How the Fraudulent Investigation of an Airline Disaster

Foreshadowed the Lies and Crimes of 9/11

A Review Essay on Kristina Borjesson’s New Feature-Length Documentary, TWA Flight 800

The Lies and Crimes of TWA Flight 800

… by Anthony James Hall



Kristina Borjesson has directed an important feature-length documentary film that casts new light on an extremely flawed federal investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800.

As viewed by hundreds of eyewitnesses looking eastward from the shores of Long Island, a Boeing 747 bound for Paris plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in the evening of July 17, 1996.

Many of these eyewitnesses viewed missile-like objects rising from the ocean’s surface to meet the trajectory of TWA Flight 800 in the moments before the airliner exploded into two fireballs.

TWA Flight 800 relates the story of how politics intervened to prevent an honest federal assessment of the causes of an airplane crash. The FBI and the CIA jumped into the investigation preempting the role of a number of career professionals working under the auspices of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The NTSB was ostensibly the lead federal agency in the investigation but its activities were clearly subordinated to agencies charged to act in the name of “national security.” This deep intervention into the realm of aviation safety marks the inception of a new phase in the growth of the national security state. Especially after 9/11 the apparatus of so-called national security would assert dominance over more and more areas of American life.

TWA Flight 800 is a case study in the corruption of scientific method in a controversial case involving national security, passenger planes, apprehensions of terrorism, denigrated eyewitnesses, and the willingness of the big media conglomerates to favor the pronouncements of public officials over the evidence of wrongdoing unearthed by genuine investigative journalists.

The meeting of all these topics in the Flight 800 investigation foreshadowed a future event that on September 11, 2001 would change the skyline of New York as well as the shape of global geopolitics.



Borjesson herself was one of those investigative journalists who faced recriminations from her employer for attempting to do her job as she understood it. CBS News fired its Emmy Award winning employee. Borjesson has stayed with the story nevertheless.

TWA Flight 800 embodies her best effort to vindicate not only herself but several career professionals whose expertise in investigating airline crashes was preempted by forces whose true nature has yet to be explained by those public officials responsible for the fiasco.



Borjesson was not the only investigative journalist whose work on the TWA file was dismissed as the ravings of “conspiracy theorists.” The “conspiracy theory” meme would be extended and amplified to apply malevolently to many of those who did not accept as valid the findings of the federal investigative body charged to look into the events of September 11, 2001.

The work of the 9/11 Commission suffers from many of the same afflictions that plagued the work of the National Transportation Safety Board in its investigation of the Flight 800 crash.

In both instances the imperatives of national security favoring secrecy and deception trumped the requirements of transparency, due process, and honest and open interrogation of the evidence from a variety of perspectives.

After 9/11 the national security state’s subordination of evidence-based inquiries become more pervasive, systematic and insidious.

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Engineering Public Perceptions



Borjesson’s cinematic gem, entitled TWA Flight 800, finally provides some definitive answers to questions that should have been authoritatively answered long ago. Her documentary demonstrates that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Flight 800 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean due to a high velocity ordinance explosion outside the airplane.

Some very powerful flying devices met Flight 800’s path and blew up near the airplane with such massive force that fragments from the explosion were picked up on radar hurtling at 4 times the speed of sound.

The cause of the crash was not—to repeat, not– a mechanical malfunction inside the aircraft as determined by the National Transportation Safety Board in a report that continues to embody the US government’s official position on the matter to this day.[1]



The well documented misrepresentation and cover up of the true causes of the Flight 800 crash offers an ominous primer to introduce the uninitiated to a whole category of media-government collaborations devoted to keeping the general population ignorant about certain topics and certain projects, often of extreme consequence in the shaping of future conditions.

Large amounts of public resources are thus commandeered to black out public awareness of what is being done with our own tax money and in our name by public officials theoretically accountable to us. The public trust is thereby violated in ways that, if known, would certainly have the effect of delegitimizing our governors.

While such dark collaborations became a staple of anti-communist propaganda in Cold War, the manufacturing of mass misperceptions would become even more pervasive, manipulative, insidious, and incessant after 9/11.

Some of the psychological manipulations that constitute a central dynamic of the so-called Global War on Terror involve variations on a much larger scale of the same tactics of misrepresentation deployed in officialdom’s specious and self-serving explanation of Flight 800’s demise.

The lies and crimes entailed in holding back from the public the real story of what made Flight 800’s fall from the sky provides a telling case study. It illustrates graphically how the sacrifice of truth to political expediency is becoming more the norm, a trend that accelerated dramatically after 9/11.



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In a society where exercises of power are, at least to some extent, subject to formal and informal exercises of public opinion, dominant groups have invested heavily in strategies for engineering mass perceptions that advance their interests while tending to inoculate themselves and their operatives from criminal accountability for even their most gruesome atrocities.

Massive amounts of financial, creative, and political energy are devoted to spinning into the popular imagination power-serving mythologies deployed to disguise inconvenient aspects of reality that that, if widely known, might lead to sharp disruptions in the status quo.

The engineers of mass deception, often shielded behind the carefully-constructed imagery of the so-called Public Relations industry, have become especially adept at keeping the general public as unaware as possible of the Frankenstein-like attributes of an increasingly deregulated and privatized military-industrial complex.

Especially since 9/11, the directors and main beneficiaries of America’s permanent war economy have become more and more adept at developing elaborate media strategies aimed at extracting enlarged profit streams from war, from preparations for war, and from reconstruction following war.

At every stage in this militarized cycle the all-important site of manipulative enterprise is the mind of the masses.

The successful manufacturing of the necessary imagery to animate broad public consent for the totalitarian claims of never ending war after 9/11 might have been disrupted if the true causes of Flight 800’s crash had been allowed to come to light at the time of the aviation disaster.



This larger panorama of more expansive meanings and implications is only implied in a film where Borjesson displays rigorous journalistic discipline in maintaining a tight analytic trajectory aimed at hitting a very specific target.

Rather than addressing directly the question of who was responsible for the aviation tragedy, Borjesson holds herself to the task of providing indisputable proof to expose the horrendous fraud contained in the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB’s) final report on Flight 800’s demise.

This strategy of analytic restraint and discipline is well justified in an era when whistle blowers often face severe recriminations for their attempts to bring inconvenient truths to light. In response to the predominant ethos in the repressive, self-censoring and paranoiac culture of mainstream media, Borjesson makes a point of not stepping beyond the boundaries of conclusions flowing from evidence of impeccable veracity.

I for one would have preferred the interjection from time to time of a narrator’s voice in TWA Flight 800 to help explain the main outlines of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigative process. I would have liked a narrator to help me understand the nature of the various professional relationships between experts and between institutions involved in this matter.

The director eschews this more traditional approach. Kristina Borjesson leaves the audience on its own to figure out from the words of those being interviewed who is who and what is what. The individuals highlighted in the film are left free to speak for themselves without the intervention of some sort of third-party voice to clarify and contextualize the meaning of what is being said.

While the lack of a narrator makes it necessary for the audience to work harder in making sense of the Flight 800 story, it also allows the film’s viewers more latitude to identify patterns and to come to conclusions independently.

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A Very Controlled Trajectory of Analysis That Hits Its Target



This is an era when dominant systems of command and control depend on tight adherence in the mainstream media to increasingly outlandish and far-fetched mythologies of power. At their core these mythologies supporting the authority and privilege of ruling elites draw clear distinctions between our supposed allies and our supposed enemies, good religion and bad religion, civilization and savagery.

Messengers of interpretations not supportive of these mythologies of power are frequently held up to ridicule when their analysis extends to even a hint of unsubstantiated speculation. Accordingly, Borjesson’s application of interpretive conservatism and restraint must be understood as a logical response to the machinations of a troubled communications industry with much to protect and much to conceal.

Borjesson’s circumspect cautiousness in doing investigative combat with the forces of systematic deception and cover-up occurs at a time when the managers of mainstream media are encouraged by their employers to push to the forefront those commentators who regularly flaunt the “conspiracy theory” meme as smear, as an insidious inhibitor to critical thought, and ultimately as a linguistic weapon deployed to discredit any expose’ of wrongdoing deemed menacing to the maintenance of the status quo.

How many examples are there of media projects that contain ample revelations of proven wrongdoing but have been dismissed for including even a hint of conjecture that goes beyond the bounds of that which can be conclusively demonstrated to be true?



In such a media culture the credibility of a documentary such as that put together by Kristina Borjesson and her colleagues is only as strong as its weakest link. Borjesson makes sure that every conclusion she draws satisfies the requirements of unequivocal proof.

Borjesson stays on message by focusing most unrelentingly on the lies and crimes of the National Transportation Safety Board. By so doing Borjesson leaves the responsibilityat the doorstep of the implicated federal officialsto revisit the still-unanswered questions concerning criminal liability for this lethal and still-unresolved episode.

The current NTSB Chair, Deborah A.P. Hersman, is prominent among those federal officials with a heavy fiduciary responsibility to respond proactively to the findings brought forward by the makers of TWA Flight 800. Moreover, Hersman and those to whom she reports must investigate the nature of the forces operating within government that have obviously subordinated the protection of aviation safety to other priorities.

If those responsible for the creating the Flight 800 fiasco will not live up to the public trust put in their hands, then outside investigators and third-party arbitrators will have to be brought in to assess the mess.



TWA Flight 800 is dominated by the filmmakers’ sustained focus on the most authoritative forensic evaluations of what did or did not happen to bring the Boeing 747 down.

Moreover, Borjesson opens up media space to afford substantial public exposure to the previously suppressed eyewitness accounts of the crash’s firsthand observers.

