Excerpted from ENN Daily Intelligence Report-03/12/97-Vol. 3, No. 071

"CONSPIRACY THEORIES"
Editorial by Steve Macko, ENN Managing Editor

I began work on Wednesday by finding a large number of e-mail messages regarding the latest news surrounding the downing of TWA Flight 800 in my mailbox. The Boeing 747 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island on 17 July and killed all 230 aboard.

The latest rumors were in regards to a reddish residue that was found on the some recovered seats from the plane which are said by some people to indicate the presence of solid-rocket fuel, which in-turn "proves" that a missile brought down the ill-fated plane.

Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom, the chief law enforcement officer in the case, says that the residue found was from an adhesive in the seats of the plane.

Many of the messages that I received on Wednesday also concerned a recent article from a person who I will not dignify by naming, who is thought to be an "foreign agent." That's okay, he laughingly calls ERRI a mouthpiece of U.S. intelligence. His cohort in the theory was recently interviewed on CBS' "60 Minutes" recently and came off looking like a "nut case" that some say he is.

ERRI has many times stated its position in regards to the crash of TWA Flight 800. I will reiterate once again. We do not know what brought the plane down. We are open-minded to the three working theories that investigators are considering. Those theories are: 1. a mechanical malfunction; 2. a bomb; 3. a anti-aircraft missile. There are not enough F-A-C-T-S known to the public or our agency to draw a firm conclusion about the exact cause of this tragedy.

ERRI only deals and bases its reports and analysis on known F-A-C-T-S. We do not and will not deal with wild conspiracy theories. That's not what we do here and will not do here as long as I have a say in the content of these reports.

In the past, we have examined the bomb theory considerably. ERRI counterterrorist analysts and virtually every other reputable counterterrorist, at first, highly suspected a bomb brought the plane down. There has only been one problem with the theory -- there's been no PROOF of a bomb. There has been NO evidence of a bomb -- as of yet.

This publication has also examined the missile theory. Again, there is NO EVIDENCE that a missile struck the airliner and thus there is no proof -- as of yet.

Since none of us at ERRI are airline maintenance experts or aeronautical engineers, we really have not examined the possibility of a mechanical malfunction in great depth. We'll leave that to the NTSB and others with the expertise.

And, since ENN does not currently have investigators working on the case in New York, we must rely on the facts that are presented by federal investigators. I have checked into the background of Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom and we have closely watched his demeanor in every interview of him that we have seen. We have come to the conclusion that the man has integrity "coming out of his ears." We have no reason not to believe the information that he offers.

We have no choice but to watch and wait for the investigation to reach its final conclusion. At that time, we will determine if all the facts "jive" and then will report the F-A-C-T-S accordingly.

As for being a lackey for the FBI, as some conspiracy theorists and foreign agents have called us, then I guess I'm probably the first lackey who has ever publicly called for the resignation of my "boss." <G>

[Editor's note; In the last paragraph, Mr. Macko is jokingly referring to at least one previous editorial in which he advocated the resignation of FBI Director Louis Freeh. The issue in question in that editorial was an unrelated matter to TWA-800]

(C) Copyright, EmergencyNet NEWS Service, 1997. All Rights Reserved. Redistribution without permission is prohibited by law.

Emergency Response & Research Institute
6348 N. Milwaukee Ave., #312 Chicago, IL. 60646
(773) 631-3774 - Voice
(773) 631-4703 - Fax
(773) 631-3467 - Modem/Emergency BBS On-Line
http://www.emergency.com - Website
enn@emergency.com - E-mail

For a series of ENN reports, starting with coverage from the time of the original incident, Click here

ERRI Clarification:

In order to better understand Mr. Macko's editorial, above, please find two recent allegations (below) by Mr. Parveez Sayed of the "Shanti RTV News Agency." Mr. Parveez, as he readily admits in the last paragraph (highlighted) of the next article below, brought forward the first allegations that the TWA tragedy was the result of "friendly-fire," and did so within hours of the incident....long before there was ANY evidence available to any observer.

