Posted on 02/28/2002 9:31:30 AM PST by Asmodeus
AIM Report: 2002 Report # 03 - CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS IS A LIE? I CAN'T
By Reed Irvine |
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2002 Report #03 | February 25, 2002 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS IS A LIE? I CAN'T
My by-line is on this article because it involves some very sensitive conversations that I have had and opinions about them that are best discussed in the first person. I am revealing the name of the Navy master chief who last November told an acquaintance of his that on the evening of July 17, 1996, he was on the bridge of the USS Trepang, a submarine that was practically underneath TWA Flight 800 when the plane exploded and crashed into the sea. His acquaintance, whose name I wont disclose because it adds nothing to the story, had called me the night before on a line in my office that had been used to take calls for the TWA 800 Eyewitness Alliance generated by an ad placed in The Washington Times on August 15, 2000. He shared our views about the cause of the crash, and we had a good conversation. The next morning he called again to tell me that he had just run into a casual acquaintance who was a retired Navy petty officer. Because of his discussion with me the night before, he brought up TWA 800. Here is an edited partial transcript of our conversation. [H for him and I for me] H: Have you ever heard of the submarine Tripanga? I obtained Beers phone number from information and found him willing to talk. In our taped interview, he was somewhat more guarded than he had been with his acquaintance. He said he didnt want to do anything that might mess up his retirement, but nothing was said about the conversation being off the record. I told him that I was with Accuracy in Media and recommended that he visit our Web site, where he would find a lot of articles we had written about TWA 800. The following is a partial transcript of the taped interview. I did not begin taping at the very beginning of the conversation. The transcript begins where the taping started. This was Thurs., Nov. 15 at 10:00 a.m. B: I told everything, you know, when the Navy came on board with everybody else on my submarine. I called Randy again the next morning, Friday, Nov. 16. He asked me to call him back Monday morning, Nov. 19. I did, and I found myself talking to an entirely different person. The confident, courageous master chief had been transformed into a quivering moral coward. He said he had talked to his skipper over the weekend and that he had been reminded that he had signed certain papers when he retired from the Navy. Whoever it was that he had talked to had scared him to death. He feared that he was going to lose his retirement because of what he told me. He claimed he had spoken off the record, but I told him that was not so and that was very clear from the tape that I had recorded. I said I didnt want to hurt him and that there was no way the Navy could rescind his disability pension because he told the truth about what he had seen on the evening of July 17, 1996. Something had obviously gone wrong and they had successfully covered it up, but that too was wrong. It would be a scandal if they tried to deprive him of his pension because he had helped expose an illegal, immoral cover-up of a mistake that had cost the lives of 230 people. Cmdr. William S. Donaldson, who tried very hard to pin the blame on terrorists, told me several times that if it turned out that the Navy was responsible he would spearhead a demand that the officers behind it be court-martialed. I told Randy that he had a moral obligation to go public with what he knew and to help us expose the cover-up. I cited the example set by another chief petty officer, Kathleen Janoski, who was in charge of photography for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Dover Air Force Base. She had found and photographed the perfectly round hole, about the diameter of a .45-caliber bullet, in the top of the head of the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. She had also photographed what was called the lead snowstorm inside his skull that showed up on the head x-ray. She took photos of the x-rays that were up on a light box, and it was a good thing that she did, because the one showing the lead snowstorm was destroyed. The colonel in charge rejected recommendations of three lieutenant colonels that an autopsy be performed on Browns body. Kathleen Janoski had put her job at risk when she was still on active duty. She was relieved of her duties, and she feared she was going to be court-martialed. But she nevertheless shared her photos with Chris Ruddy who reported on the suspicious hole in the top of Ron Browns head and the lead snowstorm in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. I suggested that he ought to show as much courage as she had. Kathleen Janoski retired and is drawing her pension. Nothing I could say had any effect. He explained that he had lost his job, and although his wife was working, they would be in deep trouble if he lost his pension. I can sympathize with him, but there are whistleblowers in the government who risk their jobs by exposing wrongdoing. If we want to encourage more government employees to follow their example it would make sense to reward the whistleblowers and punish those who see the wrongdoing but seal their lips and close their eyes. I couldnt budge Randy Beers, but one of the significant things about that conversation was that he did not deny the truth of anything he had told me when we first talked. When Pierre Salinger held a press conference in March 1997 and 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 in