>> brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> we may have a few latecomers who will go through the back. first route welcome to the tw. we hope you enjoy. we also, if you want to tour the museum you'll have to go back out at around. we have a room that may be of interest to you.

it's my pleasure to welcome jack to the museum for this presentation. you're going to do questions and answers so he'll be doing q&a after his speech. welcome jack. [applause] >> this is a great venue, i suspect it's the first time book tv has done one from an error line hanger. this is probably my tenth book tv but it is closest to my heart. let me start background. many of you know that on july 17, 1996, at 819 p.m., twa flight 800 life to the jfk airport in hundred life the jfk airport in new york bound for paris. twelve minutes later, 8:31 p.m. off the coast of long island, the popular south shore of long island it was blown out of the sky. 230 people were killed.

fifty-three of them were twa employees. many of you in this room knew at least some of those people. there is a memorial in their honor at the museum and if i were coming here and to spread a conspiracy theory i would be dishonoring their memory and would be insulting you. instead i'm here to tell you what happened on july 17, 1996. and the nights, days, months, and years thereafter. there are people in this room who know more about aviation than i do. at the end of my conversation i'm going to take questions and answers because i know some of you have first-hand experience with this tragedy. here's what we know. in the last few years researchers have unearthed a mother load of new information

from essential intelligence agency, the cia. so the question is what is the cia doing involving itself with the domestic airline crash. we also have interesting videos and a lot of whistleblowers from with inside the investigation have come forward. the state of our knowledge today is much better than it was 20 years ago. when i say we, i have to to give credit to the people who do research here, sanders, a physicist, christina who came here and spoke, a former cbs producer, a former eastern and united airline pilot. and some good people at accuracy media including roger -- and hank as the investigator and others. they deserve a lot of credit for digging up the information i'm going to share. i wanted wanted to let that be known.

since the book has, at least 100 individuals individuals from within the military or the aviation industry support my thesis. many of them work for and at the investigation itself. many of them are still angry about what they experienced in what happened to them. here's what we know. according to an air traffic controller, in fact -- he just e-mailed me today saying he loved the book and that he thanked me for treating his story accurately. i wrote about it. it. i did not release his name. he worked for 30 years as an air traffic controller, he wants to keep his pension. he says i have children. you hear hear that from a lot of people. what you he told me that night, he's had a primary radar return indicated vertical movement intersecting twa 800. that shows on you screens -- and

that is what precipitated the panic in washington d.c. those the first notice, was not the eyewitnesses that came out of the air traffic control centers in new york, that some something had happened to the plane. seconds before it intersected that airplane it disappears. the twa 800 notation disappears from the screen. the supervisor comes over to my correspondent and he says, have you ever seen anything like this before? and i said yes, missile test when i was in the navy. i saw it all the time. so was not something unknown to him. the next day he comes back in and wants to review the tape. he goes to supervisor come i want to take another look at that tape. the supervisor says no, it is gone. it has been taken, this is a violation of all protocol. tapes are tapes are supposed to stay there for future adjudication. now, the the only person who has spoken about what happened next

in washington is richard clark, he spoke a liar and a breaker so it is hard to sort through the information to get at the truth. but we spent some time on this. everyone else who writes about that period of time in that administration is completely silent in the event. even those the it is the number one new story 1996. it was richard clark titles the chapter, the almost war of 1996. clark, 96. clark, thinkest on the truth here, he convenes a meeting of the in the situation room in the white house at 9:00 p.m., i have an hour after the crash. i know from hillary clinton's blog so my sources within the white house that the clintons

return to the white house just about 8:30 p.m. after routine fundraising nearby. they retreated to the family quarters and they stay there the rest of the night. they did not go to the situation room. i asked who was with them in the family quarters and he could only come up with one name, sandy berger. now burger was the deputy national security adviser, his boss was a national security advisor and is a set elsewhere, he knew knew that when the conversation got political he left the room. berger was the political guy, political decisions were about to be made. among them was the insertion of the fbi into the investigation. one of my most helpful people in this book and he's going to come into the story later on, his name is vernon gross, he is a former ntsb board member. there's a five members on the national transportation safety board. it is a pretty powerful position. vernon is a leading expert in the country on plane crashes. he was so knowledgeable that cnn

called him and that night to do on air interpretation of events. on on your commentary. he spent the next six hours there. and as he tells me he says i wasn't there couple of hours and already the fbi has taken over the investigation. as of former board member of the ntsb this was unprecedented and illegal. the ntsb was set up to be independent. at that point the second of sacrifice their independence and yielded to the fbi. now no one knew at that time that some other insertion was taking place on the very first day. this we know from the treasure trove of cia documents that we have unearthed. this is what we know, according to their own documents quote, the director of intelligence became involved in the theory that the day after the crash occurred.

