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.
Kaelstrom comes across as sincere ... delusional, but sincere.
The fact that Kallstrom lies persist to this day should tell everyone all that we need to know about the leaders at the top of the FBI.
1. Even if an order had been given to shoot down the plane, it would have taken far too long for even an F-15 or F-16 to arrive on the scene. As we learned on 9/11, it's not as if there are a bunch of these aircraft sitting on tarmacs with pilots in them just waiting for an order to take off.
2. The U.S. Navy was apparently conducting some kind of exercise off the coast of New Jersey that evening, which put them in a fairly good position to respond to an emergency of this kind.
3. There are a variety of different eyewitness accounts regarding the "missiles," but from what I understand, all of them can be clearly assigned to one of two different missile trajectories. This is what led to some speculation that the incident was actually the result of a military test gone awry (i.e., the Navy was testing a missile by firing at another missile or a drone of some kind, and the interceptor took down Flight 800 by mistake).
4. While covering up such an incident would be difficult, it certainly would not be impossible. I understand that the crews of the Navy recovery teams at the site were subject to some kind of unusual executive order, and there is clear evidence to suggest that the U.S. military has attempted to cover incidents up before (remember that explosion in the gun turret of the U.S.S. Iowa, in which the Navy tried to pin the blame on a "gay" sailor?)
Why not? I'm not just talking about a hijacked airplane, but a hijacked airplane that was about to be flown into a building in New York City.
I will never forget this moment. I will never forget Stephanopoulis saying this...where he sat...the moment in detail. I was shocked and then felt a certain 'gut knowingness' that the truth of the TWA 800 tragedy has just been announced accidentally. I still firmly believe that plane was shot down.
I will never trust any investigation performed by our government until the truth of this plane accident is released. Common sense, the tremendous amount of witnesses who SAW something streaking UPWARD-hundreds and hundreds-were NOT ALLOW TO TESTIFY at the governmental hearing. This reeks so badly-it makes your heart hurt.
1. The actors are willing to die themselves. There are great numbers of the willing. This fact means that no escape plan is necessary, no attempts at detection avoidance, etc., greatly simplifying the act.
2. The actors don't have the need to claim credit. That isn't part of their strategy or tactics. It's not necessary to their ends.
Does anyone remember seeing this article? It was posted on FR two or three months ago. I don't remember what number 3 is.
That's very interesting. Have you ever heard anything about that, any speculation that this might be the case? I haven't, but it is a theory that would fit the facts as we know them.
Vaguely. But the third element is that traditional terrorism is a political tool. The Bader Meinhof group and related "movements" wanted to effect changes and make a political statement. These critters just want to kill everyone not like themselves.
_Jim and good ol' Elmer haven't shown up to spam and poo-poo the thread in the first 50 posts or so...
This was one of the reasons why it was probably deemed necessary to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. Even the most fanatical zealots can be snapped back to reality if "their people" are exposed to a hideous, ghoulish form of punishment that was beyond their imagination.
See also #40.
The Navy moves at 25 kts. The Air Force moves at 500 kts+. We don't have either a Naval base or and Air Force base around here, so whom do you think would be most likely to get here the soonest? Was the Navy called on 9/11? The Air Force was.
ML/NJ
Par for the course for the cowardly sociopath.
The small plane might have chickened out at the last moment or just missed. It is hard to hit another plane when you have a significant speed and climb rate disadvantage.
Simultaneous attacks, rocket and small aircraft, cobbled together. Sure sounds like an al-queda operation to me.
Yes. There was a man by the name of Samir Ferrat who was supposed to be on Ron Brown's plane and missed it. He also took out a large insurance policy shortly after Mr. Browns plane went down.
Another clinton enemy on board was Hank Gray.
Look about 1/3rd of the way down the attached link for a bolded area. It describes both of them.
More info here from the incomparable Alamo-girl's site:
DOWNSIDE LEGACY AT TWO DEGREES OF PRESIDENT CLINTON
SECTION: REMEMBERING THE DEAD
SUBSECTION: TWA800 –– RESEARCH PROJECT
Revised 10/12/00
While the link is long it covers the military presence in the area, types of missiles, witnesses, targets on board and tons of other info.
God Save America (Please)
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