-- BOOK REVIEW
Richard Clarke's
Orchestra:
Maestro Plays
Simple Waltz; Shackled Media Manage to Dance Along
by
Jamey Hecht, PhD
© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness
Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved.
May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet
web site for non-profit purposes only.
[There's a very troubling aspect of Clarke's testimonies
that can and should be questioned. He maintains that
he had repeatedly urged, both in the Clinton and
Bush administrations, that direct action be taken to
destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But there is abundant evidence that Clarke's plans
had been listened to and implemented. A great
many publications, from the Indian magazine, “India
Reacts” (June 26, 2001) to the BBC's George Arney
(Sept. 18, 2001) to authors Jean Charles Brisard and
Guillaume Dasquié “Bin Laden the Forbidden Truth” documented
clearly that plans and staging for a US military invasion
of Afghanistan in October of 2001
were in place and being pursued long before 9/11. It
is absurd to think Clarke didn't know of this. It was,
in fact, common knowledge in the region. US special
operations troop deployments in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan through
2000 and early 2001 belie Clarke's assertions that
nothing was being done.
It was the fact of these preparations that gave
weight to Forbidden Truth's allegations that an ultimatum
was delivered to the Taliban by a group called the
6+2 in the fall of 2001 (before the attacks),”Either
you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we will
bury you in a carpet of bombs.” Their goal: to secure
pipeline routes intended to bring Turkmeni natural
gas to market and supply and Enron-owned power plant
in India and to “monetize' what were then hoped for
large oil reserves in the Caspian Sea basin. As
FTW has repeatedly reported, drilling operations in Kazakhstan from
2000 through 2002 showed that the Caspian reserves
just weren't there in the quantities hoped for.
Ultimately, we are left to answer a deeper question.
How much truth does Richard Clarke actually wish to
tell? Can we assume that his motives are entirely pure?
Or is he, to one extent or another, still protecting
some of the deepest secrets of a system which raised
him and in which he still hopes to function? Either
way, Clarke has left a lot of meat on the table to
work with. -- MCR]
APRIL 5, 2004 1800 PDT ( FTW) – At the end
of a distinguished three-decade intelligence career in
various offices of the U.S. government, Richard Clarke
has just published a sharply critical account of the
Bush administration's anti-terrorism record. Timed to
appear on the day of Mr. Clarke's public testimony in
the 9-11 Commission hearings, the book has caused a wave
of indignation among those it chides. It has also done
much to redirect the country's attention back to 9-11,
even as the Bush group tries to wield that day of mass
murder as its own private political instrument.
Readers of FTW and other critics of the official 9-11
narrative will be right to condemn Clarke's book as too
little, too late. But it's not too little to embarrass
the administration, and it's not too late to influence
the November election (assuming that there will be a
2004 election). Incisive readers and critics perceive
that 9-11 was a false flag operation, perpetrated by
a consortium that included elements of the Bush junta
and the bin Laden organization with which it enjoys financial
and personal ties. Readers of the mainstream Left-progressive
press (like the Nation, which this writer has critiqued
on these grounds in Media Monitors Network and From the
Wilderness) regard 9-11 as an episode of colossal incompetence
and “intelligence failure.” Clarke espouses that view
and attributes much of the failure to the President and
his appointees, while distinguishing himself from them
by taking on a measure of the blame with a heartfelt
apology. But the rhetorical flavor of Clarke's book is
very strange. It doesn't read like a progressive's complaint,
nor like an insider's defense. Maybe we're projecting
or reading wishfully, but we seem to hear Clarke speaking
in two voices – an overt voice that tells the public
about the Bush administration's incompetence and neglect,
and a covert voice that whispers to those who can hear
it: false flag.
En route to his explicit case for Bush's incompetent
negligence, Clarke's narrative provides context by revisiting
several other episodes of recent history, among them
the crash of TWA 800 in July 1996, and the triggering
of Desert Storm in 1990. My aim in discussing those incidents
here is not to revisit them for their intrinsic interest,
but to examine Clarke's weirdly self-defeating treatments
of them in the light of his book's ostensible purpose.
