In Search of Nelson DeMille's TWA 800 Video

American Thinker.com ^ | July 12, 2017 | Jack Cashill

[Kaslin]

Nelson DeMille’s bestselling novel. Nightfall, opens on July 17, 1996, with a steamy encounter on a Long Island beach. The man and women involved decide to videotape their coupling. In the process, they inadvertently capture the destruction of TWA Flight 800. The novel centers around that video.

Through his many contacts with the NYPD/Joint Terrorism Task Force DeMille learned there was a real video out there. To the best of my knowledge, the FBI confiscated the original from the MSNBC studios in the early morning hours of July 18, 1996.

Although I have communicated with scores of people who saw the video when it briefly aired, I have only spoken to one who knows exactly what he saw. His name is Thomas Young. Here is his story:

In early August 1996, I was admitted to the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Hong Kong for ten days with a back injury. My employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew my wife Barbara out to join me as our anniversary was in a few days, and I knew my wife would be worried sick with me being hospitalized in a foreign country.

We had little else to do but watch TV as I was in traction for most of the hospital stay. From the first day of being admitted to the hospital until the morning I was discharged from the hospital and boarded a flight for San Francisco, I witnessed a devastating video of a missile launch recorded by an unknown Long Island, NY resident.

The video was re-played every 15 minutes (24/7) on the local English-language, Cantonese-, and Mandarin-language television stations. It was recorded on July 17, 1996.

[cherry]

"The government threw Boeing on the sacrificial altar without regard for the damage done to their reputation for quality and safety. And there almost certainly was some sort of negative financial impact to the company."

seems to me that Boeing has gotten billions in contracts from the govt and its got extremely favorable tax advantages from Washington State, run by rats for decades...

I wouldn't worry about Boeing...they played the game and went along...

[DoodleDawg]

About that same time, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus published books on how eyewitness accounts are unreliable.

Any police officer could tell you that the least reliable evidence is an eye witness.

[DiogenesLamp]

That wasn't the claim. It was military or military contractor, according to him.

Well I believe he is mistaken about that. Our military or a contractor would not go along with the sort of cover up we are seeing here. There are too many people with Honor in our armed forces. They would not be silent if it were our mistake.

Being ordered to remain quiet by the President over the possibility of triggering a war with Iran, is another matter. This they would do.

[DiogenesLamp]

seems to me that Boeing has gotten billions in contracts from the govt and its got extremely favorable tax advantages from Washington State, run by rats for decades...

I wouldn't worry about Boeing...they played the game and went along...

This.

[DoughtyOne]

This link will take you all the way back to 05/27/2002. There is a mountain of information still available here. If you could go back using the numbers, you’d probably find some articles back to our earliest days. I know some of it got corrupted, so I can’t say for sure exactly how much you’d glean from doing a search like that.

As you browse these articles, there will be sections where TWA 800 is not in the title, but I’m sure someone probably put in TWA 800 as a keyword.

Remember that this happened in 1996. Free Republic wasn’t up and being populated until that year, and most of the long timers that go that far back, actually signed up in 97 and 98.

I had many conversations about this on the old AOL Whitewater Bulletin Board when the flight went down. Jim was there.

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/twa800/index?tab=articles

[UCANSEE2]

WPIX in NYC played it continuously and then within a day it was never broadcast again.

SO.... even though the FBI took the original video, these networks that broadcast it would have had a COPY. Did the FBI go to all of them and force them to give up their COPIES ?

[ro_dreaming]

I think he was referring to affect or effect.

[zeebee]

From Michael Rivero:

These are frames from an FAA radar tape obtained by Paris Match and published at their website and in their newspaper.
These images say it all. (separate the GIF into frames to study)

00 h 29 min 58 s:
According to Paris Match, the object in the red circle is the US Air flight, descending into Rhode Island which is going to intersect the flight path of the TWA flight and force it to take an air corridor that is unusually low. I qualify the identification as there is no associated data block within the field of view of this image. Flight 800 is in the blue box, and although the slash through the zeros makes it hard to read the numbers, the course annotation "BET - 37 H" is the assigned course for flight 800. The "H" means "Heavy", the ATC designation for a wide body jumbo jet.

00 h 30 min 17 s:
Circled in yellow, the US Navy P-3 Orion which refuses to identify itself. It will stay on the scene until one minute after the explosion. The aircraft in the Red Circle is on a northerly course headed into Rhode Island, consistant with the prior identification as the US Air flight.

