Jack Cashill: Reopen the TWA Flight 800 Case

American Thinker ^ | June 07, 2009 | Jack Cashill

[neverdem]

Nearly thirteen years after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island, I had begun to think that the case was a dead issue, but then two unexpected and unrelated events caused me to think otherwise.

The first was a phone call from one of the three most important eyewitnesses to the case.  The second, two weeks later, was the still-mysterious crash of Air France Flight 447 off the coast of Brazil. 

This eyewitness put a further dent in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) claim that a fuel tank explosion brought down TWA Flight 800.  The crash of Flight 447 has put TWA 800 back in the news again.   If the media are going to look to 800 as a template for 447, they need to know what the eyewitnesses to the 800 crash actually saw.

The eyewitness in question may be prepared to tell his story publicly.  After giving his testimony to the FBI in July 1996, for personal reasons, he had chosen to remain silent.  He is still sufficiently wary that I will shade his testimony and refer to him only as "Surfer."  What I will share, however, is his one, entirely damning, new revelation.

The other two critical eyewitnesses I will identify by name and FBI number.  The first is Mike Wire, #571. I have become good friends with Mike and his wife Joan since meeting them while doing research on the book, First Strike, that I co-authored with James Sanders in 2003.  (The documentary that Sanders and I produced in Spring 2001 is available online.  Part 1 sets the scene) 

The second key eyewitness, Joseph Delgado by name, 649 by number, was at the time the principal of Westhampton Beach High School.  He was not thrilled that Sanders and I had identified him in First Strike, but he acknowledged that our facts were accurate.  No one provided the FBI a more precise description of the event than Delgado.  His illustration of the same is stunning.

The surfer saw the events just about as clearly as Delgado.  What he also saw, in addition to the apparent missile, was the break-up sequence of the aircraft.  He described it accurately to the FBI long before the NTSB came to the same conclusion based on radar and the debris field. 

These are just three of the 270 eyewitnesses by the FBI's own count that saw a flaming, smoke-trailing, zigzagging object appear to destroy TWA Flight 800.   All three followed the object off the horizon.  Delgado and the surfer tracked TWA 800 separately from the object and witnessed the moment of impact.  Wire and the surfer saw the object "arch over" before the strike. The New York Times interviewed none of these three, none of the 270 for that matter.

A no-nonsense, 6'-7" millwright and U.S. Army vet, Mike Wire watched events unfold from the Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton on Long Island.  He came to play a key role because the CIA based its notorious video animation on Wire's perspective.  Why the CIA was involved in a domestic airplane "accident" is anyone's guess.  The media never bothered to ask.

The FBI showed the CIA video just once.  That was in November 1997 when it officially bowed out of the case.  The FBI needed it to negate the stubborn testimony of the eyewitnesses.

A key animation sequence in the CIA video showed not a missile but an internal fuel tank explosion blowing the nose off the aircraft. According to the video's narration, TWA 800 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 was alleged to look like a missile and to have confused the eyewitnesses.  (The animation begins at the 8:30 mark of Part 2 of "Silenced"). 

This animation was essential to close the investigation. Without it, there was no way to explain what these hundreds of official FBI eyewitnesses, many of them highly credible, had actually seen.

According to the official record, the three key eyewitnesses were re-interviewed by the FBI in 1997.  The authorities paid most attention to Delgado.  On May 8, 1997, agents from the FBI and the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, interviewed Delgado at his Long island school.  According to FBI notes, the China Lake rep was introduced to Delgado simply as "a member of the Department of Defense."

Delgado told the authorities once again that he had seen an object like "a firework," ascend "fairly quick," then "slow" and "wiggle" then "speed up" and get "lost."  Then he saw a second object that "glimmered" in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a "firebox."  The agents seem to have taken him seriously.

In Mike Wire's first interview on July 29, 1996, at his Pennsylvania home, he told an FBI agent exactly what he had seen, and it tracks closely with Delgado's account.  Here is how the agent recorded the conversation on his "302:"

Wire saw a white light that was traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40 degree angle.  Wire described the white light as a light that sparkled and thought it was some type of fireworks. Wire stated that the white light 'zig zagged' (sic) as it traveled upwards, and at the apex of its travel the white light "arched over" and disappeared from Wire's view. . . . Wire stated the white light traveled outwards from the beach in a south-southeasterly direction.