the cia has absolutely no business being involved in this kind of event. especially since the year before, 1995 the department of justice sent out a memo and is often known as the wall memo. the wall memo says that there is a wall between the intelligence gathers in the cia and the criminal investigators in the fbi. they cannot collaborate because it would be a violation of people's rights, who knows. and george pennant in 2004, at that point he was the director of central intelligence, the the head of the cia. he told the 9/11 commission that he was the first introduce the notion to the public about the wall. he wasn't the only one who talked about it but he was the first to do it.

as a cia documents prove, the cia and the fbi for the next 16 months would collaborate on the twa investigation. but what they did not say outright is that the collaboration was designed to subvert the twa 800 investigation. the cia had no other role and it becomes incredibly clear when you reach your documents than to make all -- missiles go away. on the opening night that is all people were talking about. within the first few hours. we know that there is one, at least one amateur video taken of the complete sequence of events. some of you may have seen it. it was aired on msnbc to the best my knowledge, probably two or three times. i talked to one of the fellows who is a technical director at msnbc, and he said we showed it a few times and then these guys had copies of it told us mouth shut throughout.

that was the end of that. now the elaboration of what was seen i got from a 747 pilot and he was willing to give me his name and he allowed me to use his name which is a sign of some confidence, he he was laid up in a hong kong hospital with a back surgery. his wife came to visit him. they had nothing to do but watch a tv for several weeks. this is during the sequence of events. he events. he said we watched the video over and over again. here's what we see, there's a bunch of people milling around on the deck. and then someone says look, fireworks. and then they see, and this is a lot people say the same thing, they see an object to come up off the horizon. it has a red burning tip and gray smoking contrail and heading out to see and it arched over. and then disappears for a second and then there's a bright white flash, big orange fireball and the plane falls out of the sky.

he saw this he said 30 - 50 times. he saw the video. nelson to melt would write a novel along this video. now, we get into the cia documents and make it interesting. on july 30, 13 days after the crash, the cia analysts, and i know the name of their head guy, i may or may or may not mention it later, meets with the fbi whistle team. it is only two or three man missile team. he headlines the memo to his superior and says hold the presses. and that is interesting. he tells his sin. that he just met with the missile team, the missile team has already interviewed 144 excellent eyewitnesses to a

missile attack on twa flight 800. he says the evidence for a missile attack for a surface to air missile is overwhelming. he said these people are mainly professionals and their testimony is too consistent for it to be anything but a missile attack. now the cia analyst, talks how he discovers the fbi from going forward from this report which was about ready to be published. he was successful because that report never came forward. between july 30 and august 17 someone gets to the fbi. they came to the job intending to do it justice, someone gets to them before august 17 because on august 17 the fbi speaks for the first time to the new york times about eyewitnesses.

now the fbi would speak almost exclusively to the new york times. they became very dependent on that relationship. in fact, at the heart of this story i'm telling is a media scandal. more than a government scandal, government scandal, more than anything else, it is a media scandal. at the heart of the media scandal is the new york times. so they meet with the new york times and the stories reported on august 17 so they probably met on the 15th or 16th for in two weeks or so after the missile team met with the cia. the new york times is told that there are fewer than one dozen credible eyewitnesses. the new york times is allowed to interview just one of those eyewitnesses. he is a good witness, his name is michael russell. he is on a barge a barge doing survey work. he is pretty knowledgeable. he said you can see it out of the corner of his eye, bright white flash. then he saw the

plane fall immediately out of the sky. now there are two things the nt ntsb would say but for at the time and serve the purpose. the purpose was to switch the scenario from missile to bomb. so for whatever reason the administration decided with a bomb it was that as scary as a missile. by by the way this crash took place two days before it -- so there was a lot of it steak for keeping airlines fly in keeping commercial traffic in gear and keeping people away from feeling insecure about taking airplanes. now the new york times would interview, with 84 through through the fbi would interview 258 eyewitnesses who sought an object is streaking up and hitting the airplane.