As the film brings to light, some of these eyewitnesses were threatened, intimidated, and demeaned by officers of the FBI.

The authors of the NTSB’s final report followed the lead of the FBI and the CIA in treating the large body of eyewitness accounts as irrelevant to their final conclusions.

A common feature of the eyewitness accounts was the consistent insistence that just before Flight 800 burst apart in the sky, the Boeing 747 was met by bright flying objects that had previously shot upwards from the ocean’s surface.

Some of the eyewitnesses spoke on camera of a second and third missile-like object ascending towards Flight 800 and exploding near the aircraft. The commentaries of the aviation experts featured in the documentary corroborate the eyewitness accounts pointing to the core conclusion that it was explosions outside the aircraft that brought Flight 800 down.

Longtime NTSB staff member, Dr. David L. Mayer, was one of the most instrumental Mr. Fix-Its in the misrepresentation of the crash as the outcome of an internal mechanical failure. In 2009 Mayer was named as the NTSB’s Managing Director, which is the organization’s senior career position.[2]

Mayer’s promotion could well be interpreted as his reward for doing the bidding of those with the most to lose from a truthful exposure of the actual causes instigating the Flight 800 disaster.



In the investigation leading to the NTSB’s final report in 2000, Mayer’s titles included that of Chairman of the Witnesses Group. Mayer appears in the film acting in this dubious capacity providing cover for the NTSB’s decision to disregard the convincing body of eyewitness testimony pointing dramatically away from its unproven mechanical-malfunction theory.

In presenting his specious rationale for disregarding a huge body of extremely pertinent evidence, Mayer is pictured articulating a particularly noxious mouthful of psychobabble. He is filmed citing a list of secondary sources describing why observer accounts of cataclysmic events are not to be believed and how human memory becomes an agency of negligible usefulness in a situation like the identification of the causes of the Flight 800 disaster.

Mayer is a Ph.D. said to specialize for the NTSB in something called “human factors.” Mayer’s key role in misrepresenting the causes of Flight 800’s crash is indicative of the corruption of many facets of the so-called behavioral sciences.

The operative drew on the same body of academic literature integral to the integration of so-called psy ops—psychological operations— into the core methodology of never ending warfare. The normalization of unethical conduct in many professions is part of a terrible trend where the increasingly expansive claims of so-called national security are made to trump the need for transparency, accuracy, accountability, and the rule of law in public affairs.

The larger context of this plunge into increased deception in combination with unwarranted termination of many forms of professional and political accountability is the privatization by the corporate sector of many facets of public government.

This shift of influence from public to private spheres of authority moves government away from the basic conditions of a free and democratic society.

The viability of democratic self-determination depends on the existence of an informed citizenry with unobstructed access to the information it requires to make knowledgeable decisions through the ballot box and other venues of public participation.

A veteran NTSB investigator and one of the core group of career professionals featured in Borjesson’s film, Henry Hughes reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for David Mayer.

Among Mayer’s crimes of professional misconduct was his repeated tampering with the physical evidence of the crash. As Hughes describes it, this interference went beyond the betrayal of the professional ethos of public service.

It was “illegal.” Nevertheless Mayer’s work was pushed to the forefront of the NTSB’s consideration.

On the other hand the analytic efforts of Henry Hughes, then one of the most senior and respected airline-disaster investigators in the United States, was downgraded and ultimately censored.

Hughes reading of the evidence was suppressed and disregarded in formulating theNTSB’s final report put forward by its Chair, Jim Hall.

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Transforming Eyewitnesses into “Conspiracists”



Jim Hall has been referred to by one of his detractors as “arguably the least qualified and most political chair in NTSB history.”[3] Along with James Kallstrom, who was the head of the FBI’s investigation of Flight 800’s demise, Hall emerges in TWA Flight 800 along with Mayer as a carefully-sketched villain.

Indeed, Hall bears much of the primary responsibility for signing off on the federal government’s misrepresentation of the crash as if it was the result of an electrically-induced explosion in the center-wing fuel tank.



The film, TWA Flight 800, is not the only piece of investigative journalism where Borjesson lingers to observe larger meanings in the dealings of the Honorable James E. Hall, Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board between 1993 and 2001.

As Borjesson depicts him, Hall is a telling archetype of a certain kind of highly-politicized public servant who achieves and maintains high office through skillful trafficking in the contraband of deceit.

Hall’s expertise in the art and science of sowing disinformation is highlighted in Borjesson’s important essay, “Into the Buzzsaw.” This contribution forms part of a 2004 book of the same name containing essays edited by Borjesson.

In this work the author/editor illuminates various aspects of the alleged “myth of a free press.” She collects together the whistle-blowing accounts of some of her journalist colleagues.[4]

Written as a first-person narrative, Borjesson’s essay,“Into the Buzzsaw,” can be read as a telling literary supplement to provide context and background for the subject matter of her new documentary film. [5]

Borjesson’s focus on the NTSB Chairman, Jim Hall, begins with an account of how CNN put the lid on the commentary of Jack Cashill, a guest invited by CNN’s Greta Van Susteren to appear on her television show.In 2001 Cashill had just completed his own documentary, Silenced, on the same subject as Borjesson’s more recent cinematic effort.[6]

After deciding to disinvite Cashill, Van Susteran added insult to injury by making Jim Hall the sole guest of her program on the TWA Flight 800 disaster. In the interview CNN’s Van Susteran invoked the key memes that would become in the era of the so-called War on Terror the classic means for corrupt journalists to evade reckoning with the genuine stuff of evidence pointing to inconvenient truths.

In Van Susteren’s introduction of Jim Hall she referred to all those not subscribing to the federal government’s account of what happened as “conspiracy theorists.” She asked rhetorically, “Is that the end of the story? And what about the conspiracy theorists who keep insisting the jet was shot down.”

CNN’s host repeated this slur later in the interview, asking, “Does that mean, Jim, that you are one-hundred per cent certain that these—that the conspiracists who some say that they saw a white light travelling skyward, uh, zigzagging, disappearing, and then an orange ball of fire—can you say with one-hundred percent certainty that they’re wrong?”

With this seemingly blasé invocation of the purposely-damning term, “conspiracists,” Van Susteran effectively characterizes hundreds of eyewitnesses as, in the words of Borjesson, “goofballs, nutcakes, bottomfeeders, crazy, and so on.” Van Susteran thus personalizes her attack on individuals who, she implies, committed some sort of crime for happening to witness a sequence of events that killed 230 innocent people.

The effect of her ad hominem attack on those hundreds of eyewitnesses whose accounts of the Flight 800 disaster did not conform with the federally-sanctioned version of events was to demean and downgrade the importance of their testimony.

Unfortunately this small episode would become a mere prelude of much worse to come from many of Van Susteran’s peers who would in the years ahead normalize defamation, blacklisting, censorship, and disinformation as mainstays of what passes for journalism in the mainstream media.

This normalization of media deceit would become especially pervasive in the reporting of matters pertaining to so-called national security.



As described by Borjesson, Hall responds to Van Susteren’s questioning with “the classic-don’t-answer-the-question-just-talk-a lot-and-say-nothing ploy.” Borjesson describes Hall’s prefacing of his answer with the words, “in my view,” as a tactic that the author of “Into the Buzzsaw” describes as “a Bill Clintonesque semantic maneuver that would get him off the hook in a court of law (Hall trained as a lawyer but did not get his degree).”[7]

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“Why was the Navy Involved in the

Recovery and Investigation while a Possible Suspect?”



In her film Borjesson restricts her scrutiny to the roles of the FBI, the CIA and the NTSB, the three federal agencies that took the lead in constructing an elaborate fraud designed to deny the now-proven-fact that TWA Flight 800 burst into flames off Long Island’s shore as a result of explosions external to the airplane.

In her essay, however, Borjesson goes beyond the strict boundaries of her cinematic assessment of the Flight 800. In her written account the investigative journalist highlights the strong possibility that it was the “friendly fire” entailed in some kind of maneouvres or tests conducted by the US Navy that brought the Boeing 747 down.

In order to escape any charge that her film is anything short of being 100% fact-based— any charge that she engages in speculation or conjecture– Borjesson steers clear of the references she makes in her essay to information concerning a vessel that sped away from the accident zone when other vessels were racing towards the crash scene as they are required to do by the federal enactment know as The Duty to Provide Assistance at Sea.

In his own report of this incident, film co-producer Tom Stalcup indicated that the position of the vessel in question was “consistent with the origin of the ‘flare’ type object, which rose from the ocean’s surface according to eyewitnesses.”

Nor does the film deal with the role of Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen who in a press conference in November of 1996 gave an incomplete account of the navy vehicles in the area of the crash. Of this lapse Borjesson writes, “The admiral was either misinformed or lying.”[8]



As to be discussed below, it turns out that there were many naval vessels, including three submarines, in the area during the time of the crash of TWA Flight 800.

This information can be juxtaposed with an observation brought forward by a former head of the US Air Force’s armaments research laboratory, retired Brigadiere-General Benton K. Partin.

General Partin indicated that the evidence gathered from the crash of the downed airplane was most consistent with the patterns of damage that would have been caused by an explosion near the Boeing 747 of radio-guided continuous-rod warhead, in other words a missile.

This observation coming from one of the foremost authorities in the United States on air-born weaponry is extremely significant. [9]

In the film Borjesson does not recount the details of a press conference where an accredited journalist was expelled by an FBI agent for asking “why is the Navy involved in the recovery and investigation while a possible suspect.”