After the light disappeared, the 302 continues, Wire "saw an orange light that appeared to be a fireball."  Although the CIA chose to build its animation squarely on Mike Wire's perspective, the story the CIA video told bore almost no relation to the one Wire had told the FBI. 

The NTSB transcribed its 1999 conversations with the CIA analysts responsible for the video.  (NTSB Witness document, Appendix FF, Docket No. SA-516, April 30, 1999).  In this document, the CIA analysts concede the problems that Mike Wire's original 302 presented. 

Said one, "We realized that if he [Wire] was only seeing the airplane, that he would not see a light appear from behind the rooftop of that house."  In other words, the CIA could not square its account of a self-imploding airline turning into a rocket with Wires' account since TWA 800 was at least 20 degrees above the horizon, well above the rooftop. So, claimed the CIA analyst, "We asked the FBI to talk to [Wire] again, and they did."

It was during this follow-up interview with the FBI, some time in 1997, that Wire was reported to have changed his mind, now admitting that he had first seen the ascending light high above the rooftop. How high?  Said the CIA analyst,  "[Wire] said it was as if - if you imagine a flag pole on top of the house it would be as if it were on the top or the tip of the flag pole."

The CIA analysts based their video on this second interview with Mike Wire.  "FBI investigators determined precisely where the eyewitness was standing," says the narrator while the video shows the explosion from Wire's perspective on Beach Lane Bridge. "The white light the eyewitness saw was very likely the aircraft very briefly ascending and arching over after it exploded rather than a missile attacking the aircraft."

The CIA animation converts Wire's "40 degree" climb to one of roughly 70 or 80 degrees. It reduces the movement of an obvious smoke trail from three dimensions, south and east "outward from the beach," to a small, two-dimensional blip far off shore.  It places the explosion noticeably to the West of where Wire clearly remembers it.  Most problematically, it fully ignores Wire's claim that the streak of light ascended "skyward from the ground" and places his first sighting 20 degrees above the horizon, exactly where Flight 800 would have been.

In fact, Wire never told the FBI anything about a flagpole.  He could not have.  He never talked to the FBI, the NTSB or the CIA after July of 1996. The CIA and/or the FBI fabricated the entire interview and added the flagpole detail to make the interview seem real.  The 302 from this alleged second interview is not in the official NTSB record.

The surfer added confirming detail to Wire's account.  After thirteen years, he finally read the 302s the FBI had prepared.  The first one from 1996 was entirely accurate.  The second one from 1997 added very specific new details about the surfer that served to discredit his testimony.  Not only were the details untrue, the surfer told me, but, as in Wire's case, there was no second interview.

Delgado presented more of a challenge.  The serious nature of his second interview suggests that there was still a force within the bureaucracy struggling to get at the truth.  By the time of the NTSB's final hearing in August 2000, that force had obviously been suppressed. 

At the hearing the task of discrediting Delgado fell to one Dr. David Mayer, who headed up the NTSB's Orwellian-titled "Human Performance Division."  He too solved his problem with a flagpole.  As Mayer described events, everything Delgado saw occurred "between these two flagpoles."  Mayer then used an illustration to show where those flagpoles were located and vectored Delgado's line of sight from between those flagpoles out to sea.

"So again," said Mayer, "it doesn't appear that this witness was looking in the right location to see where flight 800 would have been when it would have been struck by a hypothetical missile."  If he were looking in the wrong direction, Mayer implied, none of his testimony could possibly matter.

One major objection here. In none of the FBI notes does Delgado ever mention a flagpole, let alone two flagpoles. With good reason. There weren't any at his location in Westhampton. Like the CIA analysts, Mayer created flagpoles that did not exist and entered them into the official record.

Mayer knew better.  In researching this article I discovered a detail I had missed before.  On July 20, 1996, three days after the crash, the Suffolk County Police went to the high school parking lot where Delgado had been standing and did a GPS reading of his angle of vision.  Mayer had total access to this information.  He suppressed it.  And he was not the only one to suppress information.  There is powerful evidence to suggest that the authorities consciously corrupted the testimony of the three most critical eyewitness to the crash.

The NTSB has since fully abandoned the CIA "zoom-climb" explanation, but it worked to distract an administration-friendly media.  For a new administration so keen on transparency, and a media so keen on exposing the past abuses of our intelligence agencies, and for the families of air crash victims looking for closure, TWA Flight 800 would seem like a very good place to start clearing the air. 

