THE DOWNING OF TWA FLIGHT 800: 'Hey, look at the fireworks'

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, July 17, 2002 | By Jack Cashill and James Sanders

[ml/nj]

Do you believe the "official" explanation of the crash of TWA Flight 800?

Of course not. But there's a BIG difference between it having been shot down by terrorsts and haviing been shot down by our own Navy.

As I said earlier see "It wasn't terrorists. It couldn't have been." for some of my observations here. The whole terrorist thing is disinformation put out so that the uninformed will discuss things that are easily disprovable about TWA 800, and by association discredit those of us who are not.

ML/NJ

[Non-Sequitur]

Also, there are several U.S. military facilities on eastern Long Island that may have played a part in the exercises...

Really? Which ones?

[hattend]

One theory postulated was there was a drone launch off one of those naval facilities on Long Island and a missile launch to take out the drone that went awry.

That's why some witnesses reported more than one rocket trail in different positions in the sky (drone booster and missile launch).

Again, just going on witness reports and the books I read. So pick it apart if you must, I wasn't an eye-witness. I was in Europe. It wasn't me.

[billhilly]

Finally, looking at the eyewitness accounts in the article you have missiles coming from different directions and in different shapes and sizes and colors. A lot of it still makes no sense.

I thought the article attempted to show that a lot of people in different places saw the same object, but in different trajectories, based on their positions.

[Non-Sequitur]

You're right, we weren't there. But I have seen launches of Terrier, Standard, and Sea Sparrow missiles by day and by night. And none of the descriptions of any of these eyewitnesses comes close to what I've seen. So you can go down the list of missiles and show pictures of each but there is still no evidence that a missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship or aircraft brought down the 747.

[Cachelot]

Do you have any sources for this?

There's a lot of references in the various OKC threads on here - there's been witnesses describing a man strikingly like Atta, for example. Drawings and comparisons are in the threads here. Also, it looks like the cover may be coming apart at the seams, with govt sources starting to leak. All on here, but don't remember the thread titles. Just search for OKC, or maybe there's an OKC master list.

[Non-Sequitur]

Look at the descriptions in this article alone:

"From a Westhampton school parking lot, Joseph Delgado saw Brumley's streak, the one heading north toward shore and slightly west...
""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."
"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."

It's hard to believe that they could be talking about the same object.

[hattend]

So you can go down the list of missiles and show pictures of each but there is still no evidence that a missile fired from a U.S. Navy ship or aircraft brought down the 747

Well, if there was unsupressed evidence of the fact then we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?

Here is some more stuff to throw in the mix:

Drone theory and missile theory

[Non-Sequitur]

I've read about the drone theory and other missile theories and rather than take them up with you I'll just concede that nothing I could post would ever convince you that it wasn't a Navy missile.

[Alberta's Child]

Interesting link. I was particularly impressed with Post #7 on that one -- Rivero's point about "the dog that doesn't bark," which explains why TWA Flight 800 could not have been shot down by terrorists.

[Alberta's Child]

I was thinking about the U.S. National Laboratories in Brookhaven in particular, but the U.S. Navy also operates a remote radar installation north of Suffolk County airport as well.

[hattend]

I've read about the drone theory and other missile theories and rather than take them up with you I'll just concede that nothing I could post would ever convince you that it wasn't a Navy missile.

Right back atcha...with a change:

I've read about the drone theory and other missile theories and rather than take them up with you I'll just concede that nothing I could post would ever convince you that it was a Navy missile.

So it goes. See Ya!

[Alberta's Child]

There is plenty of evidence that something launched from the surface brought down Flight 800, and the more I read about this incident the more convinced I am that it was, in fact, the U.S. Navy.

The ongoing misinformation that had been produced by the Navy about its military exercises in the area that night, coupled with the fact that the NTSB's tests on the so-called "exploding fuel tank" were rigged (by their own admission), leads me to believe that they've got plenty to hide.

