American Pravda: The Destruction of TWA Flight 800
Ron Unz • September 26, 2016
Some
years ago as I became increasingly aware of the severe dishonesty of
our mainstream media on all sorts of controversial topics, I began
telling a joke to a few of my friends.
Suppose,
I would say, that I happened to be out walking one pleasant afternoon
in Palo Alto, and suddenly heard a gigantic explosion in the general
direction of Mountain View, soon followed by a
huge pillar of smoke
rising towards the sky. Being busy with my own work, I might have no
time to bother investigating, and merely wondered what surprising story
the front pages of my morning newspapers would reveal as the cause
behind those dramatic events. But when I eagerly opened those papers
the following day, mention of the explosion was nowhere to be found,
either on Page One or anywhere else, even in my own local San Jose Mercury News.
So unless I somehow persuaded myself that I had simply imagined the
whole thing, I would henceforth stop believing anything I read—or failed
to read—in my once-trusted news outlets.
I
thought my allegorical fable rather amusing, and repeated it on a number
of occasions. But quite recently I came across a rough counterpart in
real life, a remarkable tale that had almost completely escaped my
attention for over twenty years.
When
I used to recall the leading events of 1996, what came to mind was Bill
Clinton’s triumphant reelection campaign in the wake of the Oklahoma
City bombing and political overreach by Newt Gingrich’s Congressional
Republicans. Perhaps there had also been some sort of plane crash on
the East Coast, though none of the details were sharp or memorable in my
mind. But in fact, the sudden mid-air explosion of TWA Flight 800 on a
New York to Paris route was actually voted the top national news story of that year,
ranking above the presidential campaign, while the 230 fatalities made
it by far New York’s worst disaster of the twentieth century, and the
second worst airline tragedy in American history to that date. Indeed,
some journalists at the time suggested that the resulting media coverage
had eclipsed that of any other transportation calamity since the
sinking of the Titanic almost a century earlier.
I had almost forgotten the story of that doomed airliner when I opened my morning edition of the New York Times in mid-July 2013 and read a short review
in the Arts Section, favorably discussing a new television documentary
presenting the “conspiracy theory” that the plane had been destroyed by a
missile rather than by an accidental fuel tank explosion as the
government investigation had firmly concluded at the time, a verdict
strongly affirmed by both the news and editorial pages of the Times. I had recently published “Our American Pravda” and an eminent mainstream academic who appreciated my piece soon dropped me a note pointing to a website discussion
of the details of the plane crash, about which I knew nothing. Being
preoccupied with other matters, I could only glance at the material,
which shocked me, but now that I’ve gone back and spent some time on the
topic, the story turns out to be a truly remarkable one.
The
outline of facts is hardly complicated. Soon after taking off from New
York’s JFK Airport on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 suddenly exploded in
the air just off Long Island. So enormous a loss of life naturally
produced an immediate scrambling of numerous federal agencies to
investigate the cause, and with widespread fears of terrorism, the FBI
launched the largest, most complex investigation in its entire history,
deploying some 500 field agents to the area. The investigators soon
gathered a copious quantity of seemingly consistent evidence.
Large
numbers of local witnesses were immediately interviewed by the swarm of
federal agents, with 278 of them reporting that they saw a streak of
light, much like a missile, shoot up into the sky in the direction of
the aircraft just before the huge explosion. Employees at the local FAA
radar installation immediately reported to the government that they had
seen what appeared to be a missile closing with the airliner just before
it exploded, and other installations produced similar radar records.
When tests were eventually performed on the plane wreckage, traces of
explosive chemicals were found, exactly the sort used in the warhead of a
missile, as well as some reddish-orange chemical residue that a
laboratory later identified as likely missile exhaust propellant. An
enormous effort was made to locate every possible piece of the wreckage,
and for many of these, the contours of the damage indicated an initial
explosion external to the plane. Almost immediately after the disaster,
a bidding-war allegedly broke out between the national television
networks for an amateur home-video showing a missile striking and
destroying TWA 800, with the tape eventually being sold for more than
$50,000 and briefly broadcast on the MSNBC cable news channel before
reportedly being seized as evidence by FBI agents. In addition, a local
resident provided a still photo taken at the time showing what seemed
to be a missile rising toward the aircraft.
Based
on all this initial evidence, many of the early news stories reported
that the plane had probably been destroyed by a missile, with widespread
speculation about whether the calamity was due to terrorist action or
instead accidental “friendly fire” from one of the U.S. naval warships
operating in the vicinity. Given the extreme sensitivity of the topic,
government officials urged the media to keep an open mind until the full
investigation was completed. However, the public debate sometimes
turned rancorous, with some individuals soon alleging that a government
cover-up was in the works. Eventually, the CIA was brought into the
investigation, given its tremendous expertise in certain matters.
