Month: July 2018

On July 17, 1996, 22 years ago today, a missile or missiles blew TWA Flight 800 out of the sky off the south coast of Long Island.  The plane out of JFK was on its way to Paris.  All 230 souls on board, 53 of them TWA employees, died in the crash.

This is not conjecture.  This is fact.  As I told the audience of TWA veterans with whom I spoke during my 2016 Book-TV presentation at the TWA Museum in Kansas City, “If I were coming here to spread some conspiracy theory, I would be dishonoring their memory [the 53] and insulting you.”

The audience members, several of whom worked on the investigation, had no doubt I was telling them the truth, at least as well as we know it.  I would invite those who do have doubts to watch the Book-TV presentation. 

A question I was asked that evening, a question I have been asked more frequently since President Trump’s election, is whether either the president or Congress will reopen the investigation.  After watching the Peter Strzok hearing last Thursday, I am more inclined than ever to answer that question in the negative.  Although I remain hopeful the truth about TWA 800 will one day surface, the hearing reminded me of the many obstacles the truth faces.

The most formidable obstacle is the media, particularly the New York Times.  The saying goes that a scandal becomes a scandal only when the Times calls it a “scandal” on the front page.  Given this definition, Barack Obama and his media acolytes can pass a lie-detector test when they speak of Obama’s “scandal-free” presidency.

From the moment Strzok entered the committee hearing room, one could sense his confidence that the Times and other media, as well as the Democrats on the committee, would represent his interests.  He was right.

From the Times’ perspective, if there was a scandal, it was the cruel “grilling of the FBI agent.”  One Times headline – under the wishful rubric “Trump’s Russian Connection” – read simply, “Shouting and Personal Attacks at Strzok Hearing.”  This is the same Peter Strzok whom Trump accurately called “a disgrace to our country.”

In the case of Peter Strzok, the Times was primarily defending the Democratic Party and the larger progressive agenda.  Only indirectly was the Times protecting its own reputation.  In the case of TWA 800, the Times has much more at stake.

TWA 800 crashed in the Times’ backyard.  Given the paper’s power and proximity, the FBI talked almost exclusively to Times reporters.  In the first two months of the investigation, the Times reported the facts as the FBI provided them.  In that those facts did nothing to harm the re-election chances of Bill Clinton in November, the Times saw no reason to challenge them.

The Times’ myopia became obvious one month into the investigation, when reporter Andrew Revkin introduced readers to Witness 136, Michael Russell.  Russell told the FBI he was working on a survey vessel a mile offshore when “a white flash in the sky caught his eye.”  Of the of the 258 FBI witnesses to a likely missile strike, Russell was the only one the Times ever interviewed.

The FBI judged Russell’s story credible because it fit with the bureau’s already skewed plot line.  This was not Russell’s fault.  His observations were honest and accurate.  He caught the “white flash” out of the corner of his eye.

Russell’s account, Revkin reported, “bolstered the idea that a bomb, and not an exploding fuel tank, triggered the disintegration of the airplane.”  More to the point, his account “substantially weakened support for the idea that a missile downed the plane.”  That was the article’s money quote and the reason readers were allowed to hear from Michael Russell.

A week later, the Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold article with the screaming headline “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800.”  According to the Times, only the FBI’s uncertainty about whether the device was a bomb or a missile kept the bureau from declaring TWA 800’s destruction a crime.

By mid-September 1996, feeling confident they had the Times eating out of their hands, Clinton officials in Washington shifted from a bomb explanation to mechanical failure, and the Times shifted right along with them, with shockingly few questions asked.

The explosive residue throughout  the aircraft – the “prime evidence” of a month ago – disappeared without a credible explanation.  Michael Russell’s assertion that he did not see a fuel tank explosion was simply forgotten.

By November 1996, with Clinton successfully re-elected, the Times was blaming the “throbbing, fevered brain” of the internet for the willingness of interested citizens, now dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” to challenge the wisdom of the Times.

“Electrified by the Internet,” the Times wrote mockingly on November 24, 1996, “suspicions about the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 were almost instantly transmuted into convictions that it was the result of friendly fire.”  It would be another year before the FBI and CIA challenged that conviction, however falsely, but for the Times, the die was already cast.

As the Strzok hearing made clear, the Democrats in Congress have no interest in the truth.  Should the TWA 800 case ever make it to a congressional committee, the Democrats will feverishly obstruct any progress.

For the Times, the battle will be existential, life and death.  Its execs are the proud owners of the single greatest scandal in American media history.  To admit ownership is to close their doors.

With all the treason-shrieking and media howls about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election, it was refreshing to hear Fox News host Tucker Carlson pour some cold water onto this fever swamp. Here was Carlson, last night:

Carlson brings some needed perspective to what goes on in international affairs:  Nations don’t have friends, or even enemies; just interests. There was a famous quote from 19^th century U.K. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that phrased it well: “England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only eternal and perpetual interests.”

