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Saturday, September 22, 2001
Deception for dollars
By James Sanders & Jack Cashill
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
On September 20, The Boston Globe broke the story of how the so-
called Gore Commission failed conspicuously to address airline
safety. The Globe claims this failure "represents the clearest
recent public example of the success that airlines have long had in
defeating calls for more oversight." The Globe traces that failure
to a series of campaign donations from the airlines to the Democratic
National Committee in 1996, in the wake of the crash of TWA Flight
800.
Although on the right track, The Globe has gotten only half the
story. The complete story is much more chilling. Yes, the Clinton-
Gore team did abandon security planning for sake of campaign cash.
But worse, the White House deliberately concealed the real cause of
the crash – in no small part to justify that abandonment.
>From the very beginning, the Clinton administration knew that the
airliner did not explode due to mechanical failure. George
Stephanopoulos acknowledged as much on ABC in the wake of the recent
World Trade Center attack. "In my time at the White House," he said
off-handedly, "(the situation room) was used in the aftermath of the
Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800
bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through
the afternoon." This revelation was reported on WND by Reed Irvine
recently.
Likewise forgetting himself, Senator John Kerry, on Larry King Live
on September 11, 2001, suggested that TWA Flight 800 was brought down
by a terrorist act.
These were not mistakes. As we have reported elsewhere, the White House realized from
the beginning that the plane had been shot down. So unnerved was the White House by
the potential political consequences of this scenar
io that it singled out "missile" as the one explanation for the crash that could not
be pursued, even discussed. Almost immediately, its operatives channeled the
investigation into a false dialectic between bomb and mech
anical failure.
In the days to come, no government representative would openly volunteer information
about a missile. There would be no public discussion of the troubling radar data sent
to the White House, no mention of the 96 eyewitne
sses who saw an object streak off the horizon towards TWA 800, no reference to the
National Guard helicopter pilots who stared the missile attack in its face or the
senior Navy NCO who watched it from above on US Air 217.
On July 25th of that year, feigning an open mind, President Clinton announced the
formation of a commission to deal with the perceived attack on that doomed airplane.
It would be called The White House Commission on Avia
tion Safety and Security and was officially established by Executive Order on August
22. Chairing the commission was to be Vice President Al Gore.
On August 14, 1996, President Clinton invited Victoria Cummock, the widow of a Pan Am
Flight 103 victim and an airline-safety advocate, to join the Commission. In inviting
her, the president assured Cummock that he wante
d to develop tough new counter-terrorism measures. With the timing of this
invitation, however, he may well have hoped to offset the bombshell announcement in
that morning's New York Times.
"Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode," wrote
The Times on August 14th, "they say the only good explanations remaining are that a
bomb or a missile brought down the plane off Long Isl
and."
That same day, The Times reported that analyses of the debris field, the center wing
tank and explosive residue on the plane combined to deal "a serious blow to the
already remote possibility that a mechanical accident ca
used the crash."
Given the perceived seriousness of the threat that August, Clinton also appointed to
the Commission former CIA Director John M. Deutch, Department of Transportation
Secretary Federico F. Peña, retired Air Force General Jo
hn Michael Loh, and others with experience in aviation safety and security matters.
The full Commission held its first executive session on September 5, 1996, and on
September 9, the Commission submitted its tough preliminary report to the president,
advancing 20 recommendations to strengthen aviation se
curity. At a press conference that day, Vice President Gore declared his strong
support for these proposals.
But this support did not last for long. "Within 10 days, the whole (airline) industry
jumped all over Al Gore," Mrs. Cummock would claim. As The Globe correctly reports,
this pressure took the form of an intense lobbying
campaign aimed at the White House. On September 19, Gore backed off the proposal in a
letter to Carol Hallett, president of the industry's trade group, the Air Transport
Association.
Wrote Gore, ''I want to make it very clear that it is not the intent of this
administration or of the commission to create a hardship for the air transportation
industry or to cause inconvenience to the traveling public."