Live footage of this telling episode is included in Shadows of Liberty, a film by Jean Philippe Tremblay. This documentary includes in its survey of the downfall of media integrity in the United States a vignette on Borjesson’s removal from CBS.

This vignette devotes considerable coverage to navy exercises that were underway on July 17, 1996 when Flight 800 crashed due to explosions outside the aircraft.[10]



Borjesson does not detail in her film the ridiculous and impossible claim– the demonstration of “how outrageous the lying gets”– of the assurance issued by the Pentagon shortly after Flight 800’s demise “that all missiles in the US arsenal were accounted for, implying that friendly fire was out of the question.”

After detailing the huge logistical problems precluding even the possibility that such an inventory actually took place, Borjesson asks, “What about all those missiles we gave to the Afghan rebels and then tried to buy back from them—with little or no success?”[11]

This question harkens back to the actual circumstances making the US government the primary agency responsible for the founding of al-Qaeda, a plain fact of history that is seldom explained to the public when this entity, al-Qaeda, is again and again characterized as the ultimate global boogeyman in the so-called Global War on Terror.

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The Dark and Bright Sides of the Flight 800 Investigation



TWA Flight 800 exhibits a combination of moral certainty together with a nostalgic reverence for what America once was. These attributes give the documentary an aura of certitude reminiscent of the best of the Frank Capra movies. On the dark side of the moral ledger are Jim Hall, James Kallstrom, David Mayer, and Merritt Birky, the head of the NTSB’s Fire and Explosion Team assigned to the Flight 800 investigation.

The filmmakers demonstrate that Birky directed the fudging of tests on explosive residue found throughout the wreckage of Flight 800. If properly and comprehensively done, tests to identify the spatial distribution of nitrates throughout the airplane would have pointed to its demolition through explosive episodes initiated outside the airplane. Birky’s failure to do test on a splatter pattern located outside the aircraft comes up for especially harsh criticism.

The host of figures inhabiting the dark side of the moral drama is expanded in the closing scene of TWA Flight 800 where Borjesson presents the names, professional titles, and photographic representations of all those many individuals who refused to be interviewed for the film.

The film’s director thus does not waver from fixing responsibility very explicitly for the extremely serious crimes and misdemeanors she has identified. This attribute of the documentary offers a refreshing reminder of a form of investigative journalist that has become all-too-rare in these times when liability lawyers often assume the roles once assigned to editors in deciding what does or does not make it into news coverage.

Borjesson concludes her rogues gallery of public officials unwilling to face the cinematic lens of public accountability with a photograph of Bill Clinton. The main chapters to date of the Flight 800 saga took place during the watch of this former US president.

According to Jack Cashill, who along with Jim Sanders pursued a journalistic strategy much more far-reaching, speculative and unabashedly political than TWA Flight 800, the narrative of what happened to the doomed airplane was fabricated in the final months of 1996 so as not to disrupt the “peace and prosperity” themes of Bill Clinton’s campaign for re-election as US president.

Cashill writes, “Knowing the media had his back, Clinton responded much as Obama did [to the Benghazi incident in the re-election campaign of 2012]: deny, obfuscate and kick the investigatory can down the road until after the election.”[12]

Jim Hall’s corrupt oversight of the Flight 800 investigation can be viewed as something of a case study illustrating in microcosm the rise of an America increasingly dominated by a political economy of scams, subterfuge, and skullduggery.

The new breed of federal operator epitomized by Hall is seemingly empowered to overturn old ideals of public service; to abnegate public trusts whose foundational and sacrosanct character was once honored by government.



The roles assigned to Hall, Mayer and Birky embody the replacement of a bygone America based on the honest production of real goods and services.

In the place of this lost America of productive achievement and ingenuity is emerging an America where the expanded commodification of coercive violence increasingly dependent on corporate media’s often-grotesque concoctions of myth and illusion.

The toxification of the mental environment flows unrelentingly from this war-sustaining substitution of truth with the polluting ingredients of artful demonization, carefully conceived disinformation, and titillating circuses of mind-numbing distraction.

In an increasingly deindustrialized North America, the animating force once played by the honest making of real goods and services is being replaced by a vulture culture valorizing hucksterism through deceit.

The basis of this emerging political economy of necessary illusions feeds on the proliferation of weird and incomprehensible financial derivatives, bankster bailouts to political cronies, as well as the expansions of fictitious assets through the hyperinflation of debt.

This transformation is arriving replete with quick expansions of fiat money to fund America’s expanding mercenary armies and its rapid decent into junk science.

This trend is unfolding concurrently with a plethora of overlapping scenarios involving, for instance, massive drug deals, repeated sagas of foreign regime change, the surreptitious conniving underlying competing pipeline projects, weaponization of outer space and every other kind of space, money laundering on a gargantuan scale, wholesale tax evasion as a staple of international commerce, and false flag terrorism perpetrated repeatedly to provide the necessary “global enemy” to sustain the political economy of never ending warfare.

In the final years of the twentieth century the Flight 800 deception was just a straw in the wind, the test of new prototypes for subsequent application in more ambitious projects of official obfuscation. Now in 2013 Borjesson’s documentary offers us the possibility of gaining perspective on the pervasive disingenuousness that has engulfed our our society so overwhelmingly that the incessant lies of officialdom in government, in the academy, and in the media have been made to seem normal.

In calling attention to this more general condition through an instructive case study illuminating an earlier stage in its genesis, Borjesson presents in her film an A-Team of genuine aviation professionals who make clear technical sense of the main facts and delusions of the Flight 800 disaster.

The bright illuminations of these experts in their field stand in stark contrast to the dark and convoluted double talk of Hall, Birky, and Mayer. The dignified forthrightness of this team of intrepid investigators invokes memories of a time when the United States was the world’s undisputed powerhouse of achievement in science and especially in the innovative application of science to high-tech enterprises across whole spectrums of industrial activity.

In this America of scientific and technological prowess, the expertise of career professionals like Borjesson’s A-Team was respected and applied rather than treated as inconvenient obstacles to be overcome on the way to nefarious political agendas.

In the bygone America of engineering triumph there could be no room for top-down meddling in the core operations of essential institutions like the NTSB or the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Borjesson’s A-Team includes James Speer and Rocky Miller. The former joined the NTSB investigation on behalf of the Airline Pilots Association. In the film Speer describes in detail how the FBI impeded his efforts to do his own independent evaluation of the residues of explosive events he discovered splattered throughout the salvaged remains of the airplane.

Speer also explains how the NTSB’s conclusion that the initial explosion was caused by an electrical spark in the center wing fuel tank did not conform with his detailed knowledge of the electrical design of the airplane. After going through a lengthy analysis in the film of the circuitry of a Boeing 747 Speer asserts, “The cause of the ignition of the center fuel tank had to be something other than airplane electronics.”

Rocky Miller joined the work of the NTSB as the Flight Attendant Union’s accident investigator on the Flight 800 matter. Miller adds his own voice to those of the many experts that do not find the NTSB’s main conclusions to be credible. In an exchange with Borjesson Miller explains,

ROCKYMILLER: We didn’t find any evidence in the wiring on the aircraft that would have indicated that a spark occurred inside the center wing tank that would blow it up.

KRISTINABORJESSON: Did anybody in the investigation find this wiring?

ROCKYMILLER: Not to my knowledge, no.

Robert Young was the senior investigator representing Trans World Airlines in the work of the NTSB. Young oversaw a large group of TWA experts who were distributed among the several investigative groups connected with the crash. Young was himself a member of the Eyewitness Group.

Speer, Miller, and Young, all representing agencies of major importance to the workings of the aerospace industry, articulated in the film genuine disgust with the the way the investigation had been conducted.



Young gave voice to the views of many when he charged that those leading the assessment of the evidence put the conclusion they wanted to reach first and then worked backwards by manipulating the investigation to arrive at the predetermined outcome.

The goal of those executives that commandeered control of the Flight 800 investigation was not to find the truth of what had happened but to divert attention away from the truth. “The agenda was, this was an accident, make it so.”

To my way of thinking Henry Hughes does much of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining in the film the big picture as well as the telling details of how the Flight 800 investigation was sabotaged. Hughes came to the case as one of the NTSB’s senior investigators. The TWA disaster was his 110th such investigation since he began his work with the NTSB in 1985.

Hughes makes it very clear that the process of gathering, assembling, testing, and evaluating the evidence of what happened to TWA Flight 800 was fraught with severe professional lapses and problems from the very beginning. The process was unlike anything he had seen before in his many-faceted history of investigating many forms of transportation disaster. The inquiry into the fate of TWA Flight 800 was the only investigation he was not allowed to complete.

Hank Hughes pulls no punches in detailing the travesty of the Flight 800 investigation, an assessment he spelled out in detail in a presentation he made to a Congressional committee of Senators tasked with judicial powers to investigate the disaster in 1999.[13]

Hughes depicts the Flight 800 investigation as a kind of miner’s canary signifying the entry of a new form of toxic gas into the body politic. So severe was the malfeasance and deception he witnessed from some of his peers that he developed a deep distrust of his own government, something he claims he had never felt before.

The cover up of such a monumental fraud in the vital field of aviation safety, Hughes asserts on camera, made him “ashamed” of his country. Hughes sees the betrayal as a watershed moment portending many more evils to come.

Hughes was trained as a military intelligence specialist. He spent the early part of his career in law enforcement and as a university educator teaching techniques of investigative best practice.

Part of the Go Team assigned by the NTSB to establish the initial infrastructure for the Flight 800 investigation, Hughes arrived on the scene to discover an elaborate operation already underway. On the Moriches wharf near the crash site he saw swarms of busy FBI officers and Special Forces operatives of uncertain pedigree.