If I'm correct in concluding that Mr. Clarke knows full
well that the official explanations are bogus – and that
he's implying this knowledge in these very pages, for
those who can see it – then his message regarding 9-11
is much more radical than it appears. He's in no position
to say “Bush did it.” If he were to say that, the media
would disappear and he could accomplish much less. Clarke
must be vividly aware of this, since in Chapter 5 he
tells the story of Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy's
White House Press Secretary who publicly claimed in the
months following the TWA 800 crash that he had radar
images and documentary evidence indicating a missile
had destroyed the plane. Salinger is called by an NSC
staffer “whacked; he's lost it. The real world is a planet
he left long ago.” Whatever the facts of Salinger's case,
it's instructive that Clarke has chosen to invoke it
here. The lesson of the Salinger anecdote is: say too
much, and you won't be heard; say a little, and you might
move some people.
The book that ate the month of March, 2004 has some
very interesting merits. It's easy to overlook them if
you're furious about the murder of three thousand people.
But from a strategic point of view, this book is definitely
a win for the political justice movement. On rare occasions,
a certain kind of limited hangout can do more than aid
the cover-up; if it comes from deep enough inside the
establishment, it can quietly destabilize the cover-up,
sometimes more effectively than a direct attack. That
position might seem like a sell-out compromise, but let's
be clear: the effective thing about Clarke's particular
attack is its source and its timing – not its completeness
or its force (it has little of either). Finding something
to applaud in Against All
Enemies (and the corresponding Clarke performance
in the sham hearings) does not imply that you, or I,
or FTW, or the 9-11 political justice movement,
should take Clarke's position. We absolutely shouldn't,
because he denounces the tip of the criminal 9-11 iceberg
and tacitly accepts the rest.
That much is pretty clear before you read the book.
But as you make your way through it, something very interesting
happens. Clarke seems to leave a trail of breadcrumbs
for those who know about the dark side of September 11.
It's as if he wants the better-informed among his readers
to know that the book is really a politically pragmatic
strike against a consortium of murderers, not the frank
complaint against administration failure and incompetence
that the media sees in it.
Watch the Frontline episode archived in Realvideo
at the PBS website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/view/
And read the additional transcript interview of Clarke
on the neighboring page:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/interviews/clarke.html
I think you'll agree that one of the burning motivations
behind Clarke's current activity is his bereavement and
anger over the loss of his friend John O'Neill, the talented,
maverick FBI agent who foiled the Millennium NYC plot,
investigated the USS Cole bombing (until the US Yemeni
ambassador stopped him) and nearly prevented 9-11. O'Neill
left the FBI to become security director at the World
Trade Center. He died in the attacks, and you can see
his name among the thousands of others written on the
makeshift paper wall-hanging which passersby created
in the weeks following 9-11; it's preserved in the Union
Square subway station in New York City. As certain exceptionally
courageous individuals among the 9-11 victims' families
can attest, when a person you really need is killed,
you feel driven to find out who did it and expose them.
I believe this may well be what Clarke is doing, albeit
in a subtle and indirect way.
Before we turn to the text, let's suppose Richard Clarke
does know that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle,
[FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dave] Frasca, and key
players in the relevant agencies are guilty of criminal
complicity in the September 11 th murders. If he overtly
says what he knows, he'll trigger one of the standard
responses from media and government; they'll ignore him,
slander him, ridicule him, and quickly move on. Instead,
the wily Clarke is singing a moderate war song against
the Bush Administration, FAA, FBI, and CIA – a tune so
finely adjusted to the media's tin ear that even Time
and Newsweek and the national papers can hear it and
dance along. Allegro, ma non troppo (fast,
but not too much).
Here's what I'm seeing as a trail of breadcrumbs.
This is Clarke on Ramzi Yousef, pp. 94-5:
With almost every terrorist incident or similar
event, an urban legend develops that challenges the
official story. After the events of 9/11, one widespread
legend had it that Israel had attacked
the World Trade Center and
had warned Jews not to go to work that day. After TWA
800 crashed, the legend was that the US Navy
had shot down the civilian 747. With Ramzi Yousef,
the legend was that there were actually two people:
one was the man arrested by the FBI in Pakistan and
the other was a mastermind of Iraqi intelligence, the
Muhabarat. This legend was part of the theories of
Laurie Mylroie.