After
more than a year of detailed research, the government investigation
finally concluded that no missile could possibly have been involved,
with all the eyewitnesses having been misled by what amounted to an
optical illusion caused by the explosion of the aircraft. That
explosion itself had been entirely spontaneous, probably caused by a
random spark igniting one of the gas tanks. Given the controversy in
the case, the CIA helpfully produced a computer animation showing the
official reconstruction of the events, which was endlessly broadcast by
our news media to explain the disaster to the public. The simulation
showed the jetliner spontaneously exploding in mid-air, with no external
cause, and just to further clarify matters, the CIA animators also
inserted an explanatory message in large text: “There Was No Missile.”
The New York Times, and nearly all our other mainstream media repeatedly echoed this same simple conclusion in all their stories and headlines.
The
vast majority of our sheep-like population absorbed the simple media
message “No Missile” and went back to watching their football games and
celebrity music videos, being greatly relieved to know that
well-maintained 747 jumbo jets flown by leading national airlines can
occasionally explode in mid-air without any external cause.
However, various disgruntled “conspiracy theorists” refused to accept
these conclusions, and returned to their “crazy missile conspiracy
theories,” thereby earning the hearty ridicule of the entire mainstream
media, led by the New York Times. These conspiratorial
suspicions even extended to the U.S. navy, which had apparently been
staging military exercises in the near vicinity of the calamity,
exercises that some claimed including the test-firing of anti-aircraft
missiles. Indeed, a local resident later provided a home video clearly
showing a missile being fired in that exact same area a few days earlier
during previous naval exercises.
The
entire remarkable history of this incident is persuasively set forth in a
excellent twentieth-anniversary book published earlier this year by
investigative journalist Jack Cashill, who has been following the case
since the late 1990s, having co-authored a previous book in 2003 and
also produced an earlier 2001 television documentary Silenced, now available in its entirely on YouTube.
In addition, the 2013 television documentary by a former CBS producer, whose favorable review by the New York Times marked my first introduction to the topic, was discussed at length and substantially excerpted by NPR‘s Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!
Cashill
is strongly affiliated with conservative publications, while someone
like Goodman clearly leans toward the left, but the question of whether
an American jetliner was destroyed by a missile, and the facts then
covered up by the government is a non-ideological matter, so their
perspectives seem almost identical.
For
anyone having less than absolute faith in the official pronouncements
of our government and our media, the likely reality of what happened is
hardly difficult to guess, and for those who currently maintain such
naivete, I suspect it will quickly dissipate if they choose to watch the
documentaries or read the books. But the loss of TWA Flight 800 is
surely of no great importance to our country. Accidents do happen. A
large and energetic military, eager to test its latest missile weapons,
perhaps carelessly and fatally crossed paths with hundreds of unlucky
travelers on their way to Paris. Some 30,000 Americans die each year in
fatal car crashes, and risks are inevitable in our modern industrial
society.
However,
from a broader perspective, I believe that the truly horrifying aspect
of the incident is the tremendous ease with which our government and its
lapdog media managed to so utterly suppress the reality of what had
happened—an American jumbo jet shot down by a missile—and did so
although this occurred not in some obscure, faraway foreign land, but
within the very sight of Steven Spielberg’s home in the exclusive
Hamptons, on a flight that had just departed New York City, and despite
such overwhelming physical evidence and hundreds of direct
eye-witnesses. The successful cover-up is the important story, and
constitutes a central subtext in all of the books and documentaries on
the disaster
Given
the eyewitness testimony and other factors, it is hardly surprising
that many of the initial media stories either directly referred to a
missile strike or at least mentioned it as one of the main
possibilities, and indeed there is some evidence that top government
leaders initially assumed a terrorist attack. But President Bill
Clinton was locked in the middle of his reelection campaign, and while
the slaughter of Americans by terrorists might unify a nation, disasters
brought about by careless military action would surely have had the
opposite political impact. So it seems likely that once terrorism was
ruled out and the American military believed responsible, a direct order
quickly came down from the highest levels to make the missile and all
evidence supporting it disappear, with all our supposedly independent
federal agencies, especially the FBI, bowing to that primary directive.
