© 2006
By Jack Cashill
Although I could not bring myself to watch the CNN piece on the
10th anniversary of TWA Flight 800, I heard enough about it to request
the transcript.
One detail in particular intrigued me, the treatment of the
notorious zoom climb, CIA's now notorious animation, the one that
depicts the transformation of a nose-less jumbo jet into a soaring
rocket. This animation instantly discredited all eyewitness testimony
and ended any real investigation into the plane's destruction.
Allow me to embarrass one other mainstream news source in
discussing this story, Newsweek. In the Newsweek piece, dated Dec.
1, 1997, British reporter Mark Hosenball uses a series of nine full
color "CIA PHOTOS" to make the CIA case. The photos show TWA Flight
800's flaming passenger cabin climbing more than 3,000 feet to 17,000
feet, "creating the streak many witnesses mistake for a missile."
Hosenball acknowledges that the unlikely CIA involvement "has already
intensified talk of a government cover-up," but such talk, he
suggests, belongs to the shadowy realm of "the Internet" and "talk
radio." The respectable media would not be so easily distracted.
Indeed, had Hosenball been on the CIA payroll he could not have done
more to legitimize the agency's crude rewrite of history.
At the time, one can understand how Hosenball would have been
misled. The video does seem authoritative, and not much information
about the flight had been released publicly. Today, however, there is
no excuse, especially after the CNN piece last month.
Here is what the CNN voice-over relates as a nose-less aircraft
flying not straight up but straight ahead and, if anything, trending
downward:
The zoom climb has fully disappeared. Retired United Airlines
Captain Ray Lahr has spent the last five years of his life battling
the CIA and the NTSB to secure the calculations used to determine the
nose-less plane's vertical climb. And after five years of being
stonewalled, he learns from CNN that there was no zoom climb in the
first place. Why did he even bother?
"All those people who thought they saw a flare or rocket or a
missile," CNN tells us, "not so, says the NTSB. Missiles leave
pockmarks on metal." CNN doesn't tell us that the NTSB never got to
look at the 116 suspicious pieces of the aircraft that the FBI
acknowledged sending to its Washington labs, never to be seen again.
And what did the 270 people who told the FBI that they saw an
object streak toward the plane actually see? "Investigators believe
the red lights seen by eyewitnesses could have been an intense fire
immediately after the fuel tank erupted," CNN continues, now beginning
to embarrass itself with sheer disinformation.
Contrast this folderol with the eyewitness account of just one of
the eyewitnesses, Witness No. 73, an air travel professional. In her
interview, on July 30, 1996, she told an FBI agent that she was
standing on the beach when she noticed a 747 "level off." The flight
pattern caught this experienced observer's attention because she
thought the altitude too low for the plane to be doing this. She was
correct in this detail. The plane was holding to allow a US Air
flight to pass comfortably overhead.
With her eye still on TWA 800, Witness 73 watched in awe as a "red
streak" with a "light gray smoke trail" moved up toward the airline at
a 45-degree angle. Then, the "red streak went past the right side and
above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts
[sic] right wing."
She saw "the front of the aircraft separate from the back" and
watched in mounting horror as the burning pieces of the debris fell
from the aircraft. She provided a drawing that showed the scenario in
some detail, including the "upside down Nike swoosh" that ended at the
plane's right wing. She told this to the FBI before the public knew
that the front end of the plane had broken off. CNN would have us
believe that what she really saw was "an intense fire immediately
after the fuel tank erupted." And its executives wonder why Fox is
kicking its butt.
I know for some readers this is old hat. But for anyone who cares
about justice, if you could please call CNN or Newsweek and just ask
them for an explanation that does not insult your intelligence, the
nation will be most grateful.
Related special offer:
Get Cashill's groundbreaking exposé, "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America"
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
To jump to the original WND article,
>Click here
CNN and the disappearing zoom climb
Posted: August 24, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
[To see the CIA/FBI "zoom-climb" video as posted on You Tube,
Click Here
- The Archivist]
CNN created this animation of what the NTSB describes
as the last moments of TWA 800. Only 12 minutes after take off, the
center fuel tank blast rips away the bottom of the plane. The cockpit
and nose section plunge into the sea. For another half minute or so,
the decapitated plane flies on. Then, it loses momentum and begins
its deadly drop toward the ocean below.
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