© Jack Cashill
WND.com- January 11, 2017

Last month the New York Times reported breathlessly that, according to the CIA, Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election “with the primary aim of helping make Donald J. Trump president.”

What the Times did not say is that the CIA intervened in the 1996 election to help Bill Clinton get re-elected president and that the Times itself facilitated this intervention.

The proof of the same is much stronger than the proof for Russia’s intervention in 2016.

In mid-summer 1996, barring the unforeseen, Clinton was poised to beat Republican nominee Bob Dole and retain the White House.

Then on the evening of July 17 the unforeseen happened. TWA Flight 800 was blown out of the sky off the south coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board.

Within hours of the crash, the FBI took control of the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board. This was an illegal take-over, but it was done publicly.

True to form, the CIA did its work covertly. According to a memo in a recently unearthed cache of CIA documents, “The DI [Directorate of Intelligence] became involved in the ‘missile theory’ the day after the crash occurred.”

This move, of course, violated the law and circumvented the DOJ’s notorious “wall” restricting FBI and CIA cooperation, but the media chose not to know.

According to a CIA memo sent just two weeks after the disaster, FBI agents had already interviewed 144 “excellent” eyewitnesses to a likely surface-to-air missile strike and found the evidence for such a strike “overwhelming.”

This confirmed the data that the FAA air traffic controllers had dispatched the night of the explosion, setting the White House on edge.

But the CIA, certain elements of it anyhow, had an election to win. In the aforementioned memo, the chief CIA analyst boasted of discouraging the FBI from releasing its missile report. He seems to have succeeded.

Two weeks later, the FBI was telling the Times there were “fewer than a dozen” credible eyewitnesses, only one of whom the Times was allowed to interview.

That witness caught the event out of the corner of his eye and thought he saw a bomb blast. Going forward, the Times would not interview a single one of the official 258 FBI eyewitnesses who had seen a glowing object streaking towards TWA 800.

The testimony of these eyewitnesses to a missile strike was, as even the CIA conceded, “remarkably detailed” and “surprisingly consistent.”

It could not be allowed to stand. The CIA analysts spoke to no witnesses and reviewed just a third of the FBI witness statements before reaching their conclusion in December 1996.  

As they interpreted the FBI “302s,” the witnesses only thought they saw “a missile attacking the aircraft.” According to the CIA, what they did see was a flaming 747 zoom-climbing more than three thousand feet after an internal explosion blew the nose off the plane.

By March 1997, with the truth suppressed and the election won, this zoom-climb theory had become dogma.

That month the newly minted and politically reliable director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, sent FBI director Louis Freeh a letter assuring him that “what these eyewitnesses saw was the crippled aircraft after the first explosion had already taken place.”

One stalwart FBI agent, however, refused to accept the CIA theory. According to an internal CIA memo from April 29, 1997, FBI missile-team head, later identified as Steve Bongardt, sent the CIA a blistering critique.

Bongardt demanded to know why the analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object “hit the aircraft” or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800.

In all, Bongardt cited some thirty “problem witnesses” whose accounts did not begin to square with the “agency scenario.” With some precision, he also challenged the aerodynamics of the CIA’s preposterous zoom climb theory.

In his conclusion, Bongardt recommended that “the Agency withdraw its conclusions” until it could meet several conditions, any one of which would unravel its unfounded speculation.

The CIA memo writer did not seem overly worried. He knew that Tenet and Freeh had already signed off on his analysis.

To cover his bases, though, he got to work quickly. The very day he sent this memo, April 29, 1997, a new 302 magically appeared in the file of Witness 73, perhaps the most observant of the eyewitnesses.

According to her original 302, taken days after the crash, Witness 73 saw a “red streak” with a “light gray smoke trail” move up towards the airline, and then go “past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing.”
With uncanny precision Witness 73 detailed the plane’s break-up sequence weeks before the authorities were able to confirm it from their analysis of the debris field.

Witness 73’s 302 from April 29, 1997, amended her initial account. Now she confessed to having “consumed two (2) ‘Long Island Ice Tea’ cocktails” before witnessing the crash and was no longer confident of what she had seen.

As she told me, however, there was no second interview. A teetotaler, Witness 73 did not even know what a Long Island Iced Tea was when first approached by independent researchers.

The CIA analysts also fabricated second interviews for at least two other key eyewitnesses, both of whose altered testimony was featured in the CIA’s zoom-climb animation.

The FBI showed this preposterous animation just once in November 1997 when it closed the criminal case. The willingly gullible Times congratulated the FBI for its “admirable thoroughness and openness.”

In 1996, as in 2016, the media and key people in the intelligence agencies had a vested interest in a Clinton victory. The evidence is overwhelming that they corrupted the evidence to re-elect Bill Clinton.

Donald Trump has every reason to suspect that forces within the CIA are doing the same in 2016. It may be too late to elect Hillary Clinton president, but it is never too late to undermine Donald Trump.

Jack Cashill’s newest book, TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover up, the Conspiracy can now be ordered at Amazon.