophisticated military operation. It is possible that terrorist involvement may have gone no deeper than warnings given and credit claimed. Someone in Washington knows just how deep that involvement was.
The author argues that an independent panel from outside Washington is essential to conduct a new investigation. "Otherwise," he contends, "the same insider influences in both political parties, who have prevented the truth from being revealed previously, would control the investigation's outcome."
In the best of all possible worlds, Ray Lahr's case may just crack open the official door.
What you seem to be saying is that had the military actually shot down the plane then they would have covered it up if Clinton would have let them. What I am saying is that regardless of who is the Commander-in-Chief the Navy would not have covered it up. Period.
Not at all. I just know that mistakes happen. Take a look at any Flight Chart for the area near where TWA 800 went down and you will see the legend:
Warning. National Defense Operating Areas. Operations hazardous to the flight of aircraft conducted within these areas.What do you think this legend means? Are you aware that these areas are "activated" only several times a year, and that one of the days this particular warning area was activated in 1996 was July 17? Are you aware that TWA 800 was 6000 feet below where it normally would have been at that point in its flight?
This actually was a mistake by ATC which is supposed to keep track of things like areas that planes it is controlling should be routed around. But if the truth were known, it would have been the military that receive the blame, and it wouldn't have been pretty.
ML/NJ
You seem to have a vested interest in protecting the clinton administration.
Are there two or three I've missed or am I missing your point.
If I add the TWA 800 I see more than the 2 or 3 you suggest.
Actually I believe Pierre Salanger did briefly bring forth a couple of Navy guys who claimed there had been an accident. And they changed their minds, or maybe they were crushed like grapes?
I spoke at length to one of the major witnesses in this case, who (I think) got his wings in the Navy. When we spoke, he also asserted as you have, that it would be impossible for the Navy to keep this sort of thing under wraps. So I asked him about the Liberty. It turns out he had a good friend on the Liberty, and he withdrew his assertion.
ML/NJ
THen let me clarify that. What I am saying is that there are numerous honorable officers and crew who would have scuttled their careers to defy orders from the highest level to acknowledge the mistake, had there been one.
Don't even try to paint me as hostile to our military.
No, I'm just the guy who asks some pretty basic questions which nobody seems able to answer. If more people did that then the conspiracy industry would die away.
Those photographs of the streak of light taken that night were all photoshopped and all the people are color blind too.
Can you point me to somewhere where I can see these photos? I've never had the chance.
You seem to have a vested interest in protecting the clinton administration.
You seem to have a vested interest in connecting the military to a conspiracy. Why?
The investigators in the NTSB, etc. had everything to do with the investigation and I had no idea they were 'military. thanks for the info.
Well, I guess civility is too much to expect.
You go right on believing that AV fuel can spontaneously combust if that makes you feel better.
No, Salinger claimed a lot of things but was never able to produce a witness that would confirm the navy shot it down. He claims Russian satellites recorded the shoot down, mysterious tapes had people saying we just shot the plane down, but never produced anything conclusive, or even convincing to any skeptical viewer.
So I asked him about the Liberty. It turns out he had a good friend on the Liberty, and he withdrew his assertion.
I would hope you have more hard evidence on the Liberty than you do on TWA 800.
href=http://www.WorldNetDaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26266You, of course, have a good explanation for all the Navy ships in the area beating a haasty retreat from the scene of the accident rather than rushing in to give aid. Or maybe you don't think there were any ships there at all?Thursday, January 31, 2002
Someone has finally talked!
By Reed Irvine
(c) 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Those who accept the government's claim that the crash of TWA Flight 800 was caused by a fuel-tank explosion dismiss the evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally by missiles launched in a Navy exercise off the Long Island coast. They say that such an accident could not have been covered up because a lot of Navy personnel would have known about it, and some of them would have talked.
One of them has finally done so. He recently said in an interview that I recorded that he was on the deck of a [surfaced] Navy submarine very close to the crash site and saw TWA 800 shot down.
He was brought to my attention by an acquaintance of his who told me that this retired Navy petty officer had said he was "underneath TWA 800 when he saw a missile hit it and the 747 explode overhead." He had told this acquaintance that he had given a statement to the FBI when they returned to their port, and that the FBI had checked all their torpedo tubes and all their missile silos to make sure they had all the missiles on board that they had when they left port. Asked if there were other military vessels in the area, he had said, "Yes, several."