The dominant role of the FBI throughout the first two years of the investigation was something of an anomaly that confounded Hughes and many other professionals close to the process. The involvement of the FBI depended on the suspicion that the crash was caused by criminal acts, a premise that was never actually acted upon in the form of any federal charge being laid.

As chairman of the NTSB’s Airplane Interior Documentation Group, it fell to Hughes to set up the procedure for collecting, analyzing and reassembling the cabin of Flight 800. Indeed, it fell on Hughes to create the infrastructure and the procedural system for the reconstruction of the entire aircraft. In trying to advance this assignment Hughes who took the lead on behalf of the NTSB in directing the main site of the investigation into an airplane hanger at Calverton on Long Island.

Hughes was shocked when FBI officials visited the hangar regularly and at odd hours to remove, relocate, retag, and reshape fragments of the recovered airplane. These interventions violated well-established codes of professional conduct in investigations such as this one. Hughes became aware that the NTSB’s own David Mayer was taking part in this tampering with the material evidence of the crash, a practice that the senior investigator had no hesitation in identifying as “illegal.”

Hughes kept detailed records of the myriad professional and legal infractions, records that are published in part in Borjesson’s essay, “Into the Buzzsaw.”[14] Hughes attributed many of the problems to the failures of leadership of Robert Francis, the NTSB’s supposed hands-on director of the investigative process.

Hughes explains that Francis repeatedly failed to attend the daily meetings as the process proceeded, an abnegation of responsibility unlike any that the experienced investigator had seen prior to his involvement in the Flight 800 fiasco. It was as if the NTSB had informally ceded control of the investigation to the FBI as lead by the director of the federal police force’s New York office, James Kallstrom.



As one of the most senior and experienced investigators working on the Flight 800 matter, Hughes was able to diagnosis other jurisdictional conflicts plaguing the process involving not only the FBI and the NTSB but also the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as well as the FAA, The Federal Aviation Administration.

Once the FBI withdrew from the process the NTSB in Hughes’ view continued the momentum of the federal police force’s misdirection of the case. The NTSB kept pushing the investigation away from where the evidence pointed.

This process culminated in a report where the work of the older and more experienced Hughes was subordinated to that of the younger and more opportunistic David Mayer. It is tempting to see in this changing of the guard a breakdown in the inter-generational continuity of the NTSB’s vital work, as a portent of bigger deceptions to come.

Henry Hughes was not the only one to discover various forms of tampering with the evidence in the course of the federal investigation of Flight 800’s demise. This meddling with evidence is reported to have included the withholding and removal of some vital radar data from the archives of the Federal Aviation Administration,[15] the erasure of the of the last four seconds of information from the flight data recorder,[16]and the alteration of documents to make it appear that the residue of explosives in Flight 800 was the result of an earlier training exercise of bomb-sniffing dogs on the doomed airplane.[17]

_______________________________________

The Criticisms of the Investigation Become More Intense in

Response to a Deceptive CIA Propaganda Video

Much of the slight-of-hand essential to the Flight 800 deception took place in the final days of 1997. During this period the FBI formally withdrew from the investigative process, announcing that it had not turned up any evidence of criminal involvement in the case.

At the press conference where the FBI’s James Kallstrom announced the federal police force’s decision, a video produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was introduced. This video was broadcast in real time by CNN and subsequently by many TV news networks.



In introducing the video Kallstrom explained that the FBI had called in the CIA to explore the possibility that “international terrorists” had been involved in the crash.[18] A few days after the FBI’s press conference the NTSB held formal hearings in Baltimore that did not include any formal testimony from the eyewitnesses themselves.

From this obvious lapse in the NTSB’s public hearings to the subsequent defamation of the eyewitnesses by Greta Van Susteran on CNN, there are huge implications in the maltreatment of the conscientious men and women who had come forward to tell what they had seen with the goal of helping officials get to the bottom of the Flight 800 disaster.

This episode of abusive treatment stands as a warning for all those that witness crimes in which the investigators of the crimes at issue might themselves be implicated.



As 1997 merged into 1998 the eyewitness accounts had obviously become impediments to the full-court press of specious interpretation now pushed forward aggressively by three major agencies of the federal executive branch.

The eyewitness accounts had to be relegated to the sidelines. At the Baltimore hearings in December of 1997 it fell to Dr. David Mayer, Chairman of the NTSB’s Witnesses Group, to make this cover up of eyewitness evidence appear justified and normal. Dr. Mayer’s presentation was designed to make the firsthand observers of the disaster appear confused, deluded, and disoriented and therefore incapable of producing evidence that was anything other than extraneous and irrelevant.

The CIA video was a very big part of the federal effort to discredit those many eyewitnesses that remained adamant that they had seen missile-like objects ascend from sea level and explode as the initiating event of the airplane crash.

As if with the intention of pacifying those many US citizens that had come forward to assist their own government with a major investigation, the FBI’s James Kallstrom is pictured in the video solicitously announcing that “the witnesses are good people.”

In spite of this conciliatory comment, nothing could disguise the video’s core intent. The publication of the video on national television signaled that the federal government of the United States, through both the FBI and the CIA, was conducting a frontal attack on the credibility of accounts given to police by many eyewitnesses of the Flight 800 disaster.

The CIA video is featured in Borjesson’s film along with many commentaries describing responses to this very heavy-handed piece of government propaganda. Accompanied by an illustrative animated sequence, the CIA’s narrator explains in the video that the bright rising object observed by many eyewitnesses was in fact the tail portion of the Boeing 747 ascending to higher altitudes after an internal explosion broke the airplane in two.

Even though the CIA stresses repeatedly in the video that Flight 800 was not brought down by a missile, it does did not propose a specific cause or explanation for the initial blast.



The video’s makers describe a “zoom climb” of the rear portion of the Flight 800, an event that the eyewitnesses are alleged to have mistaken for the ascent of missile-like object. In fact the eyewitnesses almost universally agreed that the ascent of the bright objects and then their convergence with the flight trajectory of the doomed airplane took place before Flight 800 burst into two descending fireballs.

“The eyewitnesses did not see a missile,” the CIA instructed its media audience. Just to make sure this core message cannot be missed, the narrated words are mirrored on screen in a printed text appearing before the backdrop of the CIA crest.

A similar juxtaposition takes place a second time when the words, “Not a missile,” are conveyed both orally and visually. The makers of the five-minute clip return to the key idea a third time with the concluding sentence “To date there is no evidence that anyone saw a missile shoot down TWA Flight 800.”

If Shakespeare could have been present to witness this video he might have commented, Me thinks the CIA doth protest too loudly? Who in the government decided that the CIA, a federal agency with a long history of clandestine operations often covered up through elaborate media deceptions, would have any credibility at all as interpreters of a story such as this one?

Interestingly, during the introductory moments of the video the narrator poses the questions, “Was it a missile? Did foreign terrorists destroy the aircraft?”[19] This double-barreled query might be interpreted as an effort to introduce into the government’s official narrative a fallback position?

Was ground being prepared to link, if necessary, the aviation disaster to the alleged misdeeds of “foreign terrorists?” Was the CIA floating this interpretation as an insurance policy to divert future attention of even the government’s most ardent critics away from a view of the Flight 800 disaster as the outcome of so-called friendly fire by the US Armed Forces?

Not surprisingly the release of the CIA video infuriated many of the eyewitnesses who did not recognize in the propaganda film anything approaching what they had seen in the skies east of Long Island on the evening of July 17, 1996.

Among the most outspoken critics of the CIA’s interpretation was Paul Angelides. Angelides emerges in Borjesson’s film as an extremely articulate and resolute witness of the federal failures to deal with the Flight 800 evidence, including his own eyewitness testimony.

The CIA video also aroused the disdain of Major Fred Meyer, a military pilot and a decorated war hero with much combat experience in Vietnam. Major Meyer compares the ordinance blasts that he saw and heard bursting from the devices that intercepted Flight 800 with the ordinance explosions he regularly witnessed when flying helicopter rescue missions over North Vietnam.[20]

As he explains with precision in Borjesson’s film, retired United Airlines pilot Ray Lahr was drawn more deeply into the fiasco of the Flight 800 investigation after he saw the CIA’s video.

A member of the Safety Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association and a participant in seven NTSB investigations of major aviation disasters, Lahr made a number of Freedom of Information requests seeking to evaluate the data on which the CIA based its theory that the back portion of the divided Boeing 747 had climbed in an upward zoom from 13,000 to 17,000 feet.

When his requests were unsuccessful he brought legal actions against the NTSB, the CIA, and the National Security Agency.[21] These actions resulted in 2006 a partial release of new and pertinent information on the Flight 800 disaster.



The CIA video was also a major motivating factor causing Tom Stalcup to help to found and, after 1999, to chair an entity known as the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization, FIRO.[22] When Stalcup first viewed the CIA’s interpretation of the airline disaster he was shocked by the implausibility of the video’s content together with the obviousness of its propagandistic intent.

During the period when the video first aired, Stalcup had already developed a mild interest in the Flight 800 investigation. In those days Stalcup was working on his Ph.D. thesis in physics at Florida State University.

After 1997 Stalcup went into high gear treating the case of Flight 800 as something of a professional priority, at times even as a professional obsession. Stalcup gathered archives of documentation on the subject and began to collaborate with a growing array of experts in their field who shared the physicist’s developing understanding of the magnitude of the deception underway.