ninety-six of them sought come up off the horizon. and they tracked it all of the way up. of those 258, you know how many the new york times would interview before the investigation was over? zero. i talked to 20 or 30 of them. they're still there and want to tell their story. zero. they would speak to not a single one of those 258 officials witnesses. now 750 people and i'll give a report to a report to the fbi, thousands more sought because i know people who chose not to talk to the fbi. but between the fifteenth, the seventeenth, the 23rd the new york times kept running more stories about bombs. they claimed stuff was found on the plane, traces of residue was

found inside and outside the plane. on the 23rd of of august they ran this headline, above the right, the device exploded in cabin twa 800. they are pointing towards a bomb but they are not ruling out a missile. it exploded in the cabin. above -- consigns the welfare reform bill, one of the headlines had to go. it it was this one. and then the bond story is going away. the day before the 233rd i'm sure the justice department was aware that the fbi had been talking too much. so the head of the fbi investigation is called to washington for his first meeting. heading up this meeting, as the information suggests his deputy attorney general. her name name will come back to play and we

can keep track of that. reno was the attorney general and they worked around her. just like they worked around tony and the national security council. and through sandy berger. there was no record of what took place on that meeting on the 22nd. we do note that all behaviors began to change immediately afterward. from the 22nd on therapy no more interviews with eyewitnesses for at least several months. and then those later -- we know that on the 23rd the faa started searching all over the world to see if they could find a day and a place where twa flight 800, the play was used for a training exercise with

explosive training aids. it took them several weeks to find that. and then a then a series of events began to happen. begin trim between the 23rd in the 19th of september there's more stories about the bomb and they didn't know quite which way to take partly because the fbi did not know what direction to take. on september 19 the story switches to washington. now it is the ntsb leading the direction. what they say is that perhaps it was a mechanical failure after all. they said a mechanical failure alone might just explain what happened. this was a problem still because we had all of the residue traces on the plane where the headline -- so how do we reconcile these two? will the next day the fbi puts out a press release that the tw

a800 plane had been used for a training exercise in st. louis six weeks before this happened. on the 21st of september the new york times runs an article saying that very same thing and basically kills the investigation. the investigators are saying it's going to be hard for us to make her case now that there's this thing that bomb training outside. by the 20 first, neither the fbi or the new york times had cut talk to the cop who did the training. the first first person in the media to talk to that cop was me. six years after the fact. nobody had talked to him in that time. what they decided was that he

did his exercises and is an african-american guy who, excuse language, was pissed off to this day about what they did to them. they ruined his reputation. they ruined his reputation before they talk to them. they concluded that it was a sloppy exercise, he had training aids all over the plane and those were the accounts for the explosive residue sound on the plane. will the stuff that was found on the wing, his wing, his dog was not capable of getting out there and doing that and that didn't matter. but they just went with it. here's what they could have found out within an hour's worth of investigation. the fbi, they put on his report was the time of the exercise they didn't exercise on a 747 on june twentieth, in st. louis on a wide body and they did it from

1045 - 10:11:15 p.m. the plane left the gates, what they did not say is that there 400 people on board and they're bound for hawaii, now some of you who have worked on loading international flights know that you cannot do that in 15 minutes, the cop did is exercise on a completely sterile plane. there's no one on board's play for the whole time he did is exercise. they could approve that in an hour. and you cannot even disputed. that plane left at 1235, and people were ready to go to honolulu. they're supposed to to believe that in a 20 minute exercise, that just doesn't make any sense. there are other problems with it. they do not match the composition of the residue on

the plane. nor does it match where they put it. the place was wrong, the composition is wrong, the plane is wrong. was a total lie. there is no euphemism to describe what they did. the sacrifices guys career to get it done. he is still humiliated to this day. he got a letter condemning him et cetera and that the cover they needed. now, from that point on from september 21 and 20 second, the government moved into a fully different mode. fully different mode. does the mechanical failure mode. some of you are a route to remember that. i talked to several people who remembered it like a punch in the stomach when they heard that. especially people who worked in fuel tanks. the fuel tank people had to bear the brunt of that story. if there is something wrong with the fuel tank and a blowup. when i get emails from people reading the book, the the fuel tank people are the angriest.