He again publicly reiterated his charges approximately 72 hours later and has allegedly been involved ever since in a movement to discredit the FBI, NTSB, U. S. Navy and United States Government. A review of Mr. Parveez's previous reporting would indicate that using fax machines, e-mail, and a World-Wide-Web page, that he has been engaged in a campaign of anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-Jewish and pro-Islamic propaganda for several years. Mr. Parveez is reportedly also associated with the Saudi Arabian, Iraqi, Iranian dissident/exile community in the United Kingdom.

The Emergency Response & Research Institute is on record as being of the opinion that there has been a concerted effort by "foreign agents" to engage in a disinformation campaign that is designed to bring suspicion and discredit upon the United States government and to purposefully confuse and obstruct the official investigation into the TWA-800 tragedy. Further, we believe that it is possible that this campaign is part of a dedicated effort to protect extremists who have committed terrorist acts against the United States.

"In conclusion, if it was a missile that blew TWA Flight 800 out of the air on that fateful night in July..we believe it was fired by terrorists, and has subsequently been exploited by propagandists, who want to harm the U.S.A. and cause exactly the kind of fear and confusion that has resulted." -- C. L. Staten, ERRI Executive Director

Sunday 09 March 1997, London-UK [SRTV0001]

From: Parveez Syed Global Media Monitoring Unit Shanti Communications

TWA 800 a US navy missile hit denied again!
by Parveez Syed (c) Shanti RTV news agency

LONDON [SCN] - A television programme on CBS in the US recently ridiculed those who question the official lies about Paris-bound TWA flight 800 which crashed on Tuesday 17 July 1996.

The programme then called for the "policing" of the Internet. "May be CBS should be stripped of its FCC licenses, for continually defrauding the public," a Western intelligence official told Shanti RTV news agency. According to a new report, however, a missile may have shot down the aircarft. New evidence of a missile hit is coming to light and that the FAA may release the radar tape that indicates an object streaks toward TWA 800 right before it exploded.

The report "points to a missile" as the cause of the explosion that killed all 230 people aboard TWA Flight 800 off New York's Long Island almost seven months ago. The evidence includes reddish residue found on several seat backs that laboratory analysis showed to be "consistent with solid missile fuel" ingredients with some adhesive qualities. The report said information from FBI and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) documents and investigative sources indicates the plane may have been a victim of a terrorist missile or "friendly fire" - a US Navy weapon gone astray. The report was published by the Riverside Press-Enterprise (RPE) in the US. It is one of the largest circulation papers in Southern California.

Debris pattern provides key to mystery. But FBI rejects key portion of conclusion. The answer, according to a former accident investigator, to the mystery of what happened to TWA 800 lies clearly written on the ocean floor. He says a missile downed the airliner. The pattern of the first wreckage to hit the water, combined with evidence of missile-propellent residue in the Boeing 747, clearly indicates that a missile carrying an inert warhead smashed through the airliner, author and investigative reporter James Sanders has concluded.

NTSB and FBI officials, however, dispute that assertion. "We will be testifying before Congress on Tuesday [11 March 1997] that as of today there is no physical evidence of a bomb or a missile in any of the records (evidence) that we have recovered," NTSB spokesman Peter Goelz said. Sanders and reporter Mark Sauter co-authored two books, "Soldiers of Misfortune" and "The Men We Left Behind," about America's prisoners of war from World War I. New evidence, much of it distilled from FBI and NTSB documents, points to a missile as the cause of the crash.

US federal officials have spent almost seven months sifting through the recovered wreckage. Other officials have been intimidating key witnesses and journalists who question the official lies. Some top officials have been dismissing the "friendly US navy fire" theories. Officials still claim that this unprecedented effort has yet to rule out any of their three working theories - a bomb, a missile or mechanical failure - of how the Boeing 747 crashed, killing all 230 people aboard in the second worst disaster in US aviation history.