the media. They accused him of peddling unsubstantiated Internet gossip. Salinger said that his information had been confirmed by a source who had a friend whose son was in the Navy. The son was said to have called home and told his family that we shot down the airliner. Salinger said the father did not want to be identified, fearing his son would suffer retaliation for disclosing information the Navy wanted to keep hidden. That, of course, was dismissed as hearsay. We succeeded in verifying that Randy Beers was a chief petty officer on the Trepang and that he was the ships corpsman. We verified that Lt. Michael Leitner, with whom he drank Diet Pepsi on the Trepangs bridge on the evening of July 17, 1996, was also a member of the crew. What Beers said about the Navy ships in the area that night and the exercise that was being conducted confirmed what we already knew from the radar data obtained by the Flight 800 Independent Research Organization, FIRO, and what Jim Kallstrom had told me about the three Navy vessels on a classified maneuver. I wrote a column about what Randy Beers had revealed, but I did not include in it his name or the name of his submarine. Finding someone in the Navy who was willing to talk as freely as he did was an important breakthrough. He was the answer to those who were sure that the Navy could not have been responsible for shooting down TWA 800 because it would have been impossible to keep a secret like that when so many Navy personnel would have known about it. In the five and a half years since TWA 800 was shot down we heard stories about Navy personnel who had told family or friends that the Navy did it, but we were never able to make contact with them. The response to the column was encouraging even though it did not get the attention of the big media. I was persuaded by the e-mail I received that we should reveal Randy Beers name and the name of his submarine. The Navy had claimed that the Trepang was 117 miles from the TWA 800 crash site. The exposure of that lie and the fact that it took so long for someone on the sub to expose it should have shaken up those who have so confidently insisted that a secret like that could not remain hidden for long. However, I was surprised to get a few responses from individuals who completely missed this important lesson. The claim that the Navy couldnt have done anything wrong because someone would have revealed it, dies hard. My last conversation with Randy Beers was on February 5. I wanted to tell him that I was going to reveal his name, and I left a message saying it was important that he call me. He did. He first asked me if I was recording the call. I wasnt and I said so. He then said that he was so upset that he had experienced trouble sleeping for two months. But he had found a solution to his problem. He told me that he was notorious for telling tall tales and that all that he had said about where the Trepang was and what he had seen was false. He claimed he just made it up. He said the submarine was at its homeport in Groton, Connecticut that night, not beneath TWA Flight 800 when it was blown out of the sky. He said he didnt know anything about any exercise that was taking place and he had never heard of W-105, the large area off Long Island that is regularly used by the military for testing and training. He said at least twice that this was his story and he was sticking to it. That is a gag line that says, in effect, I am lying but dont expect me to admit it. The transcripts of his conversations with his acquaintance and me have been printed out because they are the best evidence that he was not lying. He had no reason to lie to either one of us. What he says and the way he says it has the ring of truth. It is consistent with what we know from other sources. I asked him for references who would attest to his propensity to lie. He gave me one name, someone who had served on the Trepang. He doesnt know where he is now. The office manager of the firm where he worked for over a year attested to his honesty. The fact that he was worried sick when we had our second conversation and was virtually begging me not to report what he said shows that the idea of claiming that he had told tall tales had not yet occurred to him. If he were a habitual liar, he would not lose a lot of sleep worrying about his lies. Unfortunately his stratagem casts a cloud over his credibility, giving the media an excuse for ignoring anything he says. We are printing a list of the officers and petty officers who were on the Trepang in 1996. We will try to locate and question them and FOIA their FBI 302s (interview reports). Your help is invited. PARTIAL SHIP'S ROSTER, U.S.S TREPANG (SSN-674), 1/12/96
AND LEADING PETTY OFFICERS
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The URL of the Donaldson report I gave was:
twa800.com/final.pdf.
It was copied directly from the URL on my browser as I was reading that report.
Trying to access that report soon after I posted the URL, I got a response saying that the link to that report is now broken. Pretty obviously, someone is determined that the public will not have access to Donaldson's report in its original form or to the original FDR data.
Nevertheless, other sites have preserved the original FDR data. That data and a readable analysis of it can also be found on the following URL:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/TWA/OVERPRESSURE/overpress.html
What that FDR data showed was a large number of changes in the flight parameters recorded by the FDR in its last second that are incompatible with anything resembling normal flight but, when analyzed together, are entirely consistent with an explosion taking place in close proximity to the aircraft.
