Posted on 01/27/2002 8:58:49 AM PST by Asmodeus
Sunday, Jan. 27, 2002
Frustrated investigators looking into the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 have an important new piece of evidence. Government sources tell Time that analysts at the National Transportation Safety Board last week got their first look at a remarkable videotape of the deadly accident. Recorded by a surveillance camera at a New York City area tollbooth, the tape captures nearly the entire catastrophe that sent the Airbus A300 crashing into a residential neighborhood in Queens less than 3 min. after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 12. According to an NTSB source, the plane can be seen "flying along normally and intact, and suddenly things start to go very wrong." The video records the plane as it begins its descent. The crash is obscured, but the tape continues to run and smoke can be seen rising from the scene. Experts at the NTSB are optimistic that the tape will help answer critical questions about the precise sequence of events as the plane began to break apart, and exactly how and when the tail section separated from the body of the plane. This is the second video record the board has obtained of the crash, but the first one was virtually useless because the plane could be seen only as a tiny speck.
I saw the passenger list. There were about 250 Hispanic names and about 10 were not. There is nothing one could learn from the passenger list unless he had a huge, all-encompassing database to reference the names against.
And as for facts, how about the fact that there were TWO explosions BEFORE the plane began to fall apart, and the fact that a fisherman saw the wing beak up BEFORE the tail broke free?
I believe in many of their statements, they gave the typical investigatory answer you give when you don't have evidence of a crime, but you are still investigating wheather a crime has been committed. Something to the effect of -- we have no evidence that a crime(a terrorist attack) has been committed at this time.
I have seen no quote that says that a terrorist attack has been ruled out. If somebody on this thread has such a quote, maybe they could help us out.
In 1984, Julia took Winston to the countryside, and found a small clearing surrounded by small, young, trees- "too small to hide a camera in", she said. Microelectronics was in its infancy back when Blair wrote 1984.
You may say they have not found any evidence which points to terrorism, but what evidence points to a bird in the engine? Did they find some feathers?
I haven't heard anything reported on the subject on way or the other. Personally, I don't have much faith in the truthfulness of either the media or the government. There is so much going on that we are not being told that I will always question the information that is "fed" to us.
Richard W.
I personally liked the way the NTSB announced it was working on the theory that this was an accident BEFORE the flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder, or other critical parts of the plane had even been recovered.
Possibly, they publically commented on the non-criminal aspects of their investigation -- e.g. they looked for feathers in the engine, they don't find feathers in the engine, they annouce that they looked for feathers in the engine and did not find it.
The criminal part of an investigation is usually handled publically differently -- e.g. they looked for explosive chemicals in the tail section, they found no explosive chemicals in the tail section, they simply comment -- when asked -- that we have no evidence that a cime(terrorist act) has been commited at this time. Not until evidence of a real crime has been found, would they probably say so.
This is probably what has happened, however always be suspicious.
Richard W.
So:
a) Baggage bomb. This was my first guess when it blew up. Why pick this flight? Timing, and Dominicans take a lot of random stuff home with them.
b) An African al-Quaida member (or a Black recruited from a European country or the U.S., like the shoe bomber) with fake papers. If the papers are fake Dominican papers, it could take a while to figure it out.
Al Quaida people are known to have traveled with elaborate fake papers up to an including fake pilot IDs, and Pan Am 103 (not an Al Quaida attack, as far as anyone can tell) was done by duping a passenger into taking a bomb on board. Nothing novel required.
Terrorists come in a variety of flavors. I heard that many relatives of the crash victims didn't want to come forward because they were illegals. Any truth to that? It would be difficult to profile a plane load of passengers who all happen to fit the profile.
Richard W.
There is a manifest. I have no doubt that the American press and the Domincan press have gone through the manifest and like I have stated no one has found anything amiss about any of the passengers.
a) Baggage bomb. This was my first guess when it blew up. Why pick this flight? Timing, and Dominicans take a lot of random stuff home with them.
This was an international flight, so that means every person who checked luggage had to be checked with the manifest. That was mandated by the FAA before 9/11.
Again any good reporter could look into the background of every passenger to see if anything was amiss. I am sure by now someone would have come up with something.
JMO, but the shoebomber #2 theory doesn't hold up IMHO. Now that is not to say there could have been a breech on the ground or with the ground crew and should be looked into and also that Flight 587 could have been brought down by mechanical problems(a gasp is audibly heard by the conspiracy contingent on FR).
Richard Reid wasn't your typical passenger. Remember he raised flags and he was not allowed on the same flight the day before, but the French let him through the next day.
Why did it take so long for this to surface? HHmmmmm.
Indeed, it's been previously posted that he was an English/Jamaican mix--not at all the typical arab terrorist. I just wonder how many more buddies of like mind he has here and back in the mother land...
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