However, independent computer analysis and laboratory tests provide compelling testimony that a missile brought down the Paris-bound jumbo jet. "That evidence includes: an analysis of the way debris fell into the Atlantic Ocean supports the idea that the initial event in the disaster involved an object striking the right side of the aircraft just ahead of the wing, travelling up through the floor and across the cabin before exiting the left side of the plane in the area of row 17," according to the PRE report. "A trail of reddish residue found imbedded in 15 seats from rows 17-19 contains chemical elements consistent with solid missile fuel, a conclusion roundly denied by the FBI, which tested the material. A tapes scheduled to be released reportedly show a projectile travelling faster than 1,500 miles per hour on a collision course with TWA 800 just seconds before the jetliner".

As for TWA Flight 800, analysis of the wreckage also disproves the most widespread version of the cause of the tragedy, an explosion of the airliner's center wing tank, Sanders said. He used classified documents obtained from confidential sources inside the official investigation to reconstruct the plane's final moments and called on his own skills as a former auto accident investigator and officer in the Seal Beach Police Department. Sanders said he believes high officials at the FBI and NTSB, the two principal agencies investigating the crash, must already have reached the conclusion that a missile caused the crash. Sanders says he does not know, he says the government is attempting to cover up the true cause of the crash.

James Kallstrom, the FBI's assistant director in charge of the investigation, bristled at the suggestion he or his agents were covering up anything. "I wish we had something that was definitive of any theory," but the FBI does not, he said. "You could walk in there (reconstruction area) and have 50 theories and to the amateur mind and novice conclude that something specific happened".

Sanders said the US government's documents paint the trail, not him. "I would love to say I'm a genius, but any accident investigator in the US would take this same information and come up with the same answer in two to three weeks," Sanders said.

A Federal Aviation Administration crash analyst who reviewed the NTSB Flight 800 crash documents said they made him believe some outside object pierced the jumbo jet from right to left and started the catastrophic sequence that eventually dismembered the plane. The analyst spoke on the condition his name not be used.

TWA Flight 800 took off from JFK Airport in New York at 20:19 hours on 17 July 1996, on a nonstop, cross-Atlantic flight to Paris. At 20:31 hours just 12 minutes after the take-off, the jet was about 12 miles south of the Long Island coastline, over the Atlantic Ocean, when it lit up the sky in a blaze and plunged into the ocean. Everyone on board died. About 150 eyewitnesses from the ground reported seeing what they thought to be a missile, climbing to meet the 747 seconds before seeing the jet erupt into flames. The FBI lists 34 witnesses it considers "credible". US government officials, including the vice chairman of the NTSB and the White House press secretary, since have made statements all but dismissing a missile or "friendly fire" from US military forces as the culprit.

Sanders said his quest for the answer to the fate of TWA Flight 800 got off to a real start in November 1996. Someone whom Sanders declined to identify passed him a 104-page printout of the FBI-NTSB catalog of every article recovered from the undersea crash site.

The tragic tally, thousands of items long, includes clothing, luggage, food trays, a woman's purse, passenger seats, aluminum wing fragments, beams and struts, human bodies and body parts. Each entry lists the latitude and longitude of the resting place on the ocean floor of an item or group of items, pinpointed within a few feet by US navy and police scuba divers using satellite-assisted position-finding electronics.

Sanders punched that information into a personal computer and produced a diagram of the debris pattern. The resulting map reveals a west-to-east swath of wreckage scattered across two miles of ocean floor. "It's like skid marks on the bottom of the ocean," Sanders said. "The diagram tells you a story of what happened". His experience reconstructing auto accidents led him to home in on the first 4,700-foot stretch of undersea debris.

"It is generally recognised that whatever was impacted first falls off first. That principal applies whether you're in the air or on the ground, moving slowly or moving fast," Sanders said. "It's like the crash of a Corvette moving more than 120 miles an hour. I've seen a Corvette engine end up more than three-tenths of a mile from the road, but that's not where the impact occurred. To find the cause, you trace the skid marks back to the point of impact".