To reassure Hallett, The Globe reports, Gore added that the FAA would develop ''a
draft test concept ... in full partnership with representatives of the airline
industry.''
What The Globe did not report, however, is that on the same day the administration was
sending this letter, it was signaling its cooperativeness to the airline industry
through a calculated leak to The New York Times. Th
e lead of The Times story reads as follows:
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, saying they are convinced
that none of the physical evidence recovered from T.W.A. Flight 800 proves that a bomb
brought down the plane, plan tests intended to
show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone.
Weeks before, The Times had reported that "the only good explanations remaining are
that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane off Long Island." In the interim, the
evidence for a missile strike had grown only stron
ger as more explosive residue had been found on the plane and more eyewitnesses had
been interviewed.
Now, however, officials were telling the public through the media that a mechanical
failure brought down the airplane. It followed, of course, that a mechanical failure
did not necessitate urgent security measures. This
was the first time the administration had made such a declaration, and its timing is
highly suspicious.
The investigators took this new direction despite an admission to The Times that "they
have no evidence pointing to a mechanical malfunction." They claimed instead that
"the failure to find proof of a bombing" had led th
em to re-explore the possibility that an explosion of the center fuel tank destroyed
the plane. As was typical, these sources refused to mention even the possibility of a
missile.
The next day, the Democratic National Committee received a $40,000 contribution from
TWA. On that same day, to make some sense of its radical change in direction, the
NTSB started leaking the story of the St. Louis dog-t
raining exercise. The NTSB claimed that a careless airport cop had spilled explosive
residue on the plane during a training exercise a month before the crash. This
exercise, the NTSB implied, was responsible for the trac
es of explosive residue found on the plane – not a bomb or missile.
As we have reported, this story broke even before the FBI had a chance to interview
the St. Louis cop who was involved. The release of the Gore letter and the receipt of
the TWA donation may explain the haste of the NTSB
leak. Those responsible needed something, anything, to throw the press off track and
allay public anxiety.
As can be proved beyond any reasonable doubt, the dog-training exercise did not take
place on the 747 that would become TWA Flight 800. Ms. Cummock sensed this
possibility herself when, at an FBI briefing, she had asked
to see the FAA log for the training exercise.
"They said, 'It's not conclusive this particular plane was involved,'" she told the
Village Voice. "They couldn't produce the log." FBI honcho Jim Kallstrom, however,
tried to browbeat Cummock into submission. "It's abs
olutely confirmed that it was that plane," he reportedly told her.
Incredibly, the dog story worked. The all-too-credulous media did not bother to check
the documentation and backed off the terrorist angle. The public relaxed, and the
pressure for increased airport security deflated qu
ickly. The Boston Globe reports what happened next:
By the time of the presidential election, other airlines had poured large donations
into Democratic Party committees: $265,000 from American Airlines, $120,000 from Delta
Air Lines, $115,000 from United Air Lines, $87,000
from Northwest Airlines, according to an analysis done for the Globe by the Center
for Responsive Politics, which tracks donations. In all, the airlines gave the
Democratic Party $585,000 in the election's closing weeks
. Over the preceding 10-week period, the airlines gave the Democrats less than half
that sum.
Unaware of the specifics of the spin or the motivation behind it, Victoria Cummock
nonetheless sensed that something was awry. "It was quite obvious," Ms. Cummock has
told us, "that we were being railroaded."
Ms. Cummock grew alarmed in January 1997 when the vice-president's staff circulated a
draft final report that essentially eliminated all security measures from their
findings. She was not alone in her concern. CIA Direct
or and fellow Commissioner John Deutch also protested.
Gore, as Tony Blankley reports in The Washington Times, withdrew the draft. On
February 12, 1997, Gore issued a final report that has all the appearance of
seriousness. Although released five months after the breaking o
f the dog-training story, the following excerpt seems to refer to the demise of TWA
Flight 800, the event that triggered this report and the only possible such attack
within the last eight years:
When terrorists attack an American airliner, they are attacking the United States.