He also followed the lead of Ray Lahr in using the courts as a means of extracting information from the relevant authorities as well as a tool to impose some accountability on those responsible for various forms of malfeasance whose effects often include defrauding the public.



Before long Stalcup began to hone in on the importance of radar information gathered on the Flight 800 disaster at multiple FAA sites. Ignored by those in charge of the process leading to the NTSB’s misdiagnosis of the disaster’s causes, the radar data showed plumes of airline debris moving away asymmetrically from the site of the mid-air explosions at four times the speed of sound.[23]

In the film Dr. Stalcup, who received his Ph.D. in 2000 and is currently president and co-founder of a high-tech company, described the radar information as the “smoking gun” of the Flight 800 case.

There is no way that an internal explosion of a fuel tank could have generated enough energy to expel airplane fragments at such a high velocity.

It was Tom Stalcup who persuaded Kristina Borjesson to direct the feature-length documentary and to share with him responsibilities for producing TWA Flight 800.

As outlined above, Borjesson had already lived through some of the harshest dramas connected to the bad editorial decisions of those directing the activities of core media venues covering the investigation of Flight 800’s demise.

Borjesson was one of those many principled reporters hurt in the mainstream media’s abandonment of investigative journalism to become stenographers to official sources; to become delivery systems offering up made-to-order public opinion as requested, purchased and commandeered by the powerful.

In directing the movie Borjesson indulges the audience with only a single moment of sentimentality when she calls on Stalcup to explain the significance of the loss of his beautiful and loving mother when he was still a boy.

Stalcup relates how this experience made him especially sensitive to the sanctity of every human life, a sanctity that he saw violated in the federal government’s gross misrepresentation of the causes of the deaths of Flight 800’s 230 innocent victims.

Mr Smith Poster goes here…..

This ethos of respect for human dignity is put on full display in one of the film’s best sequences. A representative group of the eyewitnesses are at last brought together to tell their stories in a public hearing put together by the filmmakers with the documentary’s A-Team, the stalwarts of FIRO, as a panel of judges.

All and all Dr. Tom Stalcup plays out in real life a role similar to the one that Frank Capra assigned to a young Jimmy Stewart in his 1939 drama, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Stalcup embodies the idealistic bright side of a new generation of American engineer determined to transcend officialdom’s descent into the junk science epitomized by the NTSB’s report on the demise of TWA Flight 800.

As an educator myself I cannot help contrast Dr. Stalcup’s embrace of the scientific method as a force for public good as opposed to Dr. Mayer’s opportunistic resort to the social sciences as a means of discrediting unfairly the eyewitnesses in the Flight 800 investigation.

Both individuals drew on their new Ph.Ds to attempt very different agendas, one to facilitate official deception and the other aimed at speaking truth to power.



Dr. Charles Wetli as well as Dr./Colonel Dennis Shanahan add their voices in TWA Flight 800to those of the other experts who condemn the final conclusions of the NTSB investigation notwithstanding the fact that they took part in the proceedings.

Dr. Wetli was responsible for identifying the corpses and doing autopsies on the human remains. Dr./Colonel Shanahan devoted his energies to making connections between patterns of destruction to the bodies and to the interior cabin.

Both medical examiners explain that the remains of the Flight 800 victims were shot through with shattered fragments.

As the cabin was hit by the massive force of external explosions it suddenly broke up subjecting passengers and crews to shooting-gallery-like barrages of high-velocity projectiles penetrating deep into their bodies.

______________________________________

Who Is Behind the Explosion Outside Flight 800?



Borjesson’s analytical style in TWA Flight 800 exemplifies the classic techniques of investigative journalism. Rather than lingering with secondary sources the investigator gets herself and her recording devices as close as possible to the primary sources, the original sources, so as to bring maximum illumination to the subject matter of her documentary.

Most of the primary sources in TWA Flight 800 are living human beings who either witnessed the sequence of events culminating in the crash or who are experts involved in a variety of ways with the investigation of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Borjesson’s documentary packs considerable punch because of the unwillingness of many of her primary sources, those closest to the evidence of the Flight 800 disaster, to endorse the final conclusions of the federal agency that investigated the crash.

With 26 years of hands-on experience assessing transportation disasters, Henry Hughes condemnation of his former employer’s investigation is especially significant. The level of knowledge and understanding



Hughes brought from such a long and successful tenure on the front lines of the effort to derive aviation safety from aviation disaster went far beyond anything that Jim Hall or David Mayer had to offer.

Who should we believe when presented with such a choice? Do we believe the findings of career professionals of great experience and impeccable integrity such as Henry Hughes and Robert Young or do we believe the conclusions advanced by highly-politicized opportunists such as Jim Hall and David Mayer?

By bringing together the voices of the demeaned veteran experts as well as the disregarded and smeared eyewitnesses, the makers of TWA Flight 800 have set in motion an important push back whose ramifications may ripple widely across a so-called public service pulled farther and farther away from actually serving the public.

Dr. Tom Stalcup was the newcomer to this team of veteran experts. As a newly-minted physicist, Stalcup built up his encyclopedic knowledge of the various facets of the aviation disaster through independent collection and evaluation of the data after the CIA released its “NOT A MISSILE” video.

In her capacity as the film’s director, Borjesson leaned heavily on Stalcup’s ability to explain the fundamental principles of physics together with his specific technical knowledge of various facets of the Flight 800 file.

As an expert without the complex institutional associations of the career professionals featured in the documentary, Stalcup was in a good position to help Borjesson maintain a stance of relative objectivity and independence as the production’s main point person.

Similarly, Stalcup’s arm’s-length relationship with the core agencies of the aviation industry brings to the film’s A-Team of experts a perspective that complements the critical commentaries of the veteran investigators with whom the young physicist worked.



Although Borjesson has devoted much of her work in recent times to explaining the demise of investigative journalism, in TWA Flight 800 she touches only lightly on the subject of the mainstream media’s integral role as a partner in, and enabler of, the deception. She restricts herself to covering only one media report.

This report is a particularly galling stenography of the NTSB’s main conclusions. The deliverer of the propaganda is Robert Hagar, a reporter well known for his willingness to propagate NTSB malarkey without any critical perspective whatsoever.

Hagar’s venue was NBC where his unquestioning stenography of NTSB reports caused his critics to label him a media “prostitute.”[24] Hagar’s news report on the outcome of the Flight 800 investigation began with text announcing that his story had something to do with “Conspiracy Theories.”

The intent of the text and of the whole ABC report was clearly to demean any narratives, including those of the disaster’s eyewitnesses, that didn’t support the government’s version of events.



While TWA Flight 800 leaves only minimal space for consideration of the media’s coverage, the relationship of news-and-public-affairs reporting to this story remains the 500-pound canary in the assignment editor’s office.

The story has unfolded since 1996 in such a way that puts at the forefront the obsequiousness of mass media in presenting official sources as the highest arbiters of truth.

Like so many of the cover-ups whose skeletons of deception are overloading society’s bulging closets of deception and cover-up, the scandalous nature of the Flight 800 debacle is more-than-ready for full public disclosure.

In the case of Flight 800 the conditions of disclosure depend on the mainstream media’s willingness to illuminate the larger implications of Borjesson’s feature-length documentary.

These implications should flow inexorably from the pivotal revelation that the event that brought the airliner down initiated outside rather than inside the airplane.

What led up to this external explosion? What agencies and individuals set in motion the trajectories of actions culminating in the crash? Under whose chain of command did these occurrences take place? Who led and oversaw the coordinated misrepresentations and cover-up of the Flight 800 deceptions?

Will Borjesson’s journalist colleagues build on the revelations of her whistle-blowing film or will they simply fall back into the culture of denial and cover-up that so denigrates the reputation of their profession?



Will the reputations be refurbished of those journalists such as Jack Cashill and Kelly O’Meara who have been persecuted for having the audacity to explore the whodunit aspects of the Flight 800 disaster?

Will they be invited onto talk show circuits to revisit the heretofore forbidden frontiers of their research? Will the ethics of Robert Hagar or Kristina Borjesson prevail in defining the ethos of professional journalism in the years and decades ahead?

A momentary surge of stenography-style media coverage was instigated in the mainstream media by a press release on June 19 announcing TWA Flight 800’s television premier together with a petition requesting the NTSB to reopen the case.[25]

The press release emanated from Epix, the movie’s distributor. A joint venture of Viacom, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Lions Gate Entertainment, Epix is describes itself as a premium hybrid television channel.

The well-covered announcement identified “six whistleblowers [who] were not allowed to speak to the public or refute any comments made by their superiors and/or NTSB and FBI officials about their work at the time of the official investigation.”

The communiqué went on to explain that the whistle blowers “waited until after retirement to reveal how the official conclusion by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was falsified and lay out their case in a new original documentary film which will premiere on premium TV network EPIX on July 17, 2013 at 8:00PM edt.” [26]

As agencies deeply implicated in the cover-up, many of the media venues addressing the profound issues raised by TWA Flight 800 face the problem of dealing with their own roles in misrepresenting the aviation disaster.

CBS and CNN, for instance, cannot credibly address the controversies stirred up in TWA Flight 800 without some sort of reckoning with their own roles in sweeping aside the investigative work of Kristina Borjesson in the case of the former, Jack Cashill in the case of the latter.

According to Jack Cashill, The New York Times also carries much baggage in this story. In his own review of Borjesson’s film Cashill writes,“To control the post-crash narrative, the White House allowed the FBI to talk only to The New York Times.”

The NYT/FBI spin doctors described a possible bomb plot just days before the Democratic National Convention.