[Non-Sequitur]

Brookhaven is a Department of Energy laboratory, not Department of Defense. But rather than continue, as I did with hattend I'll concede that nothing I could possibly say would ever change your mind on this. Believe what you will.

[Alberta's Child]

Then I stand corrected. The location of a U.S. military installation on Long Island was not a major factor here -- I was simply responding to speculation about why it would be necessary to conduct a military exercise in that area.

Having said that, I'll mention a couple of things that need to be addressed before I will ever be convinced that this was not a shoot-down:

1. Why the fraudulent testing by the NTSB?

2. Why the idiotic animated re-construction of the incident, showing the aircraft climbing a few thousand feet even after everything from the wings forward had been blown off?

3. Why the secrecy about what the Navy was doing in the area that night?

4. Regardless of the discrepancies between the various eyewitness accounts, you simply cannot discount the number of people from a wide range of points along the south shore of Long Island who saw something (or things) resembling a missile climbing through the sky that evening.

5. Why were the FBI and CIA involved in the investigation from Day 1? This was the first indication that something was highly unusual about this incident -- the FBI and CIA do not get involved in "ordinary" airline disasters.

I don't understand why you cannot accept the notion of the U.S. Navy shooting down a civilian aircraft -- it's not as if it hasn't happened before.

[Non-Sequitur]

I would be willing to accept almost any cause for the downing of TWA 800 from Navy missile to a tick-off Sasquatch, so long as the evidence is there to support it. Support for your theory of a Navy shoot-down isn't there. Nothing I have read in any of the eye witness descriptions of the missile bears any resemblance at all to any surface to air missile in the Navy inventory, and I base that on personal experience and 23 years of active duty are reserve service. With all due respect, you and the others are taking bits and pieces of information and innuendo, a lot of it conflicting, and trying to tie it together without any sort of personal experience or knowledge of the military, it's weapons and it's procedures. It's just not working. I don't see any point in trying to convince you otherwise.

[Cachelot]

Nothing I have read in any of the eye witness descriptions of the missile bears any resemblance at all to any surface to air missile in the Navy

I don't buy the Navy shootdown either. Some earlier accounts claimed that the missile went up from land, not out at sea.

Is there ANYTHING reasonably portable (not necessarily in the US inventory) that resemble the descriptions?

[Non-Sequitur]

I don't know a lot about shoulder fired SAMs. From what I've read the 747 was at the extreme range of the missiles existing at the time but I'll defer to any experts who may be out there. One thing that would tend to indicate that a shoulder fired SAM was not what brought the plane down was the fact that people who say that the 747 was hit by a missile all say that the missile hit it in the fuselage. A believe that all shoulder-fired weapons use an infra-red tracking system. If that is true then the missile should have gone for a heat source, one of the four engines, rather that the fuselage.

[ml/nj]

about why it would be necessary to conduct a military exercise in that area.

We have to be able to fight in populated areas where there is beaucoup radio noise. There is a limit to how much simulation can be done 300 miles out at sea. That's why there have always been (or at least there have been for a long time) areas just off the coast here where these military tests are conducted.

ML/NJ

[Alberta's Child]

The point you raised is precisely why I've discounted the whole terrorist angle in the first place. Not only was the aircraft flying at or near the range of most portable SAMs -- the aircraft was not supposed to be there in the first place. It would have been flying higher, but had been instructed to reduce its altitude to provide adequate spacing between itself and a northbound flight to Providence, Rhode Island.

Any terrorist who wanted to shoot down a passenger jet like this would not have done so by firing a "Hail Mary" from a point so far to the east -- their chances of bringing down an aircraft would have been much better if they were closer to JFK Airport.

BTW, I'm reading through a long series of informal (i.e., almost conversational) information about this incident (it happens to be 200+ pages long). Some of the technical know-how is quite fascinating, particularly the information from someone who swears that the wreckage photos bear all the trademarks of a non-explosive impact by one or more tungsten-carbide fragmentation warheads.