By contrast, America is the home of one of the most laughed-at ideas that goes on in international affairs – and we can still see traces of it in the current Trump-Putin hysteria: Harry Stimson’s claim against spying on the grounds that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Nobody disputes the stupidity of that one.

Now we have all this yelling about Russian electoral interference as if it were unique, singular, unusually diabolical, and unprecedented.

Carlson brings up the Mexican election interference (and a lot of meddling that has followed since on the issue of tariffs), and Mexico isn’t the only one.

Here is what I wrote about the Mexican case earlier:

While I am no fan of the tariffs, and certainly don’t think the leftist, anti-American steelworkers union deserves any succor from Trump, I am even less of a fan of Mexico’s politicized tariff moves, targeted at specific voters, punishing those it disagrees with to make them pay – and, by extension, boosting leftists, the same leftist Democrats its own illegals are known to vote for.

Can’t you just see them?  Slinking around, poring over trade statistics, looking for the actual addresses of U.S. manufacturers of goods bought in their country, maybe even sending their spies or “diplomats” to these counties to gather intelligence, and then matching these places of manufacture to a database of U.S. counties that voted for President Trump?  That’s what they did.

Mexico has done amazing amounts of meddling in our elections, particularly the last one.  It was the only nation that openly advertised to its nationals to come over to its diplomatic consulates (not places U.S. nationals are allowed to go to) and register to vote in U.S. elections, something that in California undoubtedly led to a lot of Mexican nationals voting and the resulting cancelation of Americans’ votes, meaning the disenfranchisement of American voters.  That’s a foreign policy objective for them.

California, understand, does not check if voters are illegal and on its voter signature form and has slyly changed its “I certify I am a U.S. citizen” to “I certify I am a U.S. resident” to avoid prosecuting illegals for voting.  Mexico knows this well.  With Mexico registering the voters of what is not its own country, but a foreign country, you can bet a lot of illegal voting has come courtesy of the Mexican government.

The Mexicans also had a government-linked entity run ads in their own country urging their nationals to encourage their American relatives (not distinguishing citizen from non-citizen) to vote here in the U.S. – for Democrats, of course.

That’s a heckuva a lot of meddling and a lot more than the computer hacks, the piddly Facebook ads, and the uncertainty sown by RT News, which is about the extent of this.

The big, big players in fact were, surprise, the U.K. and Australia, America’s purported closest allies.

Here I wrote about the mess Australia made on the U.S. election trail:

Now a new investigative report suggests a reason why: turns out Australia had been meddling in our election, in a failed bid to ensure Hillary Clinton’s victory.  The Hill reports that Downer had earlier dispensed some $25 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation back in 2006, leaving Australia in a position to ask for some fancy favors from the Democrats.  It’s far from the only instance.  Clarice Feldman notes in an email: “The only documented meddling in the election was by Australians.”  She sent links to stories showing that illegal campaign donations went to Bernie Sanders from Australian sources, which resulted in a fine for Sanders, and the Australian Labor Party sent operatives to work against President Trump.  Meddling, indeed.

It’s the Australian ruling party, the Liberal Party, that meddled most.  Turns out Alexander Downer, the supposedly untainted, dispassionate outside source that fingered one of President Trump’s young advisers in London who had had contacts with Russian sources as a likely national security concern, was anything but dispassionate.  He was in bed with the Clintons all along, shoveling the $25 million in Australian government cash into the Clinton Foundation coffers back in 2006.  Not surprisingly, he’s a member of the same Liberal Party as Turnbull, and with the London embassy post an important one for Australia, you can bet they were tight.

And one I didn’t write about was the U.K., which left a string of circumstantial crumbs – from Christopher Steele’s role in creating the phony “pee” dossier about Donald Trump (colluding with Sidney Blumenthal) to other stuff.

And don’t think it doesn’t go two ways. Some lefty scholar assembled a list of 81 elections the U.S. has been known to have interfered in here. Several stick out in my mind: First, President Obama openly interfered with a recent election in Israel in a bid to get Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu unseated. He also was known to have spied, bigtime, on Israeli diplomatic and government missions.

There was also Russia, 1996, which assured the re-election of Boris Yeltsin, a poor, hammered drunk who was so unfit to run the country he couldn’t even campaign. The alternative was an avowed communist, which would have been a mess, but there you have it, and don’t think Putin isn’t aware of this.

The U.S. also interfered substantially, via the Soros front groups, in Ukraine, to throw out Viktor Yanukovich, something that rather negates the hands-off attitude of the hand-wringers in the Russia-Trump case. You can bet Putin remembers that even more vividly, and has decided two can play that game.

Now let’s go back to Australia, where the U.S. intelligence community seems to have done its darndest to try to throw out an Australian prime minister, as documented in the Christopher Boyce espionage case of the 1970s, the old Falcon and Snowman story. Well? What can we say here.

Electoral interference is the norm, because nations have interests, not friends. Sorry, neo-Stimsonites. Carlson had it right.

Image Credit: Mapswire // Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License