They have so little respect for our values – so little regard for human life or the
principles of justice that are the foundation of Ameri
can society – that they would destroy innocent children and devoted mothers and
fathers completely at random. This cannot be tolerated, or allowed to intimidate free
societies. There must be a concerted national will to f
ight terrorism.
Following this paradoxical introduction was a series of recommendations that seem both
forceful and reasonable, to wit, "3.13 Conduct airport vulnerability assessments and
develop action plans." These recommendations did
not trouble Cummock in general. What she criticized was their vagueness. She cited
3.13 above, like many others, for its absence of "specificity," "accountability" and
"timetables/deadlines."
"In summary," Cummock wrote, "the final report contains no specific call to action, no
commitments to address safety and security system-wide by mandating the deployment of
current technology and training, with actionable
timetables and budgets." Without tough and timely enforcement, she rightly believed
that the recommendations would become just so many words on a page, pure Washington
spin.
"After much thoughtful consideration and with a very heavy heart," Cummock filed a
dissent against the Gore proposal. Gore stated publicly that he would include the
dissent in the final report. But when he presented tha
t report to the president, he not only failed to accommodate Cummock, but he also
claimed that the report's findings were unanimous. "Both of those Gore lies are on
video tape," reports Blankley in The Washington Times.
"NBC's Dateline has the tapes."
With her dissent suppressed, Cummock sued the vice president, the secretary of
Transportation, and the Commission in district court. In her view, as expressed in her
ultimately successful appeal of a dismissed suit, "The
Clinton administration had formed the Commission simply to obtain rubber-stamp
endorsement of a predetermined policy agenda, rather than to facilitate genuine
deliberations."
As her suit successfully but slowly made its way through the courts, the Clinton
administration kept on spinning its apocryphal tale that "mechanical failure"
destroyed TWA 800, a tale that deceived an all too gullible me
dia and lulled an all too complacent public.
Instead of action, President Clinton gave us the illusion of peace and security. He
had a talent for giving us exactly what we wanted, and before September 11, illusion
is all we asked for. As for TWA 800, the man on th
e street will still tell you, "It was mechanical failure or something, wasn't it?"
While the public slept and the White House spun, a band of assassins began to "conduct
airport vulnerability assessments" of their own. On September 11, 2001, these
terrorists launched an "action plan" that sliced throug
h our unfortified security like butter and dispelled every illusion of peace or
security we ever entertained.
Our illusions shattered, the time may be right to start asking for the truth.
Please mail this article to:
Congressman Dan Burton
Committee on Government Reform
2157 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
Attorney General John Ashcroft
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Related offer:
Purchase Jack Cashill's stunning documentary video, "Silenced: Flight 800 and the
Subversion of Justice" from WorldNetDaily's online store.
Related columns:
Exposing FBI's red herring: Parts 1 and 2
The fight goes on
Cracks appear in fuel-tank charade
The incredible shrinking climb
All the AG's men
Demise of the TWA 800 cover-up?
Silenced no more!
Ashcroft imprisoned by Reno legacy?
Exploding hypotheses: Parts 1 and 2
Imaginary flagpoles
The collapse of American journalism
Psychology of a cover-up
Feds muffle voice recorder data
Fateful 4 seconds
Unraveling the cover-up
TWA 800 controversy heats up
Cashill's five-part series, "Silenced: Flight 800 and the subversion of justice":
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Related stories:
Justice Department rips Flight 800 video
Haunting evidence of missile attack
'Deadly Departure'
New evidence of missile attack
TWA 800 and official lies
Investigator testifies to Congress
U.S. Stinger chief suspect
Donaldson called conspiracy theorist
Were missile parts hidden away?
Is there proof of a missile?
Was there a government cover-up?
How government stopped probers
What happened to TWA Flight 800?
TWA Flight 800 was 'shot down'
End>}}}
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