As
part of the standard investigation, all the debris were gathered and
stored at a hangar for examination, but FBI agents were discovered
spiriting away some of the most tell-tale pieces, or even caught in the
wee hours of the morning hammering them into a shape that would suggest
an internal rather than an external explosion. The amateur video
showing the missile strike was only briefly broadcast by a cable news
channel before being seized by government agents. When an investigative
journalist acquired debris containing apparent missile residue and
passed it along to a producer at CBS News, the evidence was quickly
confiscated, with the journalist and his wife even being arrested,
prosecuted, and convicted for violating an obscure law enacted to
prohibit bystanders from removing souvenirs from the scene of a
disaster; the veteran CBS producer who accepted the material was
vilified as a “conspiracy theorist” and soon forced out of her job, her
career destroyed. The written FBI reports of 278 eyewitness statements
describing the missile attack were completely ignored, and in a number
of cases, later statements were actually fabricated, falsely suggesting
that crucial witnesses had revised or recanted their earlier testimony.
These
particular examples only scratch the surface of the massive amount of
coordinated government fraud and deception that was marshalled to make a
missile strike seen by hundreds of witnesses officially disappear from
the historical record, and transform the destruction of TWA Flight 800
into a rather mysterious and spontaneous mid-air explosion. The New York Times
in particular became the primary mouthpiece of the official “See No
Missile” party-line, repeatedly denigrating and ridiculing all those who
resisted this total rewriting of the facts and history.
This gatekeeper role of the Times
in the cover-up became particularly crucial once the high-profile
figure of Pierre Salinger entered the controversy. Salinger ranked as a
full-fledged member of the political-media establishment elite, having
served as President Kennedy’s press secretary and one of the most
visible public figures in Camelot, then briefly as an appointed U.S.
Senator from California before becoming a prize-winning journalist and
the Paris Bureau Chief for ABC News. Himself half-French by birth, he
had many connections to the leadership of that country, which was
galvanized by the large number of French victims on the flight. French
intelligence became involved, quickly acquiring some of the same
voluminous missile-related evidence suppressed by its US counterpart,
and passed him the information. Cashill notes that Salinger was a loyal
Democrat, and perhaps as a consequence he sat on the story until after
Clinton was safely reelected in November, then attempted to break it,
publishing a long expose in Paris Match, one of France’s highest-circulation popular magazines.
If
Salinger had hoped his prestigious standing and long journalistic record
would insulate him from attacks, he was sorely mistaken, and instead
the threat his stature and credibility posed to the cover-up unleashed
an unprecedented barrage of insult, ridicule, and invective, with the New York Times running 18 consecutive articles attacking him, and America’s leading news magazines, Time and Newsweek
adding their own denunciations. Such remarkable vilification may have
partly been aimed at dissuading any other prominent figures from
similarly breaking ranks and following Salinger’s lead in exposing the
true facts, and if so, the effort succeeded and the cover-up held.
Prior
to Salinger’s regime disloyalty, he had regularly appeared on leading
American television news broadcasts and his opinions were treated with
the great deference accorded to a highly-respected elder statesman;
afterward he was purged and blacklisted, shunned by our elite media as a
“conspiracy nut.” Indeed, upon his death a few years later, the
disloyalty he had shown to his establishment colleagues seriously tainted his NYT obituary, which closed by describing the “strange turn” he had taken in advocating theories based upon “discredited” evidence.
I
don’t doubt that numerous other prominent figures quietly took the
lesson of Salinger’s defenestration to heart, much as high-ranking
Soviet leaders noted the dire implications of questioning Stalin’s
pronouncements. Indeed, I personally know of at least a couple of
individuals prominently situated in our current elite establishment
whose private views on various controversial topics would surely rank as
“utterly conspiratorial” but who remain extremely reluctant to have
those views become generally known.
Or
take another example, even closer to me. My old friend Bill Odom, the
three-star general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan, clearly ranked
in the upper reaches of the DC national security establishment in the
early 2000s, serving as Director of National Security Policies at the
Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at Yale. Yet his strongly
discordant views on the Bush response to 9/11 and the preparations for
the Iraq War caused him to be totally blacklisted from major media access, reduced to publishing his dissenting opinions on an obscure website or in the pages of small, socialistic quarterlies.
When
naive individuals suggest that maintaining a large government
conspiracy in America is simply impossible because “somebody would have
talked” perhaps they should consider the implications of this incident,
which occurred so close to the media capital of the world. And if they
ever decide to trust Wikipedia on any remotely controversial topic, they
should consult the 10,000 word Wikipedia article on TWA Flight 800,
comparing that exhaustive presentation with the simple facts provided
in this article, or the wealth of additional information in the numerous
books and documentaries upon which my treatment was based.
The
old Soviet Union was notoriously reluctant to ever acknowledge serious
government errors, but its propaganda machinery was of mediocre quality,
routinely ridiculed both in the West and among its own citizens.
Surely, their Politburo members and Pravda editors would have
been green with envy at how easily our own American Regime and its media
minions suppressed the true story of TWA Flight 800, shot down by a
missile just twelve minutes after it departed JFK Airport in New York
City.
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