by Jack Cashill
On Monday, President Donald Trump held a rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania.
Not many people have heard of Montoursville, a pleasant little town of fewer than 5,000 people. But those who have include the CIA analysts, FBI honchos and Clinton White House operatives who orchestrated the cover-up of the TWA 800 crash.
On July 17, 1996, the ill-fated 747 was shot down off the coast of Long Island, almost surely by accident, killing all 230 people on board.
Among the dead were 16 French-club students from Montoursville High School and five of their chaperones. I have been to Montoursville and spoken with people who lost their children. They are still waiting for answers.
Many people are waiting for answers, including the hundreds of TWA veterans with whom I have spoken, most recently at a heavily attended LAX event led by retired TWA Capt. Al Francis.
The TWA vets lost 53 of their colleagues on board that plane. If there is one among them who buys the government line that a rogue spark blew up the center fuel tank, I have not met him or her.
A question I have heard often, and I suspect Capt. Francis has too, is whether President Trump can or will reopen the investigation, there being no riper example of deep state treachery than the TWA 800 investigation.
I am not optimistic, but Monday’s rally gave me a glimmer of
hope. In the special congressional election held the following day,
Republican Fred Keller did not need the president’s help: he won by a
greater than 2-to-1 margin.
If they do not know this already, here, in brief, is what Trump’s people need to know.
- According to an air traffic controller at NY TRACON, “A primary radar return (ASR-9) indicated vertical movement intersecting TWA 800,” and then TWA800 disappeared.
- As anti-terror czar Richard Clarke tells it, he immediately called a high level meeting in the White House situation room.
- Illegally, but publicly, the FBI seized control of the investigation from the NTSB within hours of the crash.
- According to CIA documents, “The DI [Directorate of Intelligence] became involved in the ‘missile theory’ the day after the crash occurred.”
- The CIA’s George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission in March 2004 that a “wall” prevented the CIA and FBI from cooperating on national security issues.
- As the CIA documents prove, the CIA and FBI collaborated uneasily on the TWA 800 investigation for the next 16 months, wall or no wall.
- According to the CIA, within two weeks of the disaster, FBI agents had interviewed 144 “excellent” eyewitnesses to a likely missile strike and found the evidence for such a strike “overwhelming.”
- The CIA analyst boasted of discouraging the FBI from releasing its missile report. He seems to have succeeded.
- Two weeks later, the FBI permitted the New York Times to interview one and only one eyewitness. He saw the event out of the corner of his eye and thought it was a bomb.
- The NTSB eventually identified 258 eyewitnesses who had seen a glowing object streaking towards TWA 800. At least 56 had followed the object from the horizon.
- The Times interviewed none of 258.
- The eyewitnesses were not easily explained away. With the NTSB illegally shut out of witness review, the FBI turned the task over to the CIA.
- Working with just one-third of the witness statements, the CIA concluded that the eyewitnesses saw the aircraft ascend more than 3,000 feet after a spontaneous explosion blew off the plane’s nose.
- In April 1997, the head of the FBI missile team, Steve Bongardt, bucked the brass and demanded to know why the CIA failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object “hit the aircraft.” The CIA blew him off.
- Instead, the CIA created a specious animation to promote its exploding fuel tank theory. The FBI showed the animation once, when it closed the criminal case in November 1997.
- To sell this lie, as the CIA documents prove, the CIA created at least three critical witness statements from whole cloth and flagrantly corrupted more than 200 others.
- The deputy attorney general who successfully oversaw the
investigation, Jamie Gorelick, left the Justice Department in 1997 to
take a job with Fannie Mae. She would make more than 25 million over the next six years.
- In 2004, Gorelick left Fannie Mae to become a member of the 9-11 Commission.
- In April 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified to the 9-11 Commission, “The single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall.”
- “Full disclosure,” Ashcroft continued, “compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission.” Yes, that commissioner was Jamie Gorelick.
- As the nation learned in the aftermath of 9/11, the “wall” that was breached all too easily to protect the secrets of TWA 800 held much too firmly when it came to the secrets of our enemies.
Those responsible for the cover-up had to sleep just a wee bit
uneasily Monday night. They know what “Montoursville” means.
Here’s
hoping the president does too.
Did our intel leaders have any evidence when they pushed the Russia collusion line?
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has found that no one in the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, Democrats are busy moving the goal posts. But this is a distraction from the real reckoning that needs to come.
There was a great outcry among Democrats and their liberal media allies on Wednesday when it was announced that President Donald Trump had revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.
Brennan, who now works as a paid analyst for NBC and MSNBC, has been a harsh critic of the president and has even accused him of committing “treason” against America. That’s an ironic accusation, given the strong suspicion that Brennan was thoroughly involved in what appears to be a “treasonous” scheme by the Obama administration to spy on, undermine and ultimately overthrow the Trump campaign-turned-presidency.
Nevertheless, while the left wails about Brennan’s loss of a security clearance — which has absolutely nothing to do with his “freedom of speech,” and only affects his freedom to leak classified materials — there are plenty who support the move that strips Brennan of his access to sensitive information.
The Independent Journal Review noted that one individual who supported the move was author and retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, who explained why Brennan was a “clear and present danger” who never should have been granted a security clearance to begin with.
“I think it’s the right move by the president. Communist John Brennan never should’ve had a security clearance,” Tata stated on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade interjected that Brennan had admitted in the past that he voted for a Communist Party USA candidate in the 1976 presidential election.
“And he supported that way of life,” Tata stated. “And the president made the right decision in revoking his security clearance.”
But Tata wasn’t just talking about Brennan’s politics from decades ago.
“You look at what he did in his official capacity … he oversaw the Iran deal and all of the intelligence, he manipulated (Islamic State group) intelligence for President Obama, he was part of the Russian hacking, he was standing down the cyber team to allow the Russia hacking in 2016,” Tata said.“He had a secret meeting in March of 2016 with Russia. He flew to Moscow, and so there is a lot of evidence here. He met with Harry Reid and gave him parts of the unverified, Clinton paid-for dossier,” he continued.
Kilmeade interjected again to point out that Reid had stated the impression he received along with the dossier was “go and announce this,” implying that Brennan had utilized Reid to get the unverified dossier out into the public domain.
“And then he spied on American citizens and lied in front of Congress about that spying. And question 29 on the security clearance form says ‘have you ever supported overthrowing the U.S. government’ — all you gotta do is look at Brennan’s tweets and he supports the removal of this president, and right there that’s enough evidence to get rid of his clearance,” Tata declared.
IJR reported that Tata added, “I think that John Brennan is a clear and present danger and a threat to this nation.”
The general made a rather compelling case for why Brennan should have been stripped of his security clearance, a case echoed by the official White House statement read by press secretary Sarah Sanders about the matter, in which she stated that Brennan “has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility.”
While Brennan’s loss of security clearance may indeed be “unprecdented,” as the media made abundantly clear in their lamentations, that is true only insofar as he appears to be the first former CIA director to have involved himself in an equally “unprecedented” conspiracy to undermine and overthrow a duly elected president.
As was also made clear by the White House on Wednesday, Brennan may be the first high-level former Obama official to be stripped of his security clearance, but he likely won’t be the last.
Sanders included a list of other Obama administration officials who still retain security clearances, but whose credentials are “under review.”
That means they’re also at risk of being stripped of their clearances soon. And good riddance, truth be told. It’s about time.