Then “in mid-September, two months after the crash, the FBI shifted the narrative once again from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion, a possibility that had been ruled out a month earlier. The other media unquestioningly followed the Times. They too had a president to re-elect.”[27]

In his own review of TWA Flight 800 Cashill congratulated Borjesson and Stalcup for their strategy of interpretative restraint in confining their narrative to the diagnosis of an external explosion. The necessity of such a strategy speaks to the experiences of a long list of independent investigators whose efforts to get to the bottom of the Flight 800 disaster brought them mostly grief, negative notoriety, or studied disregard in the mainstream media.

As illustrated by Borjesson’s long and difficult relationship with the Flight 800 story, those journalists were not prepared to play the role of stenographers to officials sources tended to be smeared, mocked, fired, and even criminalized for the efforts they made to contribute to a discourse of vital importance to the public interest.

Among those attacked for failing to tow the official line were John F. Kennedy’s former press secretary Pierre Salinger, Congressional aid Kelly O’Meara, TWA Chief Pilot Robert Terrell Stacey, investigative reporters Jim and Liz Sanders, Jack Cashill and David E. Hendrix, the authors of a report by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, as well as former US Navy Commander William S. Donaldson whose assessment of the airline disaster was written on behalf of the Associated Retired Aviation Professionals.

Commander William Donaldson photo here.

In a classic article that appeared in the New York Observer in February of 2000 Philip Weiss documented the ruthlessness of FBI techniques in litigation and through manipulations of a compliant media to prevent stories unfriendly to the federal police force’s agenda from gaining traction. An important feature of Weiss’ narrative put in the forefront two small samples taken from the salvaged seats on Flight 800. These samples were coated with residues of magnesium and calcium, substances said to be “consistent with solid rocket fuel.”

The chemical composition of these samples came to light through the efforts of Terrell Stacey working from inside the NTSB investigation. Because of his lack of confidence in the integrity of the federal government’s process, Stacey passed on the samples and the relevant information to journalists Jim Sanders, Kristina Borjesson, and David E. Hendrix. It was this incident that led to Borjesson’s being fired by CBS on the basis of information provided by the FBI. After firing Borjesson CBS hired James Kallstrom as a commentator on law enforcement matters. Kallstrom received the new appointment on retiring from the FBI shortly following the federal police force’s withdrawal from the Flight 800 investigation.

Weiss ends his essay with an account of Howard Kurtz’s Washington Post hit job on Kelly O’Meara for questioning official sources about suppressed radar evidence indicating the presence of many US military vessels operating in the immediate area and time frame of the Flight 800 crash. Reflecting in these episodes Weiss wrote, “In the old Soviet Union, critics were put in psychiatric hospitals.” As for dissident investigators in Weiss’ own country, “the media merely labels them ‘wacky’ and ignores them.”[28]



Kelly O’Meara’s research led to her revelations in 1999 that some two dozen US Navy ships were conducting sea trials in the area of the Flight 800 crash on July 17, 1996. Also in the area were three submarines, USS Trepang, USS Albuquerque, and USS Wyoming. O’Meara explained that something went wrong with USS Wyoming, which packed 192 nuclear warheads each containing 50 kilotons of destructive potential. The outcome of the unspecified incident was that the USS Wyoming’s captain was removed. As O’Meara saw it, “This latest revelation pounds the last nail into the coffin of the terrorist story. Those who are trying to lay a false trail to the terrorists have based their claim solely on the assumption there could not be a cover-up of a Navy shoot down, even as they concocted all kinds of reasons why the FBI and the NTSB were covering up for the terrorists.[29]



Investigative Journalism and Public Service



TWA Flight 800 emerges from this background of hit jobs and recriminations. These hit jobs emanate from agencies that include the FBI, CBS and the Washington Post. The recriminations have been aimed at professionally crippling those investigators who have acted with varying degrees of acuity and skill on the widely-shared understanding that something was unusual and wrong with the way the federal government responded to the airline disaster. It turns out many disturbing incidents to come were foreshadowed by James Kallstrom’s order to remove from a 1996 press conference the journalist who questioned the propriety of including the Navy in the Flight 800 investigation.



Borjesson’s ability to survive the attacks on her career and reputation for refusing to play along with the federal government’s deceptiveness marks the steadfastness of her adherence to the core principles of professional journalism. She refused back away from her insistence that the content of the evidence must remain uncompromised in the course of her seventeen-year engagement with the raunchy politics of the Flight 800 investigation. By maintaining this principled stance all the way to the completion of her feature-length documentary, Borjesson has at least slowed down the pace of retreat by most practitioners in her chosen profession from the journalistic credo that the truth must eventually prevail, that only the truth can set us free.



The very structure of Borjesson’s documentary suggests the strength of her ability to reinforce similar convictions in others. The cinematic structure of TWA Flight 800 depended on Borjesson’s ability to instill sufficient trust and confidence in the experts she gathered around her to go on the record in a very public fashion. In partnership with Tom Stalcup, Borjesson assisted those career professionals to face down the forces that had attempted to intimidate and silence them in order to shield the guilty from ignominy and prosecution.



In setting the record straight the aviation experts followed Borjesson’s lead by becoming whistle blowers. They thereby transcended the humiliations of victimhood. They overcame the condescension of their opportunistic persecutors to reached for and attain the highest ideals of ethical professional conduct. In a much smaller and more modest way than the aviation experts who made Borjesson’s film their chosen medium for professional redemption, I count myself among those inspired to help the investigative journalist achieve her goals. I invested $5000 in TWA Flight 800 at a time when the filmmakers had run into some difficulties in financing their important project. My belief in the importance of this project as it was being made has only been reinforced now that I have seen the finished product.



Just as Borjesson helped the aviation experts to emerge from the repressive efforts to silence them, so she helped the eyewitnesses to champion the truth of what they saw off the shore of Long Island on July 17, 1996. In providing the testimony of the eyewitnesses with a dignified public forum as well as a credible and receptive judicial audience, Borjesson’s film upholds the basic human right to speak freely in ways that can be properly heard on issues of major public importance. This contribution addresses a major theme of the Enlightenment. There is no higher seat of understanding than that which comes to us through the agency of human perception attached to reason and rationality. The viability of our gift of reason requires that we do not subordinate that which comes to us through our own senses, through that which we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.



The failure of the FBI, the CIA, and the NTSB to respect the principle that eyewitness evidence must be taken very seriously marks a stunning failure of police work in the United States. The abysmal response of federal authorities to the firsthand observations of those who saw the sequence of events leading to the demise of Flight 800 provides a cautionary tale for all witnesses to crime. For those witnesses giving evidence testimony to agencies that might be implicated themselves in the crimes being investigated, particular caution is necessary. Similarly the willingness of so many news agencies to valorize official sources over eyewitness sources illuminates a fundamental flaw that continues to diminish the credibility of our failing institutions of mass communications.



It remains to be seen whether or not the principled stand taken by the aviation experts featured in Borjesson’s film will find some sort of extension within the community of career professionals staffing the mainstream media. Will a council of deputized media truth tellers come forward to press on the public and our agencies of public government the need for some sort of reckoning with the information brought forward by the makers of TWA Flight 800? Will the revelations brought to light in Borjesson’s film result in some sort of journalistic push back among hands-on practitioners against the decisions of those at the top who have aligned their communications empires with the deceptions of the more corrupted branches of officialdom?



Will principled journalists within the mainstream media address in some sort of considered and systemic fashion the failures of their own profession as manifest in the original misrepresentation and ongoing cover-up? Will the revelations in TWA Flight 800 ripple more widely throughout the mainstream media causing more questions to be asked about tactics for manufacturing consent for public policies that run contrary to the public interest? Given the long heritage of malfeasance in the Flight 800 investigation, the possibility of such a reckoning presently seems quite unlikely. A genuine reckoning in the mainstream media with the lies and crimes entailed in the debacle would not reflect the interests or ideological predispositions of the very small, concentrated and interwoven group that presently owns and directs it.

From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror



The manipulation of large media outlets to serve the propaganda needs of the powerful is nothing new in US history or in the history of all major countries, confederacies and empires for that matter. Psychological warfare aimed at linking the formation of public opinion to the agendas of the powerful became especially pervasive, well funded and sophisticated with the onset of the Cold War after World War II. The deployment of all sorts of techniques to shape public perceptions and attitudes became even more ubiquitous and intense with the onset after 9/11 of the so-called Global War on Terror. Even more than during the Cold War, the new justifications for never-ending wars of aggressions, many of them outright resource grabs in Eurasia, depend on the broad dissemination of demonic imagery especially of Arab and Islamic populations.





The Flight 800 debacle occurred in the decade of transition from the era when Soviet-backed communism was considered the number one national security threat to the era when a global network of Islamic terrorists was placed at the pinnacle of national security threats and operations. Seen in this light, the development of the dominant explanation of the airline crash was more in tune with the methodologies of spin doctoring that would predominate after 9/11 than the methodologies of anti-communist propaganda that sputtered into obsolescence with the USSR’s breakup in the early 1990s.



