Its my pleasure to welcome jack to the museum for this presentation. Youre going to do questions and answers so hell be doing q a after his speech. Welcome jack. [applause] this is a great venue, i suspect its the first time book tv has done one from an error line hanger. This is probably my tenth book tv but it is closest to my heart. Let me start background. Many of you know that on july 17, 1996, at 819 p. M. , twa flight 800 life to the jfk airport in hundred life the jfk airport in new york bound for paris. Twelve minutes later, 8 31 p. M. Off the coast of long island, the popular south shore of long island it was blown out of the sky. 230 people were killed. Fiftythree of them were twa employees. Many of you in this room knew at least some of those people. There is a memorial in their honor at the museum and if i were coming here and to spread a Conspiracy Theory i would be dishonoring their memory and would be insulting you. Instead im here to tell you what happened on july 17, 1996. And the nights, days, months, and years thereafter. There are people in this room who know more about aviation than i do. At the end of my conversation im going to take questions and answers because i know some of you have firsthand experience with this tragedy. Heres what we know. In the last few years researchers have unearthed a mother load of new information from essential intelligence agency, the cia. So the question is what is the cia doing involving itself with the Domestic Airline crash. We also have interesting videos and a lot of whistleblowers from with inside the investigation have come forward. The state of our knowledge today is much better than it was 20 years ago. When i say we, i have to to give credit to the people who do research here, sanders, a physicist, christina who came here and spoke, a former cbs producer, a former eastern and United Airline pilot. And some good people at accuracy media including roger and hank as the investigator and others. They deserve a lot of credit for digging up the information im going to share. I wanted wanted to let that be known. Since the book has, at least 100 individuals individuals from within the military or the Aviation Industry support my thesis. Many of them work for and at the investigation itself. Many of them are still angry about what they experienced in what happened to them. Heres what we know. According to an air Traffic Controller, in fact he just emailed me today saying he loved the book and that he thanked me for treating his story accurately. I wrote about it. It. I did not release his name. He worked for 30 years as an air Traffic Controller, he wants to keep his pension. He says i have children. You hear hear that from a lot of people. What you he told me that night, hes had a primary radar return indicated vertical movement intersecting twa 800. That shows on you screens and that is what precipitated the panic in washington d. C. Those the first notice, was not the eyewitnesses that came out of the air Traffic Control centers in new york, that some something had happened to the plane. Seconds before it intersected that airplane it disappears. The twa 800 notation disappears from the screen. The supervisor comes over to my correspondent and he says, have you ever seen anything like this before . And i said yes, missile test when i was in the navy. I saw it all the time. So was not something unknown to him. The next day he comes back in and wants to review the tape. He goes to supervisor come i want to take another look at that tape. The supervisor says no, it is gone. It has been taken, this is a violation of all protocol. Tapes are tapes are supposed to stay there for future adjudication. Now, the the only person who has spoken about what happened next in washington is Richard Clark, he spoke a liar and a breaker so it is hard to sort through the information to get at the truth. But we spent some time on this. Everyone else who writes about that period of time in that administration is completely silent in the event. Even those the it is the number one new story 1996. It was Richard Clark titles the chapter, the almost war of 1996. Clark, 96. Clark, thinkest on the truth here, he convenes a meeting of the in the situation room in the white house at 9 00 p. M. , i have an hour after the crash. I know from Hillary Clintons blog so my sources within the white house that the clintons return to the white house just about 8 30 p. M. After routine fundraising nearby. They retreated to the family quarters and they stay there the rest of the night. They did not go to the situation room. I asked who was with them in the family quarters and he could only come up with one name, sandy berger. Now burger was the Deputy National security adviser, his boss was a National Security advisor and is a set elsewhere, he knew knew that when the conversation got political he left the room. Berger was the political guy, political decisions were about to be made. Among them was the insertion of the fbi into the investigation. One of my most helpful people in this book and hes going to come into the story later on, his name is vernon gross, he is a former ntsb board member. Theres a five members on the National Transportation safety board. It is a pretty powerful position. Vernon is a leading expert in the country on plane crashes. He was so knowledgeable that cnn called him and that night to do on air interpretation of events. On on your commentary. He spent the next six hours there. And as he tells me he says i wasnt there couple of hours and already the fbi has taken over the investigation. As of former board member of the ntsb this was unprecedented and illegal. The ntsb was set up to be independent. At that point the second of sacrifice their independence and yielded to the fbi. Now no one knew at that time that some other insertion was taking place on the very first day. This we know from the treasure trove of cia documents that we have unearthed. This is what we know, according to