A bit later on, in the next paragraph:
Mylroie's thesis was that there was an elaborate
plot by Saddam to attack the United States and that
Yousef / Basit was his instrument, beginning with the
first World Trade Center bombing. Her writing gathered
a small cult following, including the recently relieved
CIA Director Jim Woolsey and Wolfowitz.
Next, Clarke quotes Jason Vest's November 27, 2001 article
in the Village Voice:
According to intelligence and diplomatic sources,
Powell – as well as George Tenet – was infuriated by
a private intelligence endeavor arranged by Wolfowitz
in September. Apparently obsessed with proving a convoluted
theory put forth by American Enterprise Institute adjunct
fellow Laurie Mylroie that tied Usama bin Laden and
Saddam Hussein to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
Wolfowitz, according to a veteran intelligence officer,
dispatched former Director of Intelligence and cabalist
James Woolsey to the United Kingdom, tasking him with
gathering additional ‘evidence' to make the case.
Clarke has no immediate need to mention these “legends,” but
he does so. Why? The first one is false; Israel didn't
perpetrate the attacks, and its intelligence agency repeatedly
tried to warn the U.S. government about them. 1 This
is not to ignore a serious body of evidence however,
including DEA reports, showing that Israeli intelligence
acted as an accomplice with US intelligence in facilitating
the attacks before they happened. But the second is probably
true. If TWA 800 wasn't shot down by a missile (Navy
or not), then what are we to make of all the physical
evidence suggesting that it was, 2 and
why did the FBI threaten and harass witnesses, 116 of
whom insisted they saw some kind of missile rise from
near the horizon and blow the plane to bits? 3 Both
of these are called “urban legend.”
But Clarke's third example is the Yousef story, which
he treats as if it were the work of some independent
researcher, the sort of conspiracy critic who might have
come up with the aforementioned pair of “legends.” He
calls the Yousef story a “theory” by “author Laurie Mylroie.” How
did this particular theory get so influential? “Her writing
gathered a small cult following, including Woolsey and
Wolfowitz.” Everybody knows that the American Enterprise
Institute is one among many right-wing Washington think
tanks that produce useful position papers more or less
on command. It's housed in the same building as PNAC
(Project for a New American century). Richard Perle and
Lynne Cheney are members. 4 You
don't have to be Mike Ruppert to read between the lines
here. Clarke is being understated to the point of sarcasm:
of course the story of a connection between Ramzi Yousef
and Saddam Hussein is not an “urban legend”; of course
Laurie Mylroie is not some neutral, disinterested “author”;
and of course, one has to surmise, Wolfowitz directed
her to produce this absurdity from her post at AEI in
the first place. I'm trying to call attention to Clarke's
tone. It implies that he knows this is all a limited
hangout.
In the same chapter, Clarke mentions a striking detail
of the personnel situation on 9-11: in a conversation
with FAA administrator Jane Garvey, Clarke asks how long
it will take to clear the skies:
‘The air traffic manager,' Jane went on, ‘says there
are 4,400 birds up now. We can cancel all takeoffs
quickly, but grounding them all that are already up… Nobody's
ever done this before. Don't know how long it will
take. By the way, it's Ben's first day on the job.'
Garvey was referring to Ben Sliney, the very new National
Operations Manager at FAA. (p.5)
Very new indeed! If Clarke had no suspicion that 9-11
was an inside job, wouldn't he be a bit less understated
here? Wouldn't he comment on the appalling coincidence
that the man at the controls of the FAA's National Operations
on the morning of September 11th had logged no hours
whatsoever in that position? Sure, piquant irony is just
a writing style – but in Clarke's pages it certainly
sounds loaded. 5
His discussion of the origins of the first Gulf War
is strange; it's as if he were trying to give two opposite
accounts at once. Changes in Iraqi troop readiness (i.e.,
a switch to the radio silence called “Emcon”) suggest
the possibility that Iraq may be about to move against
Kuwait. This triggers a meeting within which only a
few people are concerned, but everyone is surprised:
Only [Bob] Kimmit, NSC's Richard Haasm and I seemed
concerned. CIA Deputy Director Dick Kerr said there
was no chance of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Admiral Dave Jeremiah agreed and refused my suggestion
to retain U.S. forces that were
leaving the area after an exercise. State's own Middle
East bureau had a report from our Ambassador,
April Glaspie, noting Saddam's reassurances to her
[my emphasis]. The meeting broke up without a sense
of urgency. I went home. (p.56)
But for the educated audience, the very name “April
Glaspie” means the-person-who-gave-Saddam-a-green-light-to-invade-Kuwait.
