The TWA Flight 800 Disinformation Campaign

The FBI Stinger Missile Evidence: Why the Myth of Mechanical Failure is Still Alive

Lately, we've been hearing a lot about the abuse of the term "national security" and how under this pretense, just about any form of corruption could be concealed indefinitely. While the Bush Administration is often criticized- rightfully so- for appealing to it far too readily after 9-11, it is an odious practice that every president has appealed to since Johnson. (See Judge Grants Immortality to Presidential Privilege National Security Archives.)

We are currently in a state of war. As such, it's not surprising there will be more secrecy than we're accustomed to. But in 1996, we were not at war. And in that year, no doubt out of respect for your intelligence, President Clinton decided that "accident findings" in the TWA Flight 800 explosion constituted a threat to national security. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this is absurd. If it was an accident, then the findings of every commercial airline crash can and should be concealed under the pretense of national security, until somehow, some way- we find a cure or vaccine for accidents.

As we'll see from the evidence at hand and eyewitness reports, it was a terrorist act. It was investigated as such from day one, but because prosecuting it as one made it impossible to treat as an "accident", the suspects were free to try again. And this they did. You hear a lot about the 9-11 terrorists who went freely about the US before 9-11, tracked by the FBI but never arrested. They were known, but someone kept the FBI from doing its job. This too, shall be addressed.

Was Flight 800 linked to 9-11? Were the terrorist helped by white supremacists (Klan militia fronts) whom the FBI had known formed long-established ties to middle eastern terrorists? Indeed, even Eric Harris- one of the two killers and white supremacists in the Columbine Massacre- noted in his diary of plans to hijack planes and crash them into New York City. This was long before 9-11. It was a dream of the Klan since it was perceived as the heart of Jewish economic tyranny, and it was a dream that evidently trickled down to Harris. The Harris video in question is here.

This week, while MSNBC and other network news assets offer a "tribute" to the victims of Flight 800 by promulgating the unproven hypothesis of mechanical failure in the TWA Flight 800 explosion, let's take a look at what the FBI was looking for as soon as they arrived on the scene of the crime. (And it was a crime, because the FBI doesn't frequent accidents, nor control their investigations from day one.) Some questions we'll address:

Why would the Clinton Administration [Richard Clarke] lie and who was protected in the disinformation campaign?

Why were over 270 eyewitnesses to a missile or possible missile immediately dismissed by press assets in inexplicable reversals

Why were the Air Traffic Control tapes confiscated and never returned?

Why are the last few moments of the black box recordings missing?

Why is the current theory of mechanical failure- a spark causing the tanks to explode- technically impossible to duplicate? (e.g. the supporting beams bowed inward at the point of the explosion, as opposed to outwards, as physics and common sense would suggest in a fuel tank explosion).

Since the theory has never been reproduced in a controlled environment- ever- why is it promulgated as fact by the media? (The best they could do was a CIA cartoon that also defied the laws of physics and deliberately contradicted over 270 eyewitness reports!) If it was an accident, why are most of the key investigative findings and evidence still sealed almost 10 years later under the pretense of National Security?

What they found is now sealed and being contested in court. But if it was "mechanical failure", why is the disclosure of these files a "threat to national security"?

At the time of the Flight 800 explosion, few insiders believed it was anything other than a terrorist attack. However, the consensus was, thanks to Richard Clarke, that the true cause needed to be concealed from the public. It was speculated that perhaps the main reason for this secrecy was economics: if the US public knew Flight 800 was downed by a terrorist with shoulder-fired missile, the airline industry would collapse when customers became too scared to fly, and the results would be a costly multi-billion dollar airline industry bailout, along with having have a disastrous impact on the international tourism Atlanta expected when hosting the upcoming 1996 Summer Olympics. Who would want to fly in? Why tell the truth and let panic to ruin the celebration of the games? or ruin the international business that the city of Atlanta was counting on?

This was a common theory for the secrecy, not the cause of the disaster,  that floated around at the time. Another was that the navy accidentally shot it down in a training exercise called "Operation Global Yankee" and it also was plausible. When it came to discussing the secrecy of TWA Flight 800 investigation, the confiscated radar data, the last 5 seconds on the black box data, the contradictions and doublespeak, etc., everyone knew there was a cover-up, but few could guess why. They just knew it was downed but not exactly who or why.