00 h 30 min 35 s:
In the green circle emerges what the J.F.K. experts call an "anomaly" and which Paris Match thinks might well be the target missile whose course is carefully chartered by the P-3 Orion. My own concern about this object is that it appears mid-screen, well away from any visible launching platform. The U.S.S. Normandy is away to the Southwest, and the Standard Missile could not transit the radar view to appear within the green circle without being caught by earler sweeps. Since there was a submarine in the area exercising with the P-3, it's possible that the object in the green circle was a sub launched SAM undergoing tests.

00 h 30 min 42 s:
The "anomaly" still appears on the screen. It will stay on the radar screen for precisely twelve seconds, "being hit" by a radar sweep every four seconds for a total of four successive "hits". The successive sweeps rule out noise, which would plot as random dots all over the screen. Bradband noise able to get past the radar filters would appear as wide area blotches, not a dot. Compare the position of the "anomaly" in this frame versus the position in the prior frame relative to Flight 800. It is clearly closing the 747 from behind, meaning that the anomaly is travling at supersonic speed.

00 h 30 min 44 s:
The "anomaly" has disappeared. The TWA 800 is flying at 13,300 feet. Still visible on the radar screen, the US Air flight (in the red circle) and the P-3 Orion (in the yellow circle).

00 h 31 min 16 s:
Last second before the explosion. Paris Match says that the LA/CA code onscreen indicates that everything is still going smoothly. I disagree. My understanding (and I'm double checking) is that the CA ALERT warns of a close approach.

00 h 33 min 12 s:
Two seconds have not gone by since the explosion. The alert still hasn't been given. J.F.K. is still trying to understand what has happened to the TWA 800. The radar picks up an unidentified aircraft (blue rectangle) in the immediate area around the crash.

00 h 34 min 02 s:
The air traffic controller calculates that this object is flying at just 200 feet (66 metres) - it must be a helicopter, the only craft able to fly so low. Note that the data block for Flight 800 has vanished from the screen.

00 h 34 min 52 s:
It is a helicopter. It identifies itself to the controller using the codename "Jolly", a popular code for military helicopters and inspired by the Jolly Green Giant, which came to the rescue of many GIs in Vietnam. Before anybody else, the US Navy is already on alert and aware of the crash.

00 h 34 min 52 s:
It is a helicopter. It identifies itself to the controller using the codename "Jolly", a popular code for military helicopters and inspired by the Jolly Green Giant, which came to the rescue of many GIs in Vietnam. Before anybody else, the US Navy is already on alert and aware of the crash.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Cashill's book makes a quite plausible argument that TWA 800 was brought down by a missile - the reason no terrorists claimed credit would have been that according to his theory, the missile was fired mistakenly by the US military - the event occurred just as Clinton's reelection campaign was beginning, and had the truth come out it probably would have sunk him for good - an extensive coverup was necessary - for example, the FBI, ordinarily charged with investigating crimes, was put in charge of investigating the crash instead of the NTSB which would have been expected - Cashill presents lots of evidence including excerpts from some 200 eyewitness accounts many of whom reported seeing a trail of light heading up into the sky followed by several explosions as the plane deteriorated - many of the accounts were never seen by the investigators or were altered in ways that softened the idea that a missile was involved - Cashill also presents Navy documents and testimony from military personnel that support his idea that the shootdown resulted from a training exercise gone bad....

'Rats' attempts to frame Bush for 911 are probably aimed at covering Clinton's contributions to that disaster - the fact that he had chances to take out Osama over the course of his presidency but never acted because he was afraid of world opinion and the infamous Jamie Gorelick Wall between the foreign intelligence services and the domestic investigative capabilities which might have detected the plot - in fact Cashill's book has a fascinating chapter on Gorelick who was an inside fixer for Clinton throughout his presidency - she helped set up the TWA 800 coverup and ran interference for Sandy Burglar Berger who destroyed documents which would have made Clinton look culpable in 911....

One thing's for sure - it's a fact of life that, as you point out, when 'rats start accusing Republicans of any sort of wrongdoing, they've been involved in something nefarious and related - just look at the current Donald Jr. brouhaha involving the Russian lawyer who was let into the US with a lapsed visa by Janet Lynch and had contacts with Fusion GPS, which was doing opposition research on Donald Sr......

[Rome2000]

Disgusting indictment of the nation that those 2 came whisker close to sitting in the WH today.

They covered this up, damn them to hell.

[Lower Deck]

the reason no terrorists claimed credit would have been that according to his theory, the missile was fired mistakenly by the US military

How do you fire a missile by mistake?

