Posted on 07/17/2002 1:58:36 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
It arrived shortly before noon, Washington time, on July 17 – a fax sent to Al-Hayah in London, the most prestigious Arabic language newspaper. Sent by the Islamic Change Movement – the jihad wing in the Arabian Peninsula – the warning came one day after the group had taken responsibility for the destruction of Khobar Towers. It was as serious as a truck bomb:
The mujahedin will deliver the ultimate response to the threats of the foolish American president. Everyone will be amazed at the size of that response. Determining the time and the place is the hand of Al-Mujahedin, and the invaders should be prepared to leave ... dead or alive. Their time is at the morning-dawn. Is not the morning-dawn near?
As the sun was about to rise on the Arabian Peninsula, it was about to set on Long Island. At 8:31 Dwight Brumley, whose long Navy career included special expertise in electronic warfare, put down the book he was reading and glanced out the window of US Air 217. Night had already fallen to the east, the direction in which he looked.
"I noticed off the right side what appeared to be a small private airplane that was flying pretty much at a course right at the US Air flight," Brumley recounts. "I followed it until the fuselage and the inboard wing cut off my field of view. My first thought – that was awfully close!" Brumley estimates that the plane passed a mere 300 or 400 feet beneath him.
About 15 seconds after the small plane had passed, Brumley noticed "what appeared to be some kind of a flare," but he realized quickly that this bright, burning object ascending off the ocean was no flare. "It was definitely moving pretty much parallel to the US Air Flight and it was moving at least as fast, perhaps even faster."
As the flare-like object raced north, and Flight 800 ascended slowly and innocently east along the Long Island coast, Mike Wire, a millwright from Philadelphia working on a Westhampton bridge, saw a streak of light rise up from behind a Westhampton house and zigzag south, southeast away from shore at about a 40 degree angle, leaving a white smoke trail behind it.
Richard Goss, upon seeing the same object, turned to his friends at the yacht club and said, "Hey, look at the fireworks." Everybody turned to look, and they all watched it climb. "It was bright, very bright," says Goss, "and, you know, that almost bright pink … and orange glow around it, and it traveled up."
Vacationer Lisa Perry, on her Fire Island deck, watched an object shoot up over the dunes of Fire Island.
"It was shiny, like a new dime," says Perry. "It looked like a plane without wings. It had no windows. It was as if there was a flame at the back of it, like a Bunsen burner. It was like a silver bullet." The object was heading east, southeast toward the Hamptons.
As Paul Angelides walked out onto his Westhampton deck, he picked up what was likely the same object now high in the sky. From his angle, it appeared to be a "red phosphorescent object ... leaving a white smoke trail." At first he thought the object a distress flare, but he soon realized it was too large and moving too fast. Spellbound, he followed the object as it moved out over the ocean in the direction of the horizon.
Goss followed it, too. "It seemed to go away in the distance toward the south, and that's when I saw it veer left, which would bring it out east. It was a sharp left."
From a Westhampton school parking lot, Joseph Delgado saw Brumley's streak, the one heading north toward shore and slightly west. As he told the FBI, he saw an object like "a firework" ascend almost vertically. The object had a "bright white light with a reddish pink aura surrounding it." The tail, gray in color, "moved in a squiggly pattern." From Delgado's perspective, the object "arced off to the right in a south westerly direction."
At 8:31, FAA radar operators out of Islip saw an unknown object appear on screen and head toward Flight 800. At the same moment, FAA radar picked up something else unusual – a ship of good size nearly right under Flight 800's airborne position.
The two National Guard pilots in their nearby helicopter now picked up the streaks high in the sky. Capt. Chris Baur saw the streak Brumley had first observed: "Almost due south, there was a hard white light, like burning pyrotechnics, in level flight. I was trying to figure out what it was. It was the wrong color for flares. It struck an object coming from the right and made it explode."
Maj. Fritz Meyer, a winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service over Vietnam, saw the southbound projectile clearest. "It was definitely a rocket motor," says Meyer.
Delgado saw a second object "glitter" in the sky and the first object move up toward it. He thought at first it was "going to slightly miss" the glittering object, TWA 800, but it appeared to make "a dramatic correction at the last second." Then Delgado saw a "white puff."
"From my vantage point," says Goss, "there was a direct explosion that followed, and then after that there was a second explosion that was off to the east a little farther that was much larger."
Meyer saw a bright white light also. "What I saw explode was definitely ordnance," he said. "The initiating event was a high velocity explosion, not fuel. It was ordnance."
"I then saw a series of flashes, one in the sky and another closer to the horizon. I remember straining to see what was happening," says Angelides. "There was a dot on the horizon near the action, which I perceived as a boat."
"About two seconds later," claimed Meyer, "lower, I saw one or two yellow explosions, from that the fireball, third. The first two high-velocity, the last low-velocity petrochemical explosion."
"Then a moment later there was another explosion, and the plane broke jaggedly in the sky," says Perry. "The nose is continuing to go forward; the left wing is gliding off in its own direction, drifting in an arc gracefully down; the right wing and passenger window are doing the same in their direction out to the right; and the tail with its fireball leaps up and then promptly into the water below. The sounds were a huge BOOM! – then another BOOM!"
"You could feel the concussion like a shock wave," reports Mike Wire of the initial blast. Indeed, it shook the bridge on which he was standing in Westhampton even at ten miles distance.
"The sounds shook the house," remembers Angelides. "My wife, who was on the bathroom floor drying our son from his bath, felt the floor shaking as she heard the noise and I heard her cry out, 'What is going on?'"
And then confusion, a hellish, horrific confusion. "There seemed to be a lot of chaos out there," says Angelides. Now he, Wire, Perry, Meyer, Baur, Goss, Delgado and Brumley watched as the plane's fuel tanks exploded, and Flight 800 morphed into what Delgado described as a "firebox" and others as a "fireball."