their own documents quote, the director of intelligence became involved in the theory that the day after the crash occurred. The cia has absolutely no business being involved in this kind of event. Especially since the year before, 1995 the department of justice sent out a memo and is often known as the wall memo. The wall memo says that there is a wall between the intelligence gathers in the cia and the criminal investigators in the fbi. They cannot collaborate because it would be a violation of peoples rights, who knows. And george pennant in 2004, at that point he was the director of central intelligence, the the head of the cia. He told the 9 11 commission that he was the first introduce the notion to the public about the wall. He wasnt the only one who talked about it but he was the first to do it. As a cia documents prove, the cia and the fbi for the next 16 months would collaborate on the twa investigation. But what they did not say outright is that the collaboration was designed to subvert the twa 800 investigation. The cia had no other role and it becomes incredibly clear when you reach your documents than to make all missiles go away. On the Opening Night that is all people were talking about. Within the first few hours. We know that there is one, at least one amateur video taken of the complete sequence of events. Some of you may have seen it. It was aired on msnbc to the best my knowledge, probably two or three times. I talked to one of the fellows who is a technical director at msnbc, and he said we showed it a few times and then these guys had copies of it told us mouth shut throughout. That was the end of that. Now the elaboration of what was seen i got from a 747 pilot and he was willing to give me his name and he allowed me to use his name which is a sign of some confidence, he he was laid up in a hong kong hospital with a back surgery. His wife came to visit him. They had nothing to do but watch a tv for several weeks. This is during the sequence of events. He events. He said we watched the video over and over again. Heres what we see, theres a bunch of people Milling Around on the deck. And then someone says look, fireworks. And then they see, and this is a lot people say the same thing, they see an object to come up off the horizon. It has a red burning tip and gray smoking contrail and heading out to see and it arched over. And then disappears for a second and then theres a bright white flash, big orange fireball and the plane falls out of the sky. He saw this he said 30 50 times. He saw the video. Nelson to melt would write a novel along this video. Now, we get into the cia documents and make it interesting. On july 30, 13 days after the crash, the cia analysts, and i know the name of their head guy, i may or may or may not mention it later, meets with the fbi whistle team. It is only two or three man missile team. He headlines the memo to his superior and says hold the presses. And that is interesting. He tells his sin. That he just met with the missile team, the missile team has already interviewed 144 excellent eyewitnesses to a missile attack on twa flight 800. He says the evidence for a missile attack for a surface to air missile is overwhelming. He said these people are mainly professionals and their testimony is too consistent for it to be anything but a missile attack. Now the cia analyst, talks how he discovers the fbi from Going Forward from this report which was about ready to be published. He was successful because that report never came forward. Between july 30 and august 17 someone gets to the fbi. They came to the job intending to do it justice, someone gets to them before august 17 because on august 17 the fbi speaks for the first time to the New York Times about eyewitnesses. Now the fbi would speak almost exclusively to the New York Times. They became very dependent on that relationship. In fact, at the heart of this story im telling is a media scandal. More than a government scandal, government scandal, more than anything else, it is a media scandal. At the heart of the media scandal is the New York Times. So they meet with the New York Times and the stories reported on august 17 so they probably met on the 15th or 16th for in two weeks or so after the missile team met with the cia. The New York Times is told that there are fewer than one dozen credible eyewitnesses. The New York Times is allowed to interview just one of those eyewitnesses. He is a good witness, his name is michael russell. He is on a barge a barge doing survey work. He is pretty knowledgeable. He said you can see it out of the corner of his eye, bright white flash. Then he saw the plane fall immediately out of the sky. Now there are two things the nt ntsb would say but for at the time and serve the purpose. The purpose was to switch the scenario from missile to bomb. So for whatever reason the administration decided with a bomb it was that as scary as a missile. By by the way this crash took place two days before it so there was a lot of it steak for keeping airlines fly in keeping commercial traffic in gear and keeping people away from feeling insecure about taking airplanes. Now the New York Times would interview, with 84 through through the fbi would interview 258 eyewitnesses who sought an object is streaking up and hitting the airplane. Ninetysix of them sought come up off the horizon. And they tracked it all of the way up. Of those 258, you know how many the New York Times would interview before the investigation was over . Zero. I talked to 20 or 30 of them. Theyre still there and want to tell their story. Zero. They would speak to not a single one of those 258 officials witnesses. Now 750 people and ill give a report to a report to the fbi, thousands more sought because i know people who chose not to talk to the fbi. But between the fifteenth, the seventeenth, the 23rd the New York Times kept running more stories about bombs. They claimed stuff was found on the plane, traces of residue was found inside and