Let me remind the reader, as Mr. Clarke does not, that
on July 25, 1990 Saddam didn't give reassurances to Ambassador
Glaspie; she gave reassurances to Saddam:
Saddam Hussein: "If we could keep the whole
of the Shatt al Arab [waterway
between Iraq and Iran] - our strategic goal in
our war with Iran - we will make
concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced
to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the
whole of Iraq (which, in Saddam's
view, includes Kuwait) then we will
give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to
keep the whole of Iraq in the shape
we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United
States' opinion on this?"
(Pause, then Ambassador Glaspie
speaks carefully)
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie: "We
have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as
your dispute with Kuwait.
Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction,
first given to Iraq in the 1960's
that the Kuwait issue is not associated
with America."6
Yet on page 69, Clarke claims that “[Secretary of State]
Baker would never have gone to war in the Gulf and made
that clear at several points in the months after the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.” Mr. Baker was Ms. Glaspie's
boss. If he didn't want a U.S. war in the Gulf, why would
he have “directed” Glaspie (or State Department spokesperson
Margaret Tutweiler, or John Kelly, Assistant Secretary
of State for Near Eastern Affairs) to indicate that an
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not going to bother the
U.S., when he knew that G.H.W.B. hoped to retaliate with
a major attack on Iraq? When Clarke says that Baker claimed
to be against the Gulf War, I'm not sure I'm supposed
to believe him.
Now, Clarke has just referred to the TWA 800 shoot-down
hypothesis as an example of “legend.” On pages 121-126
his discussion of TWA 800 rejects that hypothesis and
offers the official alternative. But the way he goes
about it is, again, a little weird. Here he is talking
to his friend the late John O'Neill:
I tried to dissuade him from the Stinger theory. ‘It
was at 15,000 feet. No Stinger or any missile like
it can go that high. The distance and angle are too
far from the beach, and even from a boat right under
the flight path, you can't get that high.' John wanted
proof from the Pentagon. I agreed to get it. (p.124)
But what follows is a description of Clarke's visit
to the FBI lab, and there is no further mention of Pentagon
input regarding TWA 800. It's a bright red herring anyway,
since the “Stinger theory” is no longer (if it ever was)
the major hypothesis of the critics at the time of Clarke's
writing (2004). The Stinger was initially interesting
because it didn't require a vehicle; somebody standing
on the beach could have shot one from his shoulder. But
it turned out there were several ships nearby that night,
and in the air, a Navy P-3 Orion. Regarding the latter,
says the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization, “The
McArthur/Islip Airport radar (ISP radar) was the FAA's
closest radar site to Flight 800 when it exploded. For
approximately 28 minutes up until Flight 800 lost electrical
power, only a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft was tracked by
the ISP radar in the airspace near where Flight 800 exploded
and fell to the sea (see Figure 1).”7
So, off Clarke goes to the FBI lab where the wreckage
is being assembled. 8 An
anonymous technician shows him what to look for on the
metal wreckage: “See the pitting pattern and the tear.
It was a slow, gaseous eruption from the inside.” But
later on the same page, Clarke explains that he's convinced
of the FBI's official explanation, summing up this way: “There
was no pitting or tear [!], no indication of an inbound
explosion from a Stinger-like missile…” If that's not
tipping your hand, I don't know what is. That Clarke
does not mention that traces of solid rocket fuel were
recovered from seat cushions inside TWA 800 is a sign
that he's limiting his discussion to avoid going too
far.