The designation of those that did not adhere to the government’s interpretation of the aviation disaster as “conspiracy theorists” helped entrench a semantic device about to be deployed on a much grander scale to deflect serious skeptical scrutiny from the originating event of the Global War on Terror. So too did the federal manipulation of the supposed causes of the Flight 800 debacle mark an extension and an updating of Cold War techniques to replace inconvenient truths with manufactured pseudo-truths more conducive to the political requirements of those on the dominant side of history. The records that emerged from the retired United Airline Captain Ray Lahr’s requests to the National Security Agency help point to some of the linkages between the Flight 800 investigation and what Peter Dale Scott has dubbed “the deep state.”[30]



Like so many features of the national security state, the roots of the Cold War collaboration between government and the media really go back to initiatives undertaken during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson after the United States entered the First World War in 1917. In the name of the Committee for Public Education, journalist George Creel led a series of very deep federal interventions into the many branches of the media in order to engender supportive propaganda for the emerging superpower’s military efforts.[31]



The federal entry into the business of psychological warfare took place concurrently with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent founding of the Soviet Union. The federal government responded to these developments by incorporating anti-communist initiatives into the mix of laws, policies and regulations to control the behavior and thinking of American citizens. Among the early initiatives of the Wilson administration in laying the foundations for the national security state is the Espionage Act of 1917. This legislation formed the basis of the main criminal charge against whistle blower Edward Snowden for releasing in 2013 some of the surveillance secrets of the National Security Agency.



After the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) emerged from the National Security Act of 1947 the new organization immediately turned its attention to manipulating public opinion in the cause of promoting the worldwide interests of US corporations, but especially those at the core of the military-industrial complex. Anti-communism provided the catch-all justification for this covert federal backing extended to a favored coterie of elites on the commercial frontiers international and transnational business. These coddled comrades of capitalist corporatism were given almost unlimited license to transcend legal constraints in pursuit of profits amassed in the name of national security.



The extent of CIA involvement in the communications industry came to light in the second half of the 1970s with the investigations of Senator Frank Church’s Congressional Committee. Its work was instrumental in helping to reveal that the CIA’s Project Mockingbird employed about 3,000 journalists inside and outside the United States in the Cold War campaign to twist the news through disinformation, censorship, and distortion. In the course of this investigation a spotlight of public attention was cast on the predecessor of CIA-director, George W. Bush Sr. The former CIA-director was William Colby.



Colby may or may not have remarked that “the CIA owns every one of consequence in the major media.” Whether or not this often-quoted phrase actually fell from the lips of the man who directed between 1973 and 1976 a core agency of the USA’s national security state, there is no doubt that the idea attributed to Colby is essentially correct. The CIA was especially active throughout the news operations of the company that hired Kristina Borjesson and then fired her in the course of her investigative work on the TWA Flight 800 story. The founder of CBS, William Paley, became widely known as a very important operative in, and promoter of, the CIA. As a result one of the CIA’s premier propaganda bases coalesced in the most the famous of all the New York-basedbroadcasting empires.[32]



The work of the Church Committee was part of the federal government’s response to the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from the US presidency in 1974. Interestingly many of the key revelations that made the Watergate saga a pivotal event in US history were brought to light through the investigative endeavors of reporters at the Washington Post, a venue deeply involved in the Cold War propaganda sponsored by the CIA’s Project Mockingbird.

The Watergate scandal drew on the exuberance of the anti-war movement opposed to further US military involvement in Indochina. The grassroots success of the anti-war peaceniks in the 1960s and early 1970s suggested that the CIA’s efforts to shape public opinion from above were subject to major limitations. Those in charge of covert operations to manufacture public consent for US expansionism had apparently lost control of the public agenda.



There is considerable evidence that the overlords of the national security state responded to this setback by upgrading their capacities to engineer public opinion. From an era whose spirit was largely defined by the likes of the fallen Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. we passed into en era where Anglo-America was dominated by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their many acolytes and imitators. With the close collaboration of a compliant media the civil rights and anti-war movements lost momentum as the allure of Reaganomics gathered force. The change involved a radical shift in consciousness as many individuals subordinated their sense of citizenship to an image of themselves primarily as buyers and sellers in an increasingly deregulated, borderless and all-embracing global marketplace.



In this milieu virtually everything was made to seem like it was for sale. One of the major growth fields was the mainstream media’s creation of imagery and myth supportive of power. The best-financed agendas of the so-called Public Relations industry promoted public distrust of the state except when it came to the goal of cultivating heightened acceptance of expanded police powers combined with increased militarism at home and abroad. The social welfare state was refashioned as the stock market state combined with military Keynesianism on steroids. In the name of “free trade” the industrial base of North America was largely abandoned as manufacturing enterprises shifted their base of operations to low-wage regions where authoritarian governments prohibited trade unionism. Ironically China emerged as the great winner in this retooling of capitalism.



As low wage areas industrialized the resulting vacuum in deindustrialized Anglo-America was filled by a whole circus of fly-by-night enterprises such as those that exploited Wall Street’s federally-deregulated market in smoke-and-mirrors financial derivatives. The trafficking in these derivative instruments of legalized fraud led to the financial crisis of 2008 and to enormous “bailout” payments to indemnify and reward the bankster hooligans for their overzealous betting. These bailouts, in turn, led to the austerity measures of governments saddled with masses of new debt.

Imagining the shift from the dutiful public service of Henry Hughes to the crass opportunism of the NTSB’s Jim Hall can help us put human faces on America’s transition from productive enterprise to non-productive enterprises extending to weird computerized manipulations of hyper-inflated digitalized capital. The culture of deception that permeated the federal investigation of the Flight 800 fiasco was part of a much larger phenomenon. From the proliferation of liar loans to finance real estate bubbles to rampant insider trading on stock markets, this onslaught extended the fad of deregulation to radical extremes. The ingredient of truth in public policy became subject to made-to-order alterations as required by the whims of the rich connected to shifting currents of political expedience.



Project Mockingbird and the Ongoing Subversion of the Free Press



The federal investigations generated by the Watergate scandal were followed in the late 1980s by revelations connecting secret US arms shipments through Israel to the Islamic Republic of Iran with CIA drug deals to finance terrorist incursions of US-backed paramilitary squads in Central America. Closely connected to the Iran-Contra scandal were disclosures in the late 1980s illuminating the global business operations of the Pakistani-based, Saudi-financed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI. For those paying attention the startling news of the strange bedfellows brought together at the BCCI shed light on the nexus where CIA funding gave rise to a heavily-armed proxy force of Islamic theocrats known variously as the mujahideen and al-Qaeda.



After this US-backed Muslim fighting force overthrew the Soviet-backed puppet regime in Afghanistan, the imagery of al-Qaeda was pressed into service from the very first hours of the mainstream media’s blitzkrieg of 9/11 coverage. The former CIA asset supposedly gone rogue, Osama bin Laden, was immediately cast as the leader of a heavily mythologized network of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists. This network of scheming terrorists was made to provide the new global replacement for the defunct enemy of Soviet-backed communism.



The dramatic shift in the demonology of the permanent war economy, which has dominated the United States since 1941, kept the military-industrial complex in business. Indeed the business of war was accelerated. Militarism in all its many facets was lionized, privatized, and given unbridled license to express the Wild West-style of deregulated Reaganomics. The early years of the twenty-first century saw an extension of the Indian wars of North America into the militarized resource grabs in Eurasia. In their real or fictionalized hunt for Osama bin Laden the US Armed Forces gave the Saudi target the code name Geronimo. In 2003 Seventh Cavalry led the tank attack from Kuwait to Baghdad. This spear point of the US-led invasion of Iraq was the same Seventh Cavalry that under Commander George Armstrong Custer was defeated by Crazy Horse’s people at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.



After 9/11 the ideal of “security” became a more lucrative commodity to be marketed to governments, corporations and private individuals. The Washington Post identified this phenomenon as “Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control.”[33] The fast growth of the privatized terror economy has been accompanied by the rapid rise of a formidable political lobby. The members of this lobby have attached their nascent enterprises to the operations of older corporate entities that thrived over the course of the Cold War by integrating their activities with those of the national security apparatus and its attending the military-industrial complex.



Given the importance of the business of shaping of attitudes to conform to the needs of the permanent war economy, the big media conglomerates emerged from 9/11 with enhanced importance in the military-industrial complex. These agencies of mass communication, it seems, have become even more deeply integrated with the covert components of the national security state than they were during the Cold War.



As the politics of anti-communism gave way to the politics of anti-terrorism, the mainstream media became even less independent than it had been during the heyday of Project Mockingbird. After 9/11 the walls of secrecy and obfuscation were edified to preclude even stage-managed exercises in government self-scrutiny such as those widely-broadcasted investigations that took place in response to media revelations concerning the Watergate burglary and then the Iran-Contra-BCCI scandal.



In this post-9/11 era we do not even get sordid investigations such as those arising from the discovery that President Bill Clinton engaged in intimate erotic games that may or may not qualify as full-fledged sex with White House intern Monica Lewinski. Into the vacuum created by the dearth of genuine investigative reporting after 9/11 moved a new variety of whistle blower, a new type of truth teller. These point persons in the disclosure of otherwise forbidden knowledge were expert at moving information on the Internet from the most secret compartments of computation into very public digital arenas. So far these brave acts of public service have not generated sufficiently high levels of media-led public indignation to necessitate government investigations into areas of exposed misdeeds by officialdom.



After 9/11 we do not get government investigations to help us understand the full extent of the government’s infractions of its own law, infractions which include the invasion of citizens’ rights to privacy in our digital communications. Instead we get bombarded with officialdom’s justifications for federal efforts to round up, criminalize, and punish the likes of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. The actions of these whistle blowers can be interpreted as blowback for onslaughts of domestic and international crime perpetrated by government agencies and private contractors whose operatives claim to be acting in name of national security.