outside the plane. On the 23rd of of august they ran this headline, above the right, the device exploded in cabin twa 800. They are pointing towards a bomb but they are not ruling out a missile. It exploded in the cabin. Above consigns the welfare reform bill, one of the headlines had to go. It it was this one. And then the bond story is going away. The day before the 233rd im sure the Justice Department was aware that the fbi had been talking too much. So the head of the fbi investigation is called to washington for his first meeting. Heading up this meeting, as the information suggests his Deputy Attorney general. Her name name will come back to play and we can keep track of that. Reno was the attorney general and they worked around her. Just like they worked around tony and the National Security council. And through sandy berger. There was no record of what took place on that meeting on the 22nd. We do note that all behaviors began to change immediately afterward. From the 22nd on therapy no more interviews with eyewitnesses for at least several months. And then those later we know that on the 23rd the faa started searching all over the world to see if they could find a day and a place where twa flight 800, the play was used for a Training Exercise with explosive training aids. It took them several weeks to find that. And then a then a series of events began to happen. Begin trim between the 23rd in the 19th of september theres more stories about the bomb and they didnt know quite which way to take partly because the fbi did not know what direction to take. On september 19 the story switches to washington. Now it is the ntsb leading the direction. What they say is that perhaps it was a mechanical failure after all. They said a mechanical failure alone might just explain what happened. This was a problem still because we had all of the residue traces on the plane where the headline so how do we reconcile these two . Will the next day the fbi puts out a press release that the tw a800 plane had been used for a Training Exercise in st. Louis six weeks before this happened. On the 21st of september the New York Times runs an article saying that very same thing and basically kills the investigation. The investigators are saying its going to be hard for us to make her case now that theres this thing that bomb training outside. By the 20 first, neither the fbi or the New York Times had cut talk to the cop who did the training. The first first person in the media to talk to that cop was me. Six years after the fact. Nobody had talked to him in that time. What they decided was that he did his exercises and is an africanamerican guy who, excuse language, was pissed off to this day about what they did to them. They ruined his reputation. They ruined his reputation before they talk to them. They concluded that it was a sloppy exercise, he had training aids all over the plane and those were the accounts for the explosive residue sound on the plane. Will the stuff that was found on the wing, his wing, his dog was not capable of getting out there and doing that and that didnt matter. But they just went with it. Heres what they could have found out within an hours worth of investigation. The fbi, they put on his report was the time of the exercise they didnt exercise on a 747 on june twentieth, in st. Louis on a wide body and they did it from 1045 10 11 15 p. M. The plane left the gates, what they did not say is that there 400 people on board and theyre bound for hawaii, now some of you who have worked on loading International Flights know that you cannot do that in 15 minutes, the cop did is exercise on a completely sterile plane. Theres no one on boards play for the whole time he did is exercise. They could approve that in an hour. And you cannot even disputed. That plane left at 1235, and people were ready to go to honolulu. Theyre supposed to to believe that in a 20 minute exercise, that just doesnt make any sense. There are other problems with it. They do not match the composition of the residue on the plane. Nor does it match where they put it. The place was wrong, the composition is wrong, the plane is wrong. Was a total lie. There is no euphemism to describe what they did. The sacrifices guys career to get it done. He is still humiliated to this day. He got a letter condemning him et cetera and that the cover they needed. Now, from that point on from september 21 and 20 second, the government moved into a fully different mode. Fully different mode. Does the mechanical failure mode. Some of you are a route to remember that. I talked to several people who remembered it like a punch in the stomach when they heard that. Especially people who worked in fuel tanks. The fuel tank people had to bear the brunt of that story. If there is something wrong with the fuel tank and a blowup. When i get emails from people reading the book, the the fuel tank people are the angriest. At that point, the ntsb has been shut out of witness review. Theyre supposed to do the witness with eyewitnesses and they were totally shut out. They were humiliated and shut home. They would not even go up and look at the interviews after they had done them. Instead, the fbi the fbi handed the interviews over to the cia. Who else . To examine interviews and decide what it is that the eyewitnesses saw. I have absolutely no experience in this. They have no legal justification for this. Now, the fbi was not eager to do this. You can see that. They gave the cia the witness statements in small doses. In time. They only gave one third of the total, but they are only working a third of it. It. It didnt matter. On december 31, 1996 the cia analyst, randolph, if youre watching to me a call sometime, he comes to the conclusion that all he needs to do to explain what these people saw this contained within the claim itself. He decides the nose of the plane was blown off, then the plane tilted 90 degrees and then knows less common in aviators know what a crock this is, it shot up