[Intolerant in NJ]

Okay, sloppy wording - I don’t remember the details but the Navy had been conducting missile training exercises in the area - yes, according to the theory the missile was fired deliberately, but it ended up going somewhere it wasn’t intended - Cashill invokes military documents, observers and reported radar tracks to try to substantiate his argument.....

[politicianslie]

I don’t see how this seriously would have damaged Clinton. So that part doesn’t make sense.

I don't have the book where I am now, but as I recall Jayna Davis in her book THE THIRD TERRORIST said that Clinton when he heard about the OKC bombing said he hoped it was NOT middle eastern terrorists. Of course, IMHO, Jayna clearly showed the OKC bombing was middle eastern terrorists.

A bit over a year later, TWA 800 goes down and videos and lots of witnesses say they saw a missile (some say more than one).

Clinton could NOT let the public know that terrorists were in the US killing Americans and Clinton's gubermint let it happen not once, but twice. And these two incidents set up 9/11. If this is true, and lots of information suggests it is, then Clinton's lies led to thousands of innocent people dying gruesome deaths.

Neither Bill or Hillary Clinton ever saw a lie they wouldn't tell.

[LS]

Jayna Davis made a case there may have been a “third terrorist”. But other very good examinations that I cited in “Patriot’s History,” including “The Looming Tower” which is a vreat study of al-Qaeda, and Richard Minitier, have examined her evidence seriously & found it lacking.

There is no evidence Nichols met with any al-Qaeda in Manila, & the timing is off. We can’t just grab something because it suits our theory. It’s been 10 years since I read their analysis but it was convincing.

[Lower Deck]

Okay, sloppy wording - I don’t remember the details but the Navy had been conducting missile training exercises in the area - yes, according to the theory the missile was fired deliberately, but it ended up going somewhere it wasn’t intended - Cashill invokes military documents, observers and reported radar tracks to try to substantiate his argument.....

And as I have pointed out before, in order to believe this theory you have to believe that the U.S. military is so criminally stupid as to be shooting off missiles near or into one of the most heavily traveled air corridors in the entire world. For the record is that what you are saying?

[Intolerant in NJ]

For the record I am saying that I trust the accuracy of the information Cashill presents and that that information seems to support a plausible account of the TWA 800 tragedy being the result of an errant missile.

Cashill talks about a Cooperative Engagement Capability program, "an enormously complex system", being under development by the Navy at the time of the explosion. The system sought to track and integrate data on multiple combat elements including missiles, and used "live fire tests which began as early as 1994 in Puerto Rico". Cashill mentions another test in 1994 "when the various ships in the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower battle group successfully cued and tracked a tactical ballistic missile...off the Virginia coast" (also "near one of the most heavily traveled air corridors in the world" if I remember correctly). He goes on later "...The P-3 should have given the game away. The authorities could explain away the hundreds of missile sightings on July 17, the radar track of a missile, the photo of a drone, the photo of a smoke trail, the missile sightings on July 12 and July 17, even the location of ships and submarines. There was no denying, however, that right in the middle of the mix, exactly where one would expect to find a surveillance aircraft in a missile test, was the P-3. Its transponder "broken", the plane was flying within a mile or so of what was said to be the first spontaneous midair explosion in the era of Jet-A fuel."

Get hold of the book and read it if you haven't already. See what you think. It's part of the record.

[Lower Deck]

The system sought to track and integrate data on multiple combat elements including missiles, and used "live fire tests which began as early as 1994 in Puerto Rico".

Which makes sense since the Atlantic Fleet missile range is, or was, off Puerto Rico. But it's a long distance away from air traffic.

Cashill mentions another test in 1994 "when the various ships in the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower battle group successfully cued and tracked a tactical ballistic missile...off the Virginia coast" (also "near one of the most heavily traveled air corridors in the world" if I remember correctly).

Actually no. The Virginia coast is a long distance away from the traffic coming into and out of Dulles and Baltimore. And did Cashill say the missile they were tracking was fired off Virginia or off Puerto Rico.

There was no denying, however, that right in the middle of the mix, exactly where one would expect to find a surveillance aircraft in a missile test, was the P-3.

A P-3 is an ASW aircraft. It doesn't track missile tests. The presence of a P-3 in the area is not at all surprising or suspicious. The U.S. Navy has a major submarine base at New London. Subs entering or leaving New London transit through the eastern opening of Long Island Sound. It is routine for the U.S. and Canada to use the opportunity to try and track subs coming and going.

Get hold of the book and read it if you haven't already. See what you think. It's part of the record.

I've read his stuff online.