at that point, the ntsb has been shut out of witness review. they're supposed to do the witness with eyewitnesses and they were totally shut out. they were humiliated and shut home. they would not even go up and look at the interviews after they had done them. instead, the fbi the fbi handed the interviews over to the cia. who else? to examine interviews and decide what it is that the eyewitnesses saw. i have absolutely no experience in this. they have no legal justification for this. now, the fbi was not eager to do this. you can see that. they gave the cia the witness statements in small doses. in time.

they only gave one third of the total, but they are only working a third of it. it. it didn't matter. on december 31, 1996 the cia analyst, randolph, if you're watching to me a call sometime, he comes to the conclusion that all he needs to do to explain what these people saw this contained within the claim itself. he decides the nose of the plane was blown off, then the plane tilted 90 degrees and then knows less common in aviators know what a crock this is, it shot up about 4000 feet and the course of that would deceive people into thinking it was a missile. i talked to to many aviators that just shook their head when they saw that. that this can't happen. and so it went from 13000 feet to 17,000 feet. feet.

and he said that's what confused him. now we'll get back to that in the second. there also contracted to show a video and that is what will close the case. now we know that happened on december 31, by february 1997, george tenet who has not been promoted to the director of central intelligence, he is a political political guide to. he was the number two guy when this started. he signs off on it says yes, the nose of the plane falls off and shoots up right, this is what it is. then one heroic character from the fbi stands up. identify this guide by name not sure if i should mention it tonight, but he is basically the head of an two man missile team. the fact that there's only two on tells you something.

in 1997 he meets with the cia and he says, i don't buy this for a moment. he says we have at least 30 eyewitnesses who are coming in the opposite direction so it cannot be twa flight that they saw, said that leaves eight eyewitnesses who saw the missile hit the airplane. he said all the radar data totally disagrees with what you trying to tell us. he says i insist that you go back to the drawing board and start over. because i don't buy this. now the other member of the missile team according to cia analyst said the one guy refuse not to, not going to name him, his name is steve baumgart, steve if you're listening, get in touch. he then, and i don't think he did this until recently, on that same, april 20, 1997 day that he

is fighting with the cia, either in washington or new york, he ends up in north carolina, at least on paper he does come interviewing one of the key eyewitnesses in this book and the story. i start up the book with the story of witness 73. some of you read this and i will read a little of the story. in 2009, the sum of 2000 and get a call out of the blue and she goes, jack, and i said yeah. she said this is witness 73, did you know who i am? and i do you know who i am? and i said yes, i do. upside down -- and she said that's me. here's here's the story. and the fbi writes that these 302 summaries. and here's what their witness from july 20, 1996 is about their interview with witness number 73. i'm good to call her sandy to give her name.

it's not a real name. so they're talking to sandy and sandy tells him there on the beach with two in-laws and she sees, she is in aviation, she's interested in aviation because she is a troubled professional. she is she is tracking flight 800 across the sky. she said it seemed awfully low considering how far it is out of jfk. she was right. the altitude was down and then she said she saw an object mop off the horizon. and a red tip, smoke a trail and she's watching it zigzag him out, over and it explodes right outside the right-wing is another explosion and then i see the nose of the plank mall. a minute stalls and it stalls and falls out of the sky, breaks into flames and a huge fireball. three days after after the crash sandy had explained and told the fbi the breakup sequence of that aircraft with the nose coming off first before anyone knew.

it would take them weeks to map out the debris field before they could validate what she said. nobody sought more clearly than she did. she cooperated fully with the fbi three days later. and her two in-laws one and nothing to do with it. her husband was not with her almost broke off their engagement, they are engaged at the time because she talked to the fbi. the in-laws were upset that she gave them their names but they refused to talk. maybe they had good reason. on april 20, 1997, the same day that steve baumgart is protesting to the cia in washington and new york his down in north carolina interviewing, probably unknown to him, sandy. the same day. the cia said will take care of that, they did. they put in an 30 to enter her file. here's what sandy sandy told me when we talked in 2009. she said, i asked her, as it's only about the second interview.

>> there