{"id":45646,"date":"2013-06-27T04:40:37","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T03:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/cnn-deletes-the-uncomfortable-truth\/45646\/"},"modified":"2013-06-27T04:40:37","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T03:40:37","slug":"cnn-deletes-the-uncomfortable-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/cnn-deletes-the-uncomfortable-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"CNN Deletes the Uncomfortable Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this past
\n Saturday morning, I did a live remote from Kansas City for CNN’s
\n “New Day” program on the subject of TWA Flight 800, hosted
\n by Alison Kosik. What follows is the transcript as
\n it appears on CNN.com<\/a>. What does not appear I will explain later.
\n <\/span> <\/p>\n

Inherent in
\n this transcript is the Achilles heel of what is arguably the most
\n successful bit of government propaganda in American peacetime history.
\n Unwittingly, what the CNN editors left in is more damning than what
\n they took out.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

KOSIK:
\n <\/b>TWA Flight 800 crashed in 1996 killing 230 people. An exhaustive
\n investigation called it an accident. We’re going to tell you why
\n some of the crash investigators are now saying that conclusion
\n may have been wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

(COMMERCIAL
\n BREAK)<\/span><\/p>\n

KOSIK:
\n <\/b>It’s been 17 years since TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic
\n Ocean killing all 230 people on board. What followed was an exhaustive
\n four-year search for answers and a 50,000-page report that it
\n found a spark from faulty wiring, that that is what caused a fuel
\n tank to explode on board. But a new documentary is challenging
\n that theory arguing it was instead an external blast. Earlier
\n I spoke with Jim Polk, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
\n CNN investigative reporter and Jack Cashill, he’s the author of
\n “First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the attack on America.
\n ??(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)<\/span><\/p>\n

JIM POLK,
\n CNN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER:<\/b> Well, to begin with, the dispute
\n over whether a missile brought down the plane and not an internal
\n explosion begins with the witnesses on the ground. A number of
\n them said they saw a streak in the sky that they thought was a
\n missile. But there were two airline pilots in the area who had
\n a front row seat on this tragedy that happened right in front
\n of them. Let’s look and listen to what they said.<\/span><\/p>\n

DAVID
\n MCLEAN, PILOT:<\/b> It blew up in the air and then we saw two fireballs
\n go down to the water.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNIDENTIFIED
\n MALE: <\/b>That was the voice of David McLean, piloting a 737 over
\n Long Island. A bright light caught his eye.<\/span><\/p>\n

MCLEAN:
\n <\/b>All of a sudden, boom. Almost instantly, a fraction of a second
\n later, two streams of flames came out the bottom of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNIDENTIFIED
\n MALE:<\/b> Another pilot, Captain Paul Wheeler, was in the cockpit
\n of a Virgin Atlantic 747.<\/span><\/p>\n

CAPT.
\n PAUL WHEELER, PILOT:<\/b> I could see the cigar tube of the fuselage
\n and the windows and bits falling off, fire everywhere, and it
\n falling into the sea.<\/span><\/p>\n

UNIDENTIFIED
\n MALE: <\/b>Both had flown in the military, both know what a missile
\n looks like. Neither saw a missile that night.<\/span><\/p>\n

WHEELER:
\n <\/b>I was aware from both the height off the ground and the fact
\n there were no vapor trails in the sky that it was unlikely to
\n have been a missile that brought the aircraft down.<\/span><\/p>\n

MCLEAN:
\n <\/b>I thought there was a bomb on board. That was my initial \u2013
\n I did not see any missile at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

POLK:
\n <\/b>Now, Alison, there was a helicopter pilot who says he did
\n see a missile before the explosion, but he was at lower attitude
\n than those two airline pilots.<\/span><\/p>\n

KOSIK:
\n <\/b>Ok. So let me ask Jack. Jack, what do you think happened if
\n it wasn’t an internal explosion like those two pilots saw?<\/span><\/p>\n

JACK
\n CASHILL, AUTHOR:<\/b> Well, unlike what Jim says, there were 270
\n eyewitnesses to a missile strike, 96 of them, this is FBI eyewitnesses,
\n saw it from the horizon ascend all the way up to the plane. They
\n all described it the same way, that it was a red tip, a plume
\n trail after it, gray, and then it gets near the plane and it arcs
\n over, zigzags, hits the plane, blows up. One of those numbers,
\n number 73, described in detail the breakup sequence of the airplane
\n and she’s an aviation professional, before the FBI even knew what
\n it was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is
\n the challenge I have for Jim. The FBI recruited the CIA to recreate
\n this animation to show what the witnesses purportedly saw \u2013
\n basically discredit the eyewitnesses. What they said is after
\n the nose of the plane fell off, that it turned into a missile
\n and it ascended upright for about 3,500 feet confusing the eyewitnesses
\n on the ground, several of whom were military people, pilots, commercial
\n fishermen, et cetera \u2013 sophisticated people \u2013 into thinking
\n they saw a missile.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, when
\n CNN did its animation ten years later \u2013 ten years after the
\n crash, they eliminated that zoom climb altogether. So I ask Jim
\n this, if those \u2013 why did you eliminate the zoom climb if
\n the CIA \u2013 and what was the CIA doing involved in this in
\n the first place \u2013 if the CIA used that to expressly discredit
\n the eyewitnesses?<\/span><\/p>\n

POLK: Very
\n quickly, I would agree with you the CIA animation is controversial.
\n We did not make it climb in our animation because, frankly, the
\n transponder disappeared on the radar at the time of the explosion,
\n so there’s no altitude readout on the rest of the flight and so
\n there’s no supporting evidence for the CIA’s animation. ??(END
\n VIDEO CLIP)<\/span><\/p>\n

Missing
\n minute<\/span><\/p>\n

KOSIK:<\/b>
\n And you can see more about the investigation into this crash on
\n an Anderson Cooper Special Report: “TWA FLIGHT 800”
\n Sunday night at 11:00 p.m.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Before I comment
\n on what’s missing, let me add a little clarity to what is here.
\n In 1997, at the request of the FBI, the CIA prepared its zoom-climb
\n animation in an attempt to convince the media and the American people
\n that the eyewitnesses did not see a missile or missiles but rather
\n a noseless 747 rocketing into space. This became the official government
\n position.<\/span><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-45646","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}