"It got much larger, maybe four or five times as large," says Brumley, who was watching the explosion from overhead. "It was the same explosion. It just got bigger. My first thought was, 'Boy, what was that?'"
"When that airplane blew up it immediately began falling," adds Meyer. "It came right out of the sky. From the first moment, it was going down."
Brumley saw the burning debris hit the water and turned to summon a flight attendant. As he did, a passenger in the seat behind him, James Nugent, cried out, "Did you see that too?" Brumley and the others were hardly alone in what they had seen. On that soft summer eve, thousands were watching the sea and the sky. More than 700 of them would share their stories with the FBI.
See "It wasn't terrorists. It couldn't have been."
Do you think Clinton wouldn't have tried to cover up a naval exercise accident? Even Reagan would have tried to keep the lid on one.
ML/NJ
You don't call upon the Navy to shoot down hijacked airplanes.
ML/NJ
I've wondered that myself. At the same time, I don't remember any ME group taking credit for the 1993 attempt to take down the WTC. Can somebody say if my memory is correct on this?
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
New Link: Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)
A few days ago a caller on the Neal Boortz radio show asked him this very question. Boortz's response made a lot of sense. He said that the only people who know this was a terrorist attack would be the terrorists themselves and the two or three experts that found suspect residue during the ensuing investigation.
He went on to explain that a sitting president's reaction to this type of attack should be one of 'cover up' because of the probable damage to the airline industry. Cover up and go after the terrorists who commited the attack. Clinton, as usual in his half-a**ed way of running goverment, just buried it.
Let's not forget that for the week or so before 587 happened Thompson was all over the media giving us dire warnings that something BIG was expected soon....it happened and then, within hours, was declared an accident.
Don't believe anything they tell you through the media.
I am curious of your assertion. Would you not call upon whatever resources existed at your command to get the job done? Why couldn't that be the Navy?
Mmmmm...partially...it was a group of ME individuals, but not an organization...
On 3rd March, a type-written communication was received at the New York Times. The communique claimed responsibility for the bombing of the World Trade Center in the name of Allah. The letter was composed on a personal computer and printed on a laser printer. Very little can be identified as to the origin of the printer, but a search of the hidden files in Ayyad's computer revealed wording identical to that of the text of the communique. Saliva samples from Salameh, Ayyad and a third man, Mahmud Abouhalima, were obtained and compared with the saliva on the envelope flap. A DNA Q Alpha examination concluded that Ayyad had licked the envelope on the communique received by the Times. Abuhalima, who was an integral part of the conspiracy, had fled the United States the day after the bombing, and had later been arrested in Egypt and extradited back to the United States.
I found this to be a plausible explanation:
"The absence of a claim of responsibility for the downing of TWA 800 has puzzled some, but in fact only about half of all incidents of international terrorism are credibly claimed. In another quarter of the incidents, the likely perpetrators are easily identified, but the remaining quarter requires sleuthing."
"The lack of claims may reflect the changing motives and organizational patterns of terrorism. When terrorists pursued political goals on behalf of identifiable, if imaginary, constituencies, a claim of responsibility was seen as contributing to the achievement of the terrorists' objectives. Terrorists working on behalf of state sponsors, determined solely to punish their perceived enemies, or inspired by religious fanaticism with God or his self-appointed spokesperson as their sole constituent have no need to claim responsibility. Unclaimed attacks may also simply be more terrifying as they give us no enemy to identify."
From the London paper:
U.S. officials are investigating reports that Islamic terrorists have smuggled Stinger ground-to-air missiles into the United States from Pakistan.
Senior Iranian sources close to the fundamentalist regime in Tehran claimed this weekend that TWA flight 800 was shot down last month by one of three shoulder-fired Stingers of the type used by Islamic guerrillas during the Afghanistan war. The sources said the missiles arrived in America seven months ago after being shipped from Karachi via Rotterdam and on to the Canadian port of Halifax. They claimed an Egyptian fundamentalist group backed by Iran was responsible for smuggling the weapons across the Canadian border into the United States.
The group, the Gama'a al-Islamiya, comprises followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric jailed in the United States over the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing. It has been waging a war to overthrow the government of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and has been held responsible for a number of attacks on tourists since 1992, including the murder of 17 Europeans last April.
A senior White House official responsible for counter-terrorism told The Sunday Times this weekend that he had seen a report that a Stinger missile had been smuggled into the United States from Pakistan. The official, who is involved in collating intelligence relating to the TWA inquiry for the White House, said investigators were aware of reports that Stingers may have been smuggled into the country.
So...it was blamed, not claimed.
Have we done this before?
Your entire little post is wrong or misleading.
All, or nearly all, the witnesses report seeing somthing rising offshore. Triangulation of sight lines of those not close enough to differentiate beween sea and shore mostly converge at one or two points off shore. I don't have time to find links now but if at least one other poster requests that I post such such data, I could do it this evening.
Telephone poles look pretty small from a mile away, which is certainly the minimum distance any witness might have been from the actual launch, and three miles is more likely. The people who saw this mostly had their attention drawn by the motion of the object, which of couse occurs after the launch flame, but you blow some anyway. Why?
This did not happen at "night." It happened at approximately 8:30 PM. Go outside this evening at that time and let me know how many starts you can see.
You say you've participated in many launches as if you know what kind of launch this one was. New weapons systems are bing tested all the time. Unless you were directly involved in this, you have no clue what the witnesses should have seen.
ML/NJ
Because the Navy isn't usually positioned to fire upon aircraft departing JFK. The fact that they were should be a big red flag to all.
ML/NJ
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