The nature, scope, and content of the claims of national security are purposely left vague and ill-defined. The imposition of secrecy imposes layer upon layer of concealment on activities that were once the legitimate realm of public affairs. The assault on the public interest, however, does not end there. Secrets are not inert entities resting harmlessly in vaults of concealment. Secrets contain authentic explanations of why things are as they are. Accordingly, the other side of keeping secrets is the need to develop false explanations that seemingly, but not actually, describe how reality is constructed. To withhold from the public proper explanations of our real conditions, and to divert attention away from actions of huge consequence that society’s most rich and powerful members wish to conceal, is to impose on citizens outside the inner circle of national security secrecy a huge burden making it virtually impossible for us to adapt to our actual conditions.



“Lies” is another term for false explanations. The job of the national security state, therefore, is not only to keep secrets but to generate lies that seem to explain what’s going on. In a world where much of the critical information is treated as secret, whole industries are developed to generate and sustain massive lies, to spin false explanations that cover up the secret transactions. In this environment the truth becomes a threat to many interests, but especially corporate interests with a major stake in the permanent war economy. One such blatant and now-exposed lie is the explanation of the crash of Flight 800 as the result of a mechanical failure. Another big lie is the explanation of 9/11 as an outside job pulled off by 19 Saudi jihadists controlled remotely by Osama bin Laden in Afghani caves.



The mere invocation of the term “national security” exempts those claiming to act in its name from requirements to adhere to laws prohibiting such basic crimes as murder, torture, perjury, larceny, and fraud. Assertions of national security, therefore, create a category of people who operate above the law with many special powers. Such powers can be deployed, for instance, to exploit privileged access to classified intelligence for insider trading on stock markets.



Since President George W. Bush declared his leadership of the Global War on Terror quite literally from a Christian pulpit,[34] the predominant conception of national security emerges from a very specific interpretation of the 9/11 assaults on powerful symbols of American power. The major outlines of this interpretation were delivered to the public on CNN and other networks in the midst of the 9/11 debacle even before the third World Trade Center, not hit by any airplane, plunged almost instantaneously into its own footprint at 5:20 in the afternoon.[35]



In laying out the main frames of reference of the Global War on Terror several days later in his State of the Union address to Congress,[36] Bush borrowed from the US inheritance of anti-communism. His language was reminiscent of the US rejection of the goals of the Non-Aligned Movement. All former colonies of European empires, the member nations Non-Aligned Movement sought to maintain their independence by not taking sides in the superpower rivalry of the Cold War. Bush declared, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”



The federal government’s formal investigation of the 9/11 debacle can be seen as a federal extension and even an amplification of the National Transportation Safety Board’s techniques of subterfuge, evasion and the manufacturing of pseudo-truths to cover over the real causes of Flight 800’s crash on July 17, 1996. The 9/11 Commission was set up by the Bush administration, supposedly to look into the many unanswered questions being asked primarily by the families of the 9/11 victims. The 9/11 Commission was set up so that no one who gave testimony was put under oath requiring that he or she tell the truth. Much can be implied from the political decision to strip judicial powers away from the 9/11 Commission in such a way that there were no criminal consequences for witnesses that lied to the questioners in this pseudo-investigation. And lie the witnesses did including the former US president and vice-president in their in camera testimony. As an entity that appeared to be a judicial inquiry without the actual powers of a judicial inquiry, the 9/11 Commission itself encapsulates the essence of the national security state’s culture of officially-sanctioned deception.

The 2004 report of this 9/11 Commission has been described by one critic as “the most unsupported, contrived and ridiculous work of fiction ever produced by the US Federal Government.”[37] Even the Co-Chairs of the federal investigative body understood that “in many ways it was set up to fail.” “We didn’t have enough money, we didn’t have enough time and we were appointed by the most partisan people in Washington,” declared Co-Chair Thomas Kean.[38]



Commission member Max Cleland called the investigative body a “national scandal” whose treatment by the US executive branch demonstrated that “the White House wants to cover it up.”[39] The Legal Counsel of the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, added his voice to the chorus of criticism from within emphasizing the propensity of federal officials to lie when giving testimony. “At some level of the government,” Farmer writes, “there was an agreement not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11”[40] In Harper’s Magazine Benjamin DeMott described the 9/11 Commission’s report as a “cheat and a fraud,” as an exercise in “artful dodging” that “infantilizes” its audiences even as it “conceals realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.”[41]



The huge improprieties and irregularities of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation set the stage for the intensification in the twenty-first century of the culture of concealment, junk science, and wholesale distortion of the truth. The culture of concealment privileges appearance over substance. Rather than identify and face reality on its own terms, officials who operate within the sphere of useful deception adopt the principle that it is more important to regulate, shape and exploit public perceptions of reality no matter how far removed from the truth. Nothing is treated as fixed and immutable. Everything becomes a negotiation where the need to be popular or at least acceptable with dominant oligarchies is valorized over the need to be truthful, the need to be correct in drawing logical conclusions from the available evidence.



The organization of the public face of government as a constant negotiation of surface appearances puts great influence in the hands of the small number of technocrats with access to reliable information on what’s actually happening at the deeper levels of the state. This division of the world between surface myths and underground repositories of concealed truths takes us back to pre-Enlightenment times when priestly elites and their royal adjuncts maintained positions of absolute power through the manipulation and exploitation of superstition.



Those with national security clearances and entitlements are sometimes seen to possess magic-like powers. The keepers of the state’s esoteric knowledge are, like knights of old, slayers of dragons. Often the media casts them as agents of civilization’s ascent over savagery and terror. Many years after 9/11, however, this mythology is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. The tide is turning as more and more people come to see governments as instruments of instability rather than national security. As illustrated by the rapid rise and spread beginning in in 2011 of Occupy Wall Street and related demonstrations against austerity measures throughout Europe and Latin America, governments are increasingly perceived as hopelessly beholden to corrupt financial institutions, military contractors, oil and gas interests and the like.



As the culture of paranoia becomes more intense on both sides of the relationship between governors and the governed, the incentive grows for spy agencies to widen their net of infiltration, surveillance, provocation, and entrapment.[42] Citizens become suspects. As the international law scholar Richard Falk writes in his blog, “The disinction… between suspect and citizen now seems superceded and irrelevant, and this is an ominous development that should be challenged.”[43]

In this milieu of heightened distrust, even the asking of questions awkward to power makes one a candidate for investigation, a possible subject of blackmail, a potential informer to be cultivated. In the era of the Internet much of the material obtained through digital surveillance ends up in government archives composed of our own E-Mails, Facebook posts, Google searches, and telephone calls. This feature of contemporary spying points to a key dichotomy of these times when the evolving character of the Internet is fast reconfiguring basic architectures of knowledge, human interaction, and ultimately civilization itself. Even as vital information is secreted away in the sphere of government as well as the corporate clients and patrons of government, old boundaries of demarcation protecting the personal privacy of individuals are digitally obliterated in the name of national security.



Social media presents an especially contested zone of conflicting digital agendas in this dialectical clash. On the one hand social networking offers new media of transnational democratic interaction in the cause of popular liberation. On the other hand social networking provides huge quantities of raw material to be mined, assessed and tweaked in the New Inquisitors’ zeal to find, quash, and smear heretics and heresies. In the reactionary rush to defend menaced orthodoxies, the burgeoning cult of national security insidiously infiltrates more and more aspects of business, mainstream media, education, police work, law, and administration.



The Science and Politics of Investigation

Kristina Borjesson’s TWA Flight 800 arrives at a time when fundamental questions are beginning to be asked even in some branches of the mainstream media about the extreme excesses of the burgeoning cult of national security. From the earliest days of the investigation into the crash of the Boeing 747 the agents and agencies of national security seemed to be leading the process. As Henry Hughes attests in TWA Flight 800, FBI agents and other special-forces operatives of uncertain pedigree were already busily searching for wreckage and other forms of evidence before the formal investigation of the National Transportation Safety Board even began.



The FBI asserted dominance over the Flight 800 investigation for almost two years until the CIA intervened with its infamous NOT A MISSILE video presented without any supporting body of evidence. As the product of a national security agency that has earned much notoriety for its history of covertly spinning into the public’s imagination strategic lies and distortions, this CIA video raised many more questions than it answered.



While the FBI and the CIA were at the forefront during the most formative stage of the investigation, the Navy and the Pentagon have remained active in the background of the Flight 800 controversy from its inception right up to the present. Since 9/11 this federal nexus of military command and control has sought to harness the cult of national security to the objectives of Total Information Awareness and Full Spectrum Dominance. [44] Edward Snowden’s criminalized revelations on the massive data collecting and storage activities of the National Security Agency through software known as PRISM exposed one of many elements of the US Armed Forces’ larger drive for Total Information Awareness.[45]

Kristina Borjesson, Tom Stalcup and those with whom they collaborated in the making of TWA Flight 800 have petitioned the National Transportation Safety Board to reopen the case. This strategy essentially amounts to asking a police force to investigate itself for wrongdoing within its own ranks. The film makes it very clear that the roots of the problem do not go back to evidence inadvertently missed in the course of the investigation.



The roots of the problem go back to a process where political motivations overrode and sidelined the career professionals of aviation safety assigned by the federal government to investigate Flight 800’s demise. A proper investigation of the initial investigation, therefore, would explore problems of leadership within the NTSB and how these problems might be connected to various overt and covert relationships with other agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and ultimately the White House. How is the unbridled growth of the cult of national security affecting aviation safety as well as the provision of other services of vital importance to the health and wellbeing of the general public?



The impediments raised by the claims of national security form the great obstacles blocking a proper federal probe into an investigation that went terribly wrong. Like so many features of life in the post-9/11 world, old conceptions of the relationship between truth and safety have become subordinate to a new conception linki