It is time to reopen the case.

[Outership]

I thought the conclusion explored in the “Seconds from Disaster” flight 800 episode was accepted and confirmed by all involved. If there really are still questions about this disaster it would be fascinating to discover what was actually behind it.

I don’t believe it was a missile strike as the wreckage did not support this conclusion. I suppose it is possible that the evidence was tampered with or suppressed, though I can’t imagine why anyone would do that. What benefit would there be?

If there were shenanigans involved with the loss of this aircraft, they would almost have to be on the level of this analysis:

http://www.geocities.com/electrogravitics/bm-800.html

http://www.geocities.com/electrogravitics/bm-comp.html

[Star Traveler]

You said — OH MY GOSH! WHO are you? I thought all FREEPERS swallowed the government koolaid and had gone to government schools too!

—

Well now... don’t get too excited... LOL... I’ll guarantee you that there’s something you’ll disagree with me about (there always is with anyone... :-) ... )

BUT, aside from some other differences I’m sure we’ll have, yes..., it does seem clear to me about TWA Flight 800 (as we can see on this thread), and the Oklahoma City bombing, from the information that Jayna Davis gives about it [ http://www.jaynadavis.com/ ].

AND..., I noticed one thing from another recent post of yours about the Kennedy assassination...

---

Biggest SCAM in history is not global warming but it is a protected lie by the US Government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBpHSyuueMU

---

That was an informative video, and I had not seen that exact video, but the idea of it was something that I had read about and considered before. It’s a good video for a brief look at the essence of the whole matter (as to it being a conspiracy and not as the Warren Commission said).

I was there at the time, but was only an ignorant little kid (LOL...) and so I found out more in years later from reading about it, than anything I would ever know from being there... :-)

[Stonewall Jackson]

If you want to read an interesting novel about TWA-800, try Nelson DeMille's Nightfall.

The wife of one of my friends used to be a flight attendant for TWA and she lost a lot of friends on Flight 800. She claims that she was told by a senior official with the company that the "official story" is not the real story, but he refused to give her further details. She and a number of other flight attendants ended up resigning from TWA over their refusal to answer questions about the incident.

[lentulusgracchus]

President Bush had eight years to do so.

You raise a fair point, one that has been made in perplexity many times by Bush supporters on this website.

But it is a feature of his regime, that he never, ever raised issues of criminality in the Clinton White House or Administration, although there were many. The reason given out at the time was that Clinton was such a political actor, that given the stage he would suck all the limelight and oxygen out of the room and make the Bush Administration just another chapter in the continuing Clintonista drama called "All About Bill".

There was so much misfeasance in the Clinton years, that it would have required all of Bush's first term to pursue them all and bring them to justice, which would have been a futile exercise given that Clinton devoted most of his political capital in his second term to co-opting and buying off the mostly-black District of Columbia jury pool. That's what Clinton's buffoonish "apology for slavery" tour of Africa was all about. The Africans themselves almost died laughing; they couldn't have cared less, and in many cases their ancestors had prospered in the slave trade. But they were never the audience: the potential jurors of D.C. were.

[True Republican Patriot]

Correct! and You will rarely find them above Flt Level 36.

[Non-Sequitur]

The 747 has 5 engines. Don't forget the APU in the tail. It's a little turbine engine that powers the on board systems. You can see the tailpipe of the APU at the rear of a 747 fuselage. Most big jets have one.....

APUs are used on the ground to provide power when the four main engines are shut down. Hence the name APU - Auxiliary Power Unit.

[Senator John Blutarski]

Non-Sequitur wrote: “Would it? The 747 would have been near the upper limit of the SA16/SA18 altitude and, depending in where it was launched, overall range.”

..... The SA16/18 has a target engagement height of 16-17,000 ft depending on the variant. A target at 13,000 ft altitude, especially a huge slow moving jetliner climbing for altitude, could easily be engaged from a firing position several km off the target flight path.

“For a heavily laden 747 climbing to altitude, the center of the IR signature would be one of the four engines cranking out the heat. By rights any IR guided missile would have hit an engine or wing.”

..... Maybe, maybe not. The SA-18 has a combination IR/UV seeker and an all-angles engagement capability; it is not a tail-chaser. Also, it has multiple fuzing options [delay impact, magnetic, grazing]. Without knowing the exact location of launch vis-a-vis target flight path and the fuze setting, it is risky to assume anything too specific about the inter-action between missile and airliner.