Now for the big elephant in the room. On pages 126-127,
just after the TWA 800 discussion, are the paragraphs
that drove me to write this article. I have to quote
them in full:
Unfortunately, the public debate over the [TWA 800]
incident was clouded by conspiracy theory. Conspiracy
theories are a constant in counterterrorism. Conspiracy
theorists simultaneously hold two contrary beliefs:
a) that the U.S. government is so
incompetent that it can miss explanations that the
theorists can uncover, and b) that the U.S. government
can keep a big and juicy secret. The first belief has
some validity. The second idea is pure fantasy. Dismissing
conspiracy theorists out of hand, however, is dangerous.
(p.126)
Let's take this a sentence at a time:
1) “Unfortunately, the public debate over the [TWA
800] incident was clouded by conspiracy theory.” Yes,
it's unfortunate when a perfectly good debate is
ruined – clouded – by the presence of more than one
point of view.
2) “Conspiracy theories are a constant in counterterrorism.” Except
for the part that counters terrorism by lone nuts.
3) “Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two
contrary beliefs: a) that the U.S. government
is so incompetent that it can miss explanations that
the theorists can uncover …” This takes the
cake. It's the cover-up that alleges government incompetence
and intelligence failure; the critics allege government
complicity and guilt. The central claim of Clarke's
book is that the Bush administration accidentally
permitted 9-11 because it was incompetent, in that
it focused on missile defense and Iraq instead of
on al Qaeda; in Clarke's words, the government
missed the explanation whereas he uncovered it.
By his own definition, then, Clarke is a conspiracy
theorist. Yet everybody knows that the phrase is
a derogatory term for anybody who argues that the
U.S. government includes murderers with the power
to cover up their own crimes. By definition, nobody
in the mainstream makes that argument; not Al Franken's
new Air America radio show, not the Nation magazine,
not NPR, not PBS, and certainly not the 9-11 Warren
Commission. Those are the voices crying “incompetence,” and
Clarke's is the loudest.
4) “Conspiracy theorists… hold …b) that the U.S.
government can keep a big and juicy secret.” No,
we hold that the huge quantities of information (e.g.,
documents, recordings, transcripts, testimony, diaries
and logbooks, photographs, interviews and physical
evidence) which the government emits (some of it
deliberately, some accidentally, some through FOIA
and litigation) might be worth looking at. For instance,
Mike Ruppert pointed out long ago that Dave Frasca,
Special Agent In Charge at the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist
Unit, was the choke point high up in the Bureau,
the man who quashed important investigations of Moussaoui
and his cohorts prior to 9-11, including those by
Colleen Rowley, Kenneth Williams and others. The
lesson in the Frasca story is that you don't need
the secrecy of thousands, just the obstructionism
of a few people in the right places. But the other
lesson is that stuff gets out – stuff
like the Rowley memo, the Phoenix memo, and the data
with which FTW established the identity
of the man so bitterly described in those memos.
And things have always gotten out. Already in 1964,
pioneer researchers like Sylvia Meagher and Mark Lane
uncovered scores of facts indicating the conspiracy to
murder President Kennedy. Clarke's assertion that critics
overestimate the government's capacity for secrecy is
itself “pure fantasy.” If there were no evidence discovered
or leaked, there would be nothing to discuss. How could
a critical discussion of the evidence include the belief
that the government keeps its secrets perfectly and therefore
there is no evidence to discuss?
So Clarke's dismissal of “conspiracy theory” does not
sound sincere, but it doesn't exactly sound like confident
disinformation, either. It sounds transparent. And what
makes it more transparent is the last passage I want
to discuss:
Another conspiracy theory intrigued me because I
could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely
on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Mohammad
had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building.
The problem was that, upon investigation, we established
that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the
city of Cebu on the same days. I
had been to Cebu years earlier;
it is on an island in the central Philippines.
It was a town in which word could have spread that
a local girl was bringing her American boyfriend home
and that the American hated the U.S. government.
Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there
to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate
chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against
the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives
expert have been introduced to the angry American who
proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. government?
We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We
do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his
Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We
also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long
after his wife returned to the United States.
The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives
had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years
earlier in, in all places, Oklahoma City.
(p.127)
A disinformationist who wanted to succeed wouldn't round
out his list of misguided “conspiracy theories” with
a story that he “could never disprove,” while continuing
to call it a “conspiracy theory.” Peter Dale Scott once
remarked, with his characteristic brilliance, "Disinformation,
in order to be successful, must be 95% accurate." He
meant that if you want to deceive the public, tell a
story that's mostly the truth and then slip in something
that's your very own lie. But Clarke is doing the opposite.