Note to everyone: the wiring bringing that data from the control area and electronics bay of the airplane to its FDR, which is located in the rear of the plane, passes by the center fuel tank and would have been severed by an explosion of that tank BEFORE the effects of any explosion of the center tank would have reached the sensors involved and BEFORE it could have been recorded by the FDR.
It is VERY disturbing to me that a post to you involving this information would lead to SOMEONE breaking the link to that information.
The only ones you will see are the ones that parrot the government line or version. They probably weren't no where the scene.
You sound like the knight from Monty Python's The Holy Grail who is flopping around on the ground after losing all his limbs telling the guy who chopped all his limbs off to come back and fight.
Let me quote from the Accuracy in Media website: "Accuracy In Media is a non-profit, grassroots citizens watchdog of the news media that critiques botched and bungled news stories and sets the record straight on important issues that have received slanted coverage". Irvine, (one of the leading advocates of the missile theory and chairman of the organization that provides funding for Donaldson's site), is duped by a story so ridiculous it took most folks seconds to figure out it was a lie. The man who has become the self-appointed figurehead for ensuring "accuracy" in the media publishes a story that requires so little research to debunk that he did it himself after making just a few phone calls. Then, after a month's worth of wild accusations he publishes a clintonian mea culpa in which he waits until the last paragraph to state the obvious..."He lied to me, and I regret having been deceived by him." But without missing a beat he quickly adds "But his lie is nothing compared to our governments lies about TWA 800."
And your only reponse to that is to pat him on the back for publishing a retraction, and then call anyone who doesn't believe his tripe "desperate".
Hmmm. Let's see. After a little research I see a freeper named Dr. Luv was the first to point out flaws in Irvine's article when the story was first published on 31 Jan 2002. A6Intruder followed minutes later. I chimed in just minutes later on the same date. I notice I was the first to question Irvine's second article on 28 Feb. My quote then..."I see Irvine is caught in a lying death spiral" followed a post or two later by "Bottomline, Irvine is a fraud. His witness created a story that is almost impossible to believe, and Irvine bit off on it, hook line and sinker. So much for accuracy in the media."
So now Irvine has finally done his research and figured out what Freepers knew for over month. Damn he's good.
Anyway, I guess we're going with the expert FDR analysis that says the last second of tape records an overpressure event. Looking at the graphically plotted data of the FDR data on page 52 of the NTSB exhibit 10A you will note that absolutely every parameter recorded by the FDR is spiked at 20:31:12. That includes elevator position, rudder position, pitch trim, heading and the VHF mic switch position, as well as the instruments sensitive to outside pressure. In fact the flight control parameters indicate changes that are impossible for controls on a 747 to achieve in 1 second. And how about that roll rate of 144 degrees per second. Most fighters can't do that. The heading changes 81 degrees in one second?!? All of which is attributed to the explosion of a 12' diameter warhead exploding 63' from the airplane. That obviously excludes all shoulder launched missiles, so the missile must have been radar guided. Only the Standard missile could have a warhead of that size. But its warhead is designed to throw a wall of pellets toward its target, which would leave clear signs of impact (try hundreds of large penetrations all over the forward section of the airplane) and that is assuming the fuze would even function 63' from the aircraft (a very big assumption). So, we can believe that a warhead blew up near the aircraft and ignore the FDR data that doesn't make sense, or we can believe that all the data recorded in that last second was faulty either due to it being from a previous flight, or some other electrical glitch stemming from power being cut to the FDR when the CWT exploded. I'm sure you can guess what my opinion is.
Nice use of CAPS by the way. Are you getting a little frustrated.
That's not fair. I thought we were just going to talk about the 1 second of data showing a missile explosion. You non-tank sparkers need to pick one theory and go with it.
"Spend more quality time with her and the kids and less time here, because your not doing anything on these posts but looking like an idiot. I would certainly not brag about your flying status cause personally I don't think you can."
Hey, at least this idiot didn't fall head over heals for the crap Irvine is spreading. But again, I sense some frustration. My invitation for beers and curds stands. Maybe I'll see you at OshKosh. You can read my log books then.
You mean like this?
For cryin' out loud, if you're going to rant in all caps, at least learn how to spell.
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