- - -

I have NEVER bought the story of fumes in the center fuel tank detonated by static electricity. If such a thing actually occured, the courts would have been inundated with hundreds of civil suits filed by families of the victims.

[microgood]

WHAT???? The plane would not have been at 15,000 in that location, much less below that. He would have been at maybe 30,000 at that point.

I was relying on the wikipedia article here: TWA Flight 800

[JimRed]

TWA 800- who speaks for the dead?
Published: 07-14-01?

No such file (give_legacy_article)

[JimRed]

I’m sure that the government knows that this was a terrorist attack and for some reason they decided that it would be better to keep the whole thing secret and under wraps (and for some misguided reason, I think...).

To keep mosques from being targeted by real Americans, no doubt...

[JimRed]

The French are helping NATO with combat troops in Afghanistan...

just in case NATO has to surrender!

[backhoe]

No such file (give_legacy_article)

Keep hitting refresh, or F5... those old file system files are very hard to load- sometimes taking 20 tries-- but they eventually will come up.

[gaijin]

At the time of the TWA 800 shoot-down, the theme of choice was peace & prosperity; reports of that nature would help the Clinton Admin, while shoot-down talk was bad and hurtful; those reports were unwelcome and resented.

Many or even most witnesses who detailed their FBI interviews after the shoot-down indicate that they were being TOLD what they saw, rather than asked. When showed the 302’s, many were substantially altered or fabricated. Some witnesses were told that they were considered mentally unstable.

Now we have an administration whose theme is Recovery & YouAin’tSeenNothingYet.

So I think if a US Submarine recovers those boxes before the French, they’re history —we’ll never hear about what they contained, and most likely we’ll never hear that they were recovered at all.

But we definately need to know the truth about TWA 800.

[Blueflag]

LS —

One thought to consider: A proximity-fused SAM does not leave explosive residue. It kills by spraying a cone of small cubes of metal towards its target. These frags break things, sever fuel lines, rupture tanks, break windows etc.

Now these *DO* leave telltale holes where they puncture the skin of the aircraft.

I have no data on what the skin of the aircraft looked like.

Just food for thought.

[Mamzelle]

So why don’t the terrorists take credit, if it was terrorism?

[RaceBannon]

TWA 800 wasn’t flying outbound from JFK heding east and exploded near East Morichis??

[UCANSEE2]

If Flight 447 was flying at approximately 50,000 feet there aren’t very many missiles of the normal kind that could have taken it out from what I understand.

All the 'evidence', so far, indicates that the Airbus Flight 447 went nose up in an updraft (estimated to be 100mph) , and the control surfaces (rudder, and likely a wing) were ripped off the plane.

Either that or one of Kim's NK missiles went way off course.

[UCANSEE2]

You were saying about the WMD being carted off to Syria

There have been ample reports about that.

There was even an international 'incident' where U.S. forces were shooting at an escaping convoy. This 'convoy' had a Russian diplomat (yes, carrying a diplomatic 'case' just like in the movies) riding in one of the lead vehicles.

After a quick cell phone call, the Leader of Russia demanded the U.S. back off, according to international treaty and diplomatic laws, and we did.

We don't 'know' what those convoys carried, and they weren't the only transportation method used. Air ambulances were commandeered by the RG and Russian officers, and again, were protected from search by diplomatic and treaty laws.

[UCANSEE2]

Many missiles above the MANPADS class are designed to do much of their disassembly work through fragmentation, such as the expanding-rod warheads common in U.S. Navy SAM's and AAM's.

What if they are a dummy missile, being used to test anti-missile missiles?

[lentulusgracchus]

What if they are a dummy missile, being used to test anti-missile missiles?

Then they wouldn't have had a terminal-homing guidance system, if it was a target vehicle.

If it was a real system test, it would have been conducted in a different location -- Kennedy Spaceflight Center in Florida, or Vandenburg AFB in California, or out in the Pacific, someplace like that, certainly not in close proximity to one of the most heavily-traveled air and shipping lanes in the world.

And then, if it were a live test of any kind, there would have been NOTAM's issued for aviators and mariners, warning them of the impending activity and giving all parties due advance notice of hardlined exercise areas to avoid.