Among those insiders who believed it was a terrorist attack, most believed that the downing was a follow-up attack to  the Oklahoma City Bombing and that it involved white supremacists, umbrella groups of the Klan whom were at the time, burning down black churches across the nation in the hundreds; and who were also involved in OKC and planned the attack with Timothy McVeigh in Elohim City. Despite this, the Clinton administration, as well as the right-wing Republican leadership under Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, all chose to do worse than nothing... they abetted and comforted the enemy by not looking for additional suspects after the arrest of McVeigh, insuring known accomplices would plan another attack as virtual "untouchables".

The most disturbing aspect of Flight 800 was the realization that domestic terrorists had struck an alliance with an enemy power since Oklahoma City, and that by choosing to ignore this critical element Flight 800 inevitably came to pass. July 17 was, after all, an Iraqi national holiday akin to our 4th of July: National Liberation Day. Iraq had already been bombed by Clinton before Flight 800, when he showered Iraq with cruise missiles as retaliation for a plot to kill George H. Bush. Saddam did have a motive.

The Waco Massacre: How it Boosted Klan Recruitment

Yes, it was a massacre. No matter how you look at at, men, women and children were burned alive in a botched assault that could have easily been avoided had David Koresh been peacefully arrested when he went out shopping for supplies. Instead, Clinton had to make it a gun control infomercial, a psychodrama to involve viewers and educate them on the horrors of the 2nd amendment. It would show Americans how neat it was to have a police state that protected "molested children" by burning them alive. It was seen as Clinton's massacre, and the truth is that by not accepting responsibility for the mistake, like Kennedy did when he took blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the offense to Americans was doubled.

The Klan didn't need polls to know the American public saw through the media spin and the latter proved it by turning over the House and Senate to the GOP. (Americans were soon in for a rude awakening, the Republicans brushed over Waco with toothless commissions that amounted to absolutely nothing.)

Even now, however, few blame Koresh for the massacre. It's all on a C-SPAN tape, with the clarity of the Zapruder film, and even at a better angle. The federal government, the "UN lackey", was out of control, and only the Klan with its "patriotic" history, connections in DC, and Templar pals in the Scottish Rite could save the day. How? by staging another coup, which eventually culminated in Clinton's impeachment. As was the case with Lincoln and Kennedy, right-wing extremists were involved more than most dare imagine. But unlike Lincoln and Kennedy, Clinton was no hero...he was a product of Mena, Arkansas, and even when playing JFK in the Oval Office, couldn't do better than boinkiing a fat chick. Clinton was simply a lesser evil from two dangerous and entrenched Washington cabals  Compared to the Templar Klan apologists the far right offered, such as Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole, Clinton was the Son of God.

The far-right in DC, seeing the Klan's nascent militia drives and penchant for a violent overthrow wasn't popular, sought to appease unruly Klaverns in the Invisible Empire through legal means. This still-born coup was the impeachment of President Clinton. Regardless, that which was feared most should Dole have won, the pardoning of Klan terrorism by the executive branch, still happened when Clinton realized he was about to be impeached.

The Klan had deftly used the massacre at Waco to recruit followers in the schools, prisons, army, navy, everywhere...and it worked. The recruitment worked so well they gathered enough followers to go national; and to create the greatest arson attack against black churches in US history. Militias popped up in almost every state. Pete Wilson, the governor of America's largest state, California, became the Aryan Nation Hero of the Year in 1995. Publicly, he refused the dubious honor, but privately he gladly accepted their money when  campaigning for president in 1996, on an anti-immigration platform geared for the cross-burning demographic.

Rally 'round the Stars and Bars

At the time, the Klan's Invisible Empire was still hoping to incite a race war by using the banner of Waco and white separatist Randy Weaver. The Klan's terrorism between 1979 and now remains well-documented by the FBI, ATF, and even CIA but was virtually ignored by the media. Why? Because we still have high ranking leaders in both parties who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, ex-Klansmen who would like to stay in office and do it be refusing to designate the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization.

(click to enlarge)

In 1995, the Klan, having united with the international neo-Nazi movement since the late 70s, actually had cells in US army bases in Germany, making the Aryan Nation and Klan virtually one and the same. Under Gingrich's wink and nod, 1994 was a time when the Republicans let a Klan leader, David Duke, use their banner to openly run for Congress in Louisiana. News assets friendly to the extreme-right promulgated Confederate flag controversies that erupted in the south, and these were by design. They claimed it was about culture and heritage, but the real reason was psychology, i.e. social conditioning.

