On this past
Saturday morning, I did a live remote from Kansas City for CNN’s
“New Day” program on the subject of TWA Flight 800, hosted
by Alison Kosik. What follows is the transcript as
it appears on CNN.com. What does not appear I will explain later.
Inherent in
this transcript is the Achilles heel of what is arguably the most
successful bit of government propaganda in American peacetime history.
Unwittingly, what the CNN editors left in is more damning than what
they took out.
KOSIK:
TWA Flight 800 crashed in 1996 killing 230 people. An exhaustive
investigation called it an accident. We’re going to tell you why
some of the crash investigators are now saying that conclusion
may have been wrong.
(COMMERCIAL
BREAK)
KOSIK:
It’s been 17 years since TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic
Ocean killing all 230 people on board. What followed was an exhaustive
four-year search for answers and a 50,000-page report that it
found a spark from faulty wiring, that that is what caused a fuel
tank to explode on board. But a new documentary is challenging
that theory arguing it was instead an external blast. Earlier
I spoke with Jim Polk, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
CNN investigative reporter and Jack Cashill, he’s the author of
“First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the attack on America.
??(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIM POLK,
CNN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Well, to begin with, the dispute
over whether a missile brought down the plane and not an internal
explosion begins with the witnesses on the ground. A number of
them said they saw a streak in the sky that they thought was a
missile. But there were two airline pilots in the area who had
a front row seat on this tragedy that happened right in front
of them. Let’s look and listen to what they said.
DAVID
MCLEAN, PILOT: It blew up in the air and then we saw two fireballs
go down to the water.
UNIDENTIFIED
MALE: That was the voice of David McLean, piloting a 737 over
Long Island. A bright light caught his eye.
MCLEAN:
All of a sudden, boom. Almost instantly, a fraction of a second
later, two streams of flames came out the bottom of it.
UNIDENTIFIED
MALE: Another pilot, Captain Paul Wheeler, was in the cockpit
of a Virgin Atlantic 747.
CAPT.
PAUL WHEELER, PILOT: I could see the cigar tube of the fuselage
and the windows and bits falling off, fire everywhere, and it
falling into the sea.
UNIDENTIFIED
MALE: Both had flown in the military, both know what a missile
looks like. Neither saw a missile that night.
WHEELER:
I was aware from both the height off the ground and the fact
there were no vapor trails in the sky that it was unlikely to
have been a missile that brought the aircraft down.
MCLEAN:
I thought there was a bomb on board. That was my initial –
I did not see any missile at all.
POLK:
Now, Alison, there was a helicopter pilot who says he did
see a missile before the explosion, but he was at lower attitude
than those two airline pilots.
KOSIK:
Ok. So let me ask Jack. Jack, what do you think happened if
it wasn’t an internal explosion like those two pilots saw?
JACK
CASHILL, AUTHOR: Well, unlike what Jim says, there were 270
eyewitnesses to a missile strike, 96 of them, this is FBI eyewitnesses,
saw it from the horizon ascend all the way up to the plane. They
all described it the same way, that it was a red tip, a plume
trail after it, gray, and then it gets near the plane and it arcs
over, zigzags, hits the plane, blows up. One of those numbers,
number 73, described in detail the breakup sequence of the airplane
and she’s an aviation professional, before the FBI even knew what
it was.
Here is
the challenge I have for Jim. The FBI recruited the CIA to recreate
this animation to show what the witnesses purportedly saw –
basically discredit the eyewitnesses. What they said is after
the nose of the plane fell off, that it turned into a missile
and it ascended upright for about 3,500 feet confusing the eyewitnesses
on the ground, several of whom were military people, pilots, commercial
fishermen, et cetera – sophisticated people – into thinking
they saw a missile.
Now, when
CNN did its animation ten years later – ten years after the
crash, they eliminated that zoom climb altogether. So I ask Jim
this, if those – why did you eliminate the zoom climb if
the CIA – and what was the CIA doing involved in this in
the first place – if the CIA used that to expressly discredit
the eyewitnesses?
POLK: Very
quickly, I would agree with you the CIA animation is controversial.
We did not make it climb in our animation because, frankly, the
transponder disappeared on the radar at the time of the explosion,
so there’s no altitude readout on the rest of the flight and so
there’s no supporting evidence for the CIA’s animation. ??(END
VIDEO CLIP)
Missing
minute
KOSIK:
And you can see more about the investigation into this crash on
an Anderson Cooper Special Report: “TWA FLIGHT 800”
Sunday night at 11:00 p.m.
Before I comment
on what’s missing, let me add a little clarity to what is here.
In 1997, at the request of the FBI, the CIA prepared its zoom-climb
animation in an attempt to convince the media and the American people
that the eyewitnesses did not see a missile or missiles but rather
a noseless 747 rocketing into space. This became the official government
position.
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell