SANDY’S SECRETS: THE TWA 800 COVER-UP AND 9/11
By Jack Cashill*

On July 6, 2006, Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, announced that it had added a new member to its high-profile, five-member advisory board?former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton.

True to form, the major media ignored the Hamilton appointment. They should not have. Hamilton, who had served as Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had just joined a firm headed by the man who had criminally undermined that very Commission, Stonebridge chairman and founder, Samuel “Sandy” Berger. 

In the words of a House Committee report, Berger had perpetrated “a dis-turbing breach of trust and protocol that compromised the nation’s national security,” a breach that had come at the expense of the 9/11 Commission’s very mission.

(Editor’s note: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that Berger, former National Security Advisor to President Clinton, was sentenced to community service and probation and fined $50,000 plus court costs in September 2005 for removing documents related to 9/11 from the National Archives. Berger agreed to take a polygraph test as part of his guilty plea in the case but the Justice Department never administered one. As a result, 18 Members of Congress, led by Davis, sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking that a test be administered to him promptly. “This may be the only way for anyone to know whether Mr. Berger denied the 9/11 Commission and the public the complete account of the Clinton administration’s actions or inactions during the lead-up to the terrorist attacks on the United States” in 2001, Davis says. The report issued by Davis characterized the Justice Department’s investigation of Burger’s thievery as “remarkably incurious.”)

The unseemly nature of this new alliance [between Berger and Hamilton] apparently did not trouble the Washington media. By the spring of 2006, Berger felt sufficiently comfortable in his relationship with that media to execute a brazen, political drive-by on the one man who most seriously threatened the Clinton legacy and his own reputation, namely Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania.

Berger began his spring offensive in March 2006 with a fundraiser for Weldon’s opponent, Joe Sestak. Almost universally despised by his Naval colleagues, the former vice admiral was forced into retirement for what the U.S. Navy charitably called “poor command climate.” Before being recruited to run for Congress, Sestak had not lived in Weldon’s district for 30 years.

The Clinton Connection

Although hosted by Berger, the fundraiser was held at the law offices of Harold Ickes, a veteran Clinton fixer, and Janice Enright, the treasurer of Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign. 

Before the campaign was through, Clinton insiders would enlist Stonebridge’s Director of Communications to serve as Sestak’s campaign spokes-person, summon former president Clinton to rally the troops, and finally call in the federales. Their motives were transparent even to the local media. 

“A Sestak victory,” observed suburban Philadelphia’s Delco Times early in the campaign, “would muzzle a Republican congressman who blames Clinton for doing irreparable harm to America’s national security during the 1990s.”

As the number two Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon had not only exposed the Clinton administration’s lethal “Able Danger” breakdown, but he had also catalogued the CIA’s failures before Sept. 11 in his book Countdown to Terror. And he wasn’t stopping there.

TWA 800

In late July 2006, I accompanied Mike and Joan Wire to visit Weldon in his D.C. office. The Wires, who live in suburban Philadelphia, had arranged the interview. I happened to be in New Jersey at the time so we drove down together. The interview lasted two and a half hours and ended only because I had to leave.

Mike Wire just happened to be the most critical of the 270 eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike on TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996. As is well enough known, the government had argued that a mechanical failure brought down the plane. 

To make the story work, however, the FBI and/or the CIA had to manufacture from whole cloth a second interview with Wire that fit their invented scenario. This was criminal obstruction, and it is easily verified.

As late as 2001, I was as skeptical about TWA Flight 800 as the next guy. It was then that I met James and Elizabeth Sanders. The Sanders and TWA captain Terrell Stacey had been arrested in 1997 and charged with conspiracy.

An investigative reporter, Sanders was doing the job the major media had chosen not to do. Elizabeth, a TWA trainer, had introduced her husband to Stacey, then working inside the investigation; nothing more.

Targeting Weldon

Before committing to co-produce Silenced [a film about TWA 800], I had flown to Ft. Lauderdale, where the Sanders were living, and spent three days reviewing their evidence and assessing their character. As I learned, the government arrested the three of them?and convicted the Sanders?only because they had been closing in on the truth.

When the Wires and I met with Weldon and his aide Russ Caso, we showed them sections from Silenced, but we were not revealing anything they did not know or at least suspect. What most intrigued Weldon was the cast of characters involved in the misdirection of the TWA Flight 800 investigation. Many of those characters were working to unseat him. They included:

Sandy Berger:  Col. Buzz Patterson, who carried the nuclear football in the summer of 1996, identifies then-Deputy National Security Advisor Berger as the one person holed up in the family quarters with the president on the night of July 17, 1996. In addition to his other services, Berger donated $1,000 to the Sestak campaign. Sestak was the only congressional candidate to whom Berger gave money.

Tony Lake:  As national security advisor, Lake was Berger’s immediate boss. Although he stayed out of the family quarters on July 17, he too was in the loop that night. At 3 A.M. he received a call from the president asking that he “dust off the contingency plans.” Lake donated $500 to Sestak. It was his only federal donation in 2006.

Richard Clarke:  The anti-terror honcho takes credit for discovering the exploding fuel-tank theory that provided a mechanical explanation, however contrived, for TWA Flight 800′s demise. He is likely also responsible for bringing the FBI and CIA together to create the zoom-climb animation which was used to discredit the eyewitnesses. Clarke donated $2,100 to Sestak. It was the only federal donation he made in 2006

John Deutch:  Deutch was serving as CIA director the night TWA Flight 800 went down. Several months later, in a scandal that foreshadowed Berger’s own, Deutch was discovered to have loaded classified documents onto to his personal computer and taken them home. His motives were never made clear. He eventually signed a plea agreement and agreed to pay a $5,000 fine only to be pardoned the next day by President Clinton. Deutch donated $500 to Sestak, one of only two congressional candidates he supported in 2006.

Mary O. McCarthy:  In 1996, McCarthy, a CIA analyst, served as an intelligence officer on the National Security Council. In 1998, Berger appointed her as Special Assistant to the President. In 2006, the CIA fired her for allegedly leaking secret information about so-called overseas CIA prisons to the Washington Post. The only federal candidate to whom she donated in 2006 was Joe Sestak. To give some sense of the politicized nature of the CIA, McCarthy donated $2,000 to John Kerry in 2004.

Jamie Gorelick:  Gorelick does not have the excuse of knowing Sestak from his work on the National Security Council. Gorelick served as Deputy Attorney General in the Justice Department. Still she donated $3,000 to the Sestak campaign, the most she gave to any candidate in 2006.

Gorelick, of course, was one of five Democrats appointed to the 9/11 Commission?and for no more obvious reason than her stake in keeping talk of TWA Flight 800 out of the Commission room.

On August 22, 1996, the politically reliable Gorelick met with the FBI brass and directed their efforts away from any serious terror or missile leads. From this point on, the FBI was tasked with finding an alternative explanation for the explosive residue found throughout the plane and duly reported to The New York Times for the previous month. 

This FBI search culminated in an exculpatory tale of a sloppy dog-training exercise aboard the Flight 800 plane five weeks before the crash. Though easily disproved, the story satisfied a painfully incurious media.

Prelude To 9/11

Unfortunately for America, by suppressing talk of TWA Flight 800, the Clinton administration had to suppress talk of a very real terror plot against the United States that culminated in the events of September 11.

In the way of background, in January 1995, the Philippine police shared with the FBI detailed plans for an aerial terrorist assault on the United States. Those plans called for the use of hijacked airliners and/or explosives-filled private aircraft as flying bombs to attack the United States. 

The architect of those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and a cohort of 9/11 chief strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his alleged uncle. 

Richard Clarke obviously took Yousef’s planes-as-bombs plots seriously. In planning security for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Clarke warned of the possibility of terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into a packed Olympic stadium.

The U.S. Navy apparently took Yousef’s plans seriously as well. On July 17, 1996, National Liberation Day in Saddam’s Iraq and two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, a small fleet of ships and subs, some perhaps NATO, cruised off the coast of Long Island, locked and loaded.

One of two things happened next: Either Navy missiles intercepted a terrorist plane and inadvertently took out TWA Flight 800 in the process; or, more likely, while practicing to intercept a terrorist plane in the kind of crowded air corridor where such an attack would likely occur, Navy missiles accidentally destroyed the 747.

In either case, the U.S. Navy did not have the will or the wherewithal to conceal this on its own. That decision would have been made in the family quarters of the White House in the early morning hours of July 18. 

Clinton’s Re-election At Risk

Those few subordinates in the know would have been told that the decision was made for reasons of national security. A more urgent reason, of course, was to secure Clinton’s reelection a few months hence.

The evidence for Navy involvement has been greatly enhanced by the research of Capt. Ray Lahr on the west coast and the legal work in the Federal courts by his counsel, John Clarke. Highly useful too has been a new and stunningly sophisticated crash analysis drafted by an apparent insider (or insiders), whose identity remains stubbornly unknown.

As a result of Lahr’s work in particular, the NTSB and FBI have quietly abandoned the CIA zoom-climb scenario and rely now only on a quiescent media to ignore the un-rebutted testimony of some 270 eyewitnesses to a missile strike.

In the summer of 1996, President Clinton had a keen interest in the planes-as-bombs plot as well. Soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800, Col. Buzz Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he “keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.”

“I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,” Patterson writes, “and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.” The president’s handwritten comments on the documents verified the same.

The Cover-Up

Most likely to keep the subject of TWA Flight 800 off  the table, all talk of planes as bombs ended in the summer of 1996. Incoming National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was not even warned about the possibility. Richard Clarke verified as much when he testified before the 9/11 Commission. 

“Knowledge about al Qaeda having thought of using aircraft as weapons,” admitted Clarke, was “5-years, 6-years old.” He asked that intelligence analysts “be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn’t seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.”

As to President Clinton’s legacy-killing notes on the Yousef plot documents, they obviously did not find their way to the 9/11 Commission. Not surprisingly, according to the National Archives staff, “Berger was especially interested in White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke’s personal office files.” He reviewed these and “original NSC numbered documents” on his first visit to the Archives.

The House report noted, “Had Berger seen ‘a smoking gun’ or other documents he did not want brought to an investigatory panel’s attention, he could have removed it on this visit.”

When the Wires and I left Weldon in July 2006, he was on his way to review the Berger evidence. Weldon was the one man in Washington willing and able to put all the pieces together of what loomed as the most serious scandal in American political history. But this was not to be. The Clintons and their cronies had other plans.

During the now legendary Chris Wallace interview with President Clinton in late September 2006 on FOX News, the nation saw just how potent were the guns aimed at Weldon. “A three-star admiral,” Clinton announced out of nowhere, “who was on my National Security Council staff, who also fought terror, by the way, is running for the seat of Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania.” He did not even mention Sestak by name. He may not have known it. Other than President Bush, Clinton mentioned no other Republican than Weldon.

The Curious “Leak”

It is not easy to take out a popular ten-term congressman. Weldon’s enemies, however, had a nasty little ace up their sleeves. A week after President Clinton visited Weldon’s district to fire up the troops, the McClatchy Newspapers broke a story attributed to two anonymous sources, namely that Weldon had “traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter.”

Alleging a need to act quickly because of the leak, the FBI raided the homes of Weldon’s daughter and a friend on Monday, Oct. 16. By noon of that same day, a group of nearly 20 Democrat protesters were milling outside Weldon’s district office in Upper Darby, carrying matching signs that read, “Caught Red-Handed.” The story received a great deal of unreflective attention from a media desperate for a Democrat win, and Weldon went down to defeat.

The move against Weldon was naturally attributed to the Bush Justice Department. As the Berger case proved, however, there are powerful forces operating in the Justice Department and FBI that seem to have no greater goal than protecting the Clinton legacy and advancing the Democrat agenda. The idea that Karl Rove somehow orchestrated the Weldon hit makes sense only in the nether reaches of the liberal blogosphere.

Sometimes, as in the case of Watergate, conspiracy is not a theory. It’s a crime. Still, the major media will use the “conspiracy theory” mantra as an excuse to ignore this story. 

To this point, the “respectable” conservative media have been intimidated into following their lead.

*Jack Cashill is an award-winning writer and producer whose website is http://www.cashill.com/. This article first appeared at WorldNetDaily.com.

 

WHAT IS STONEBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL?

Stonebridge International describes itself as a “leading international advisory firm helping global business navigate the most promising and challenging markets, including Brazil, China, Russia and India.” It is aligned with Hogan & Hartson, an international law firm, and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Berger, chairman of the group, also serves as chairman of the International Advisory Board of DB Zwirn & Co., a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund. He argued in a May 8, 2006, column in the Wall Street Journal that Washington should talk to Iran, rather than threaten military action against the regime over its nuclear weapons program. Anthony Harrington, president of Stonebridge, has been quoted as saying that Washington should not view China’s growing presence in Latin America as a threat.

The firm’s clients have included French aircraft manufacturer Airbus, the Boeing Company’s major international rival in the production of civilian aircraft, and Gulfsands Petroleum, a British company with oil interests and projects in Iraq, Syria, and the U.S.

Principals:

Sandy Berger, former national security advisor under President Clinton.
H.P. Goldfield, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development.
Anthony Harrington, former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil.

Advisory Board:

Roger C. Altman, Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Clinton.
Thomas J. Donahue, President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Craig L. Fuller, Assistant to the President for Cabinet Affairs for President Ronald Reagan, and Chief of Staff to Vice President George Bush.
Lee Hamilton, former Demo-cratic Congressman.
Warren Rudman, former Repub-lican Senator.

What You Can Do

Send the enclosed postcards to Bill O’Reilly, asking that he address the TWA 800 cover-up, and your own Representative in Congress, asking for a federal probe of Al-Jazeera activities in the U.S. Also, please let AIM know what you want us to do about the return of the fairness doctrine.

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