He's telling what serious critics will read as barely
disguised lies, then adding something he “could never
disprove.” Might he be trying to tell us something which
others won't hear?
The phrase AGAINST ALL ENEMIES comes from
the Oath of Office, in which officials like the President
solemnly swear to “defend the Constitution Against
All Enemies, foreign and domestic." And who
is the main target of Clarke's book, the enemy against
whom it levels its charges? The Bush administration.
Are they foreign? No, they are domestic. Now for what
reason would anybody call the Bush administration domestic
enemies? It's hard to miss, if you know the facts of
9-11. The explicit meaning of the book's title is that
Bush did not defend the country against foreign enemies;
the implicit meaning is that by attacking Bush, Clarke
is now defending it against domestic enemies.
ENDNOTES
1. See item
64 of FTW's 9-11 timeline: Sept. 11,
2001 - Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the
world's largest instant messaging companies with offices
in New York, receive threat warnings of an imminent
attack on the WTC less than two hours before the first
plane hits. Law enforcement authorities have gone silent
about any investigation of this. The Odigo research
and development offices in Israel are located in the
city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv that
is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism,
which eight days later reports details of insider trading
on 9-11. [Source: CNN's Daniel Sieberg, Sept. 28, 2001;
MSNBC Newsbytes, Brian McWilliams, Sept. 27, 2001;
Ha'aretz, Sept. 26, 2001]
2.
http://www.flight800.org/petition/pet_contents.htm
3. http://www.flight800.org/witness-review.htm; http://www.flight800.org/petition/pet_sect9.htm
4. For a profile
of AEI, see http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/aei.php
5. “I thought I
was missing something here,” writes Clarke in his recounting
of a meeting on the afternoon of September 12th, 2001
inside the White House. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda,
for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like
our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at
Pearl Harbor” (pp. 30-31). I doubt this is a conscious
covert reference to America's actual invasion of Mexico,
triggered in 1898 by a U.S. false flag operation against
one of its own ships, the USS Maine. But there sure is
a reference to Pearl Harbor here, the most famous false
flag operation in history, which triggered U.S. entry
into WWII as American authorities knowingly permitted
the Japanese attack. Is Clarke trying to tell us something?
6. As the sources
found on the following web page demonstrate, this was
no mistranslation; Glaspie knew exactly what she was
doing, as did her colleagues: http://www.mideastfacts.com/saddam_glaspie.html
A longer transcript of the Glaspie-Hussein meeting is
here: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html
7.http://www.flight800.org/petition/pet_sect4.htm.
FIRO also points out the presence of ships near the scene
and the FBI's failure to identify them: “When Flight
800 crashed, boats and ships up and down Long Island's
coast converged on the crash site. But the four closest
didn't react at all. Two of these four were due west
and within six miles of Flight 800 when it exploded.
They were on parallel, east-southeast headings, as Flight
800 became a cascade of flames just off the port side
of their bows. But strangely, neither changed course
or speed during or after the crash.” FIRO is currently
suing the FBI.
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that although the presence
of these ships and the Navy aircraft are enough to provide
for a non-Stinger explanation, it's also quite possible
to shoot down a commercial jet at 15,000 feet (and TWA
800 was actually only 13,800 feet up) with a ground based
HAWK missile from the beach. Easily transportable on
a 5-ton flatbed truck, the HAWK system's ceiling is 30,000
feet, and you can watch a film of a HAWK launch – on
a beach, firing into the sky over the water – at the
website of the Federation of American Scientists, page: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/hawk.htm.
8. Reed Irvine
and Cliff Kincaid write in Media Monitor, a
publication of Accuracy In Media: “The penchant of the
FBI and NTSB for hiding, altering and finally destroying
TWA Flight 800 evidence is very revealing. Last summer
the NTSB, headed by a Bush appointee, secretly sold all
the TWA 800 wreckage that had been kept at the Calverton
hangar as scrap metal to be recycled. The buyer had to
promise to keep it secret to get the contract.” http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2002/06/10.html
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