For the South, the message was clear. This was the flag they were fighting for. The deliberate polarization implied the federals were the enemy, and that enemy was to be associated to the flag it flew: the Stars and Stripes. When the KKK or Aryan Nation rallied through main streets across the USA with the Confederate flag, it was a not-too-subtle suggestion that these Klansmen were not terrorists but "patriots" and were maligned by the "liberal media".

Media assets (particularly well-known print, television and radio personalities) literally became the third party that pitted Americans against each other. In fact syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan, one of these media assets, actually ran for president in 1996 and 2000 on a platform that was the Klan's wet dream. And more than anyone, Buchanan jumped on the Confederate flag controversy, hoping to tap into the angry white vote. In doing so, Buchanan proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the divisive Confederate flag controversy was media driven and exacerbated.

The broadcast media thus programmed a subliminal association of war flags and their respective bearers:

Many Southerners now saw the Confederate flag, once a neutral association, as a sovereign flag apart from, and equal to, the US Stars and Stripes. This was precisely the same status of the Confederate flag during the Civil War.

For better or worse, Southerners and the Klan were on the same team now, since their "cultural heritage" was "under attack" (these were Buchanan's own terms and they caught on like wildfire). This bought the Klan added legitimacy as right-wing news assets pitted brother against brother, North against South, in the hyped flag controversy.

At a subliminal level, many also saw the American Stars and Stripes as an enemy flag, a symbol of occupation. And they couldn't avoid doing it, there was a time in the deep South when it was just that. This was the flag of the Federals, and the people they had now risen up against to "protect their heritage"

  Can a flag controversy really bring a nation to war? The precedent was there just about ten years earlier, as this video should illustrate.

The Two-Pronged Neo-Segregationist Attack on Minority Schooling: keep them dumb and keep them out

In addition to this, western states began efforts to bring legitimacy to Klan ideology, e.g. racial purity was at stake and segregation was the best solution. It was then the anti-immigrant movement exploded in California under Pete Wilson. The governor championed Prop. 187, a measure to bar immigrant children from schools and health care. (It was later declared unconstitutional). Wilson's attack on affirmative action, which also begin in California soon afterwards, was more successful, and it spread. It was targeted mainly at blacks; the underlying message being that immigrants and blacks are victimizing whites and thus unworthy of equal status or protections under the law. 

Both 187 and 209 (the attack on affirmative action), were focused mostly on schooling: the former on primary and secondary education, the latter on college education. The most insidious aspect of these measures was their attempt not just widen the gap between the upper class and poor, but to create a second class citizen with no higher education or in the case of immigrants, no primary or secondary schooling at all.

The medium through which most of this propaganda was channeled was talk radio, but TV chimed in when Rush Limbaugh got his own show, and the era "white victimization" began. Indeed, whites were being victimized and taken advantage of. The gut instinct was right on the money, but the true antagonist was not. They were victimized by leaders manipulating them by their basest instincts, hate and fear, that they might suspend better judgment and act against their own interests.

Don't underestimate talk radio... radio, not to mention television, is a very powerful propaganda tool.

Around the same time this was happening, at the Atlanta headquarters of CNN, an army psychological operations unit from Fort Bragg had been hired to assist in programming. To this day, little is known about the specific role they had at CNN, other than they shouldn't have been there; we were not at war. What is also known is that the Confederate flag's national spotlight  began here. Remember the nationwide Klan-led militia movements, and the motives behind the attempt to bring prestige and honor to the Confederate flag becomes quite clear. All of these scattered militias needed a unifying flag to rally under, and it was the Confederate flag.

Using militias to indoctrinate Americans, the Klan could remind skeptical recruits they were a force to be reckoned with, even then. They could point to recent Supreme Court Judges who were Klan leaders, such as Chief Justice Earl Warren and Hugo Black. They could point to Klan atrocities that were either blamed on a "lone nut" or simply ignored by crooked local law enforcement officials unwilling to arrest their own and be labeled a "race traitor". At the national level, they could point to governors, senators and congressmen who were tacitly sympathetic to the Klan and its nascent militia movement; men who quietly appointed likeminded brethren to hobble or control critical law enforcement agencies. These newly compromised agencies, both federal and local, turned a blind eye to everything that pointed to the Klan or its umbrella groups, particularly in OKC. Consistently, and to this day, these compromised  agencies mischaracterize every large scale terrorist operation involving the Klan's international cabal as an isolated aberration of "splinter cells" not tied to the Klan, or done by one or two people acting on their own.

Stop for a minute and think about that...

It was the equivalent of saying all the suicide bombers to hit Israel were isolated "lone nuts" with no ties to the PLO or Hamas, acting on their own accord.