A January NTSB report describing the order in which the plane fell apart states that the point at which items left the plane was among the more critical criteria needed to establish the cause. Two of the first aircraft parts to fall into the ocean, according to the FBI-NTSB log, were the R-2 door, a door on the right side of the forward cabin, and a leading edge of the right wing where the wing joins the fuselage, or body of the aircraft.

The area between the door and the wing fragment corresponds exactly to a "gouge" that investigators discovered on the right side of the fuselage, Sanders said. That hole, Sanders said, was where a speeding missile punched into the airliner. Investigators also discovered a second, larger hole on the opposite or left-hand side of the fuselage, one of Sanders' inside sources said. Sanders said he believes the missile, which he thinks contained no explosive warhead, created the second hole exiting the airliner. At the time Sanders says a missile hit Flight 800, the jet was traveling at 395mph. Sanders said he was told that the damage would have created "hurricane forces inside the cabin, sucking out anything not bolted down" through the left-side exit hole. Proof of those forces also lies in the initial portion of flight 800's watery grave, Sanders said. Everything ejected from the forward passenger cabin, including dozens of bodies, 42 passenger seats and a galley, landed in a west-to-east path running parallel and 1,000 to 2,000 feet to the left of the airplane's actual flight path, according to the FBI NTSB log.

Sanders noted that "left-side bias" also showed up in the resting places of dozens of bodies recovered in that first stretch of sea bottom. Sanders said the official government statements and news reports on theories into the cause of the crash have given short shrift to that first, critical 4,700-foot portion of the crash site. Instead, the government has focused its analysis on the far-less-revealing wreckage that fell into the ocean afterward, he said. More missile evidence reached Sanders in a December 1996 conversation with an investigator who had access to the facility in Suffolk County, Long Island, where the NTSB was identifying and piecing together the recovered parts of the aircraft, Sanders said. The investigator, whom Sanders declined to identify, said some of the passenger seats were coated with an orange-red residue, Sanders said.

With help from the investigator, Sanders said he pinpointed the residue-coated seats as being in rows 17, 18 and 19, all directly between the "entry" and "exit" holes in the fuselage. Sanders said he later obtained samples of the residue and sent one to a commercial laboratory for analysis. The analysis by West Coast Analytical Service in Santa Fe Springs, California, found the residue contained, among other elements, silicon, calcium and aluminum. Those elements, Sanders said, are consistent with emissions from the burning of solid rocket fuel.

"The results were conclusive," Sanders said. Sanders dismissed a different theory for what caused the crash. NBC News, citing sources at the NTSB, has reported the most likely cause of the disaster was an explosion of the aircraft's center wing tank. Sanders said analysis of the undersea wreckage "completely eliminates" that theory. Sanders agrees that a fire did occur in the fuel tank. However, that event did not occur until well after the aircraft already was in trouble, he said.

The NTSB Metallurgy/Structures Sequencing Group Report, signed by its nine members on 22 Jan 1997, reached the same official conclusion. According to Sanders' version, the missile's impact led to a fire in the center wing tank, located underneath the cabin floor and just behind, or aft, of the missile's path through the aircraft. The tank exploded 4,700 feet after the missile impact, causing the already weakened forward cabin to break free from the rest of the airplane, Sanders said.

The forward cabin - including the cockpit, all first-class seats and the most forward-placed coach-class seats - plunged into the ocean, Sanders said. By this point, most of the crew and forward passengers had been ejected from the plane or went down with the forward cabin, Sanders said. Meanwhile, the remaining part of the aircraft - most of the fuselage, including the remaining passenger sections, both wings, all four engines and the tail section - stayed airborne a few seconds longer, Sanders said.

According to the FBI-NTSB logs, almost all of the center wing tank ended up on the ocean floor, 12,000-feet east of the first fall of debris. It defies the science of accident reconstruction, Sanders said, that something located virtually at the end of such a long debris trail could have caused a disaster like TWA flight 800. "Things fall generally in the order in which they are impacted," Sanders said. "The center wing tank, if it was the initiating event (of the crash), would be among the first debris, not the last".