When Pierre Salinger, at a press conference in March 1997, declared that TWA Flight 800 had been shot down accidentally by a U.S. Navy missile, this former presidential press secretary, U.S. Senator and ABC News correspondent, was mercilessly attacked by his former colleagues. They accused him of peddling unsubstantiated Internet gossip. Salinger said that his information had been confirmed by a source who learned of the Navy's involvement from a friend who had a son in the Navy. The son was said to have personal knowledge that a Navy missile had downed the plane, but his father did not want to be identified, fearing his son would suffer retaliation for disclosing information the Navy was hiding.
There are hundreds of Navy and Coast Guard personnel, as well as some FBI, CIA, FAA, NTSB and former White House employees who know that the real cause of the crash of TWA 800 was papered over with a tissue of lies. Two of them, James Kallstrom and George Stephanopoulos, have made statements that indicate an official cover-up. Stephanopoulos, a Clinton adviser who is now an ABC News correspondent, mentioned on the air a secret meeting in the White House situation room "in the aftermath of the TWA 800 bombing." Kallstrom, who headed the FBI's TWA 800 investigation, told me and I have this on tape that three radar targets close to the crash site were Navy vessels on a classified maneuver. We know they were submarines because the radar tracks disappeared when TWA 800 crashed.
Our newly found talker was on one of those submarines. The Navy claims that it was at least 80 miles from the crash site, but he says it was very close, and that is confirmed by the radar tracks. In our taped interview, he was more guarded than he had been with his acquaintance. He said he didn't want to do anything that might "mess up" his retirement.
He said he saw "something come up." "I don't know what in the hell it was," he said, "but that's what it looked ..." Not completing what he started to say, he said, "You know, something went up." He estimated that it went up about a mile from his location, which was only a few miles from the shore. He said there were a couple of other subs nearby. When told that the radar tracks of all three disappeared because they submerged when the plane went down, he said, "Yeah, that's what we did."
He acknowledged that a number of Navy vessels were heading for W-105, a large area of the ocean south of Long Island that is used for naval maneuvers. He said that nothing they did off Long Island was classified, but he was not comfortable in discussing it.
When I called him a few days later, he was scared to death. He feared the Navy would withdraw his pension if I reported what he had said. It was not possible to convince him that the Navy couldn't do that. Not wanting to worsen his anxiety, his name and other details are being withheld as we try to get his and other interview reports that the FBI has withheld.
-----------
Reed Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy In Media, a media watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.
ML/NJ
Rather than address the question of unidentified 'witnesses' let's look at some of the verifiable claims made. This one for instance:
"Kallstrom, who headed the FBI's TWA 800 investigation, told me and I have this on tape that three radar targets close to the crash site were Navy vessels on a classified maneuver. We know they were submarines because the radar tracks disappeared when TWA 800 crashed."
Let's start with this. Most obvious question is, radar tapes from where?
I don't believe anything about this case because it makes me feel better, I believe it because the evidence supports it.
Oh, and did I mention I was the assistant crew chief of a KC-135R named The Spirit of Plattsburgh? A question for you to consider is why a aviation mechanic for heavy jets that haul a whole lot of fuel would think the NTSB is correct. You might want to ask, "why would a heavy jet aviation mechanic believe that an airframe 30,000 flight hours and 5 calendar years past its recommended retirement might have some mechanical problems?" Meanwhile, you guys have a theory that depends on an unobserved missile launch from a densely populated area and/or a terrorist network that could kill airliners at will and only did it once.
You seem to have a vested interest in protecting the clinton administration
...I should probably just write you off, but... 1. Do you have a link to any of those pics?
2. Can you answer why NS is out of line when the stuff he mentioned is what the eyewitnesses reported? It's not as if he's putting words in their mouths.
3. Why didn't anybody see the missile launch? The launch point would have been on or easily visible from Long Island.
Not when I'm right, I don't.
I don't have access where I am to my TWA files, so I don't know how much information I have on the provenance of the radar tapes that show the movement of the various objects in the area of the crash.
Have you never seen this data? If you have seen it, do you think it has been faked? I'm really not sure what your point is except maybe obfuscation. Do you doubt Reed Irvine's account? That's what your pull quote is. It is not the data itself, but rather Reed quoting Kallstrom. My own experience (including personal conversations, not just reading what he had written) with Reed Irvine was that he was very careful with his assertions.
ML/NJ
USS Liberty? My Lord, we've never heard of that ship. What happened to it?I mean, just because there was a major book, and just because it was kicked around in a thread here on FR just last week doesn't mean that there wasn't a deep, hugely successful coverup
People in the ME can keep grudges going for hundreds of years... a few years in nothing for them.
I guess the two hundred witnesses, and the radar tape don't really mean anything either. There is way more than enough here to cause one to reasonably doubt the government's line on this.
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