© Jack Cashill
In the spring of 2001, before I invested my time and reputation in the cause of TWA Flight 800, I flew to Fort Lauderdale and spent three days with Jim and Elizabeth Sanders. The Sanderses had been arrested and convicted of conspiracy for Jim's work on the downing of TWA Flight 800. When I met with them, they were both still on federal probation.
What I was looking for was that one piece of evidence that would make me doubt Jim's contention that TWA Flight 800 had been shot out of the sky. Only when I had satisfied myself that there was no such evidence did I go forward with Jim on our mutual projects, the video "Silenced" and the book "First Strike."
No one has been brought to justice for the conscious concealment of that missile strike on July 17, 1996. That concealment lulled the nation into complacency about jihadi terrorism and quite likely led to the nation blindly into September 11. I say "quite likely" because after five years of research I still do not know with complete certitude who fired the fatal missiles or how.
Ironically, I feel much more certain about who orchestrated the attacks on September 11. As one reader observed, "No reasonably intelligent person could possibly conclude it was anything but a somewhat successful terrorist attack by religious fanatics."
I would dissent only in suggesting that intelligent people have concluded otherwise. A medically retired Marine from North Carolina added a useful clarification. "Anyone who seriously considers conspiracy theories on the events of 9-11 is either too stupid to understand the easily found evidence and therefore not really at fault," he wrote me, "or they have vested themselves so deep into the whole cornucopia of conspiracies that they can no longer think in a linear way." I think the latter is more likely the case.
Unlike in the case of TWA Flight 800, the contrary evidence for a 9-11 conspiracy is becoming too obvious for all but the most vested to ignore. Many of those, for instance, who believed in a conspiracy did so because the government had not yet released the video of the Pentagon strike. Under legal pressure from Judicial Watch, the government relented last week.
"We fought hard to obtain this video because we felt that it was very important to complete the public record with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "Finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77." Although difficult to see clearly, the video convinced Fitton and Judicial Watch that the object striking the Pentagon was, in fact, American Airlines 77. They are not shills for the New World Order.
With contrary evidence surfacing all around them, many of my correspondents retreated to the redoubt of World Trade Center 7. For the record, this 47-story building collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11 about nine hours after the original attack.
One letter I received sheds some useful light on what actually happened to this building:
I was a resident of Battery Park City on 9-11, on the 26th floor of a building 300-400 yards northwest of the North Tower, in a corner apartment that pointed directly at the North Tower. I was watching within five seconds of the first impact and stayed until the following afternoon. I observed the following about No. 7.Shortly after 4 p.m. (about the time the power went out), I saw a window on the west end of the building blown out by a jet of flame that extended approximately 50 feet out of the window. The jet blew for a few seconds and then reversed itself. This repeated, over and over for the next hour, as the building seemed to breathe like a living thing. Although the flames didn't jet out as significantly, it was very easy to see that there was a bellows effect in play and the flames were becoming hotter and hotter, eventually reaching white heat. This effect was still present when the building collapsed, and the collapse started at roughly the same floor that I was watching.
Given this context, consider the statement building owner Larry Silverstein made to a PBS crew some months after the attack:
I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire [in WTC 7], and I said, you know, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.
Silverstein later clarified that the "it" that was to be pulled was the crew of firefighters still in the obviously damaged building. Remember, nearly 3,000 people had already died that day at the World Trade Center, more than 300 of them firefighters. Yes, there have been few comparable collapses of steel frame buildings, but never before has a building of this nature been allowed to burn.
Silverstein did not have to be a "traitor," as some have accused him of being, or a mercenary insurance scammer, as others have claimed, to let the building go. At that moment, his may very well have been the honorable decision.
This July marks the 10th anniversary of TWA Flight 800's demise. I would ask my vigilant correspondents – whose intelligence I don't question and whose softening of tone I appreciated greatly – to focus on the TWA 800 disaster, the most consequential political cover-up of our time.
Don't let the left bury this crime under its well-orchestrated and highly successful 9-11 obfuscation.