The NTSB's metallurgy report, designed to determine the order in which the plane fell apart, supports Sanders' conclusions. The group studied the crash debris in December 1996 and January 1997, starting after Sanders began his study and reaching consensus after Sanders reached his. In its report, the NTSB said recovery of the plane's remains, now about 95 percent, "gave a clear indication" that pieces "from the forward portion of the wing center section and the fuselage directly in front of the wing front spar were the earliest pieces to separate from the airplane," followed by the nose. The "wings, including major portions of the wing center section, and the aft portion of the fuselage, including empennage" (tail), were the last to fall.

Within hours after the TWA 800 crash, Shanti RTV reported that US navy 'accidentally' shot down the jetliners. The latest update on TWA merely confirms what Shanti RTV has been reporting since 18 July 1996. The navy is still relying on discredited FBI labs, and the FBI and the NTSB officials to keep the lid on it for much longer or forever. It is alleged that a number of individuals within US intelligence agencies and individuals are somehow linked with the cover-up. "They have been spoon-feeding media groups for months against Shanti RTV news agency, Ian Goddard and others who question official lies," according to the Western intelligence source. "They have been intimidating Goddard, Pierre Salinger and Parveez Syed and others". The intelligence source specifically identified the several FBI, CIA, NTSB officials including Ronald Lewis and his Inteligyst Group; Alijandra Mogilner and ERRI.

ends Presented by: Shanti RTV (c) 09 March 1997.

Wednesday 12 March 1997, London-UK [SRTV0001]

From: Parveez Syed Global Media Monitoring Unit Shanti Communications

TWA 800: another witness saw missile hit
by Parveez Syed (c) Shanti RTV news agency

LONDON [SCN] - A US Air National Guardsman (ANG) - Capt Chris Baur, a helicopter pilot - who saw the explosion of TWA flight 800 on 17 July 1996 repeatedly told authorities he thought a missile had struck the plane, a intelligence source told Shanti RTV news agency. Many eyewitnesses say they saw something that could have been a missile in the sky the night of the crash.

Baur's clear view from the helicopter and his military training would make his account one of the most credible. He "saw a track of light and saw a hard explosion, then another explosion," the source told Shanti RTV news agency. The pilot then shared his observations with the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and investigators from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. An NTSB investigator who interviewed Baur dismissed the evidence, claiming what the pilot saw could be explained by mechanical malfunction that might have created "a tongue of flame *coming from* the aircraft," the source explained.

Baur's eyewitness account comes to light as critics of the official probe, cover-up and initimidation said to have evidence suggesting that TWA 800 was shot down by an errant US navy missile. A Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, claimed US official investigators had thoroughly probed the issue, even inventorying the navy's missile arsenal. Bacon claimed "there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory".

Commenting on the accidental "friendly fire" possibility, James Hall, chairman of the NTSB claimed that there is no physical evidence of TWA Flight 800 being shot down by a missile. The FBI seized a videotape on Tuesday 11 March 1997 from the Florida home of retired United Airlines pilot Richard Russell, who has long supported the theory that a US navy missile brought down the plane. Russell contends the tape is a copy of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar and that it shows an object speeding *toward* the jetliner. The tape is to be reviewed by a US federal grand jury which has been considering possible criminal elements of the crash, but the exact nature of that probe is "top secret," the souce told Shanti RTV news agency.

The NTSB and FBI officials continue to claim they cannot yet determine whether the jumbo jet was brought down by a bomb, a missile or a mechanical malfunction. The crash into the Atlantic Ocean off New York's Long Island almost seven months ago killed all 230 people aboard.

Last year Muslims were being blamed - by self-styled "terrorism experts" - for the crash. New, independent evidence indicates that a missile probably brought down the jetliner. This would give credence to the theory of an accidental shootdown by US forces training in the area. The evidence includes reddish residue found on several seat backs that laboratory analysis showed to be "consistent with solid missile fuel" ingredients.

ends Presented by: Shanti RTV (c) 12 March 1997.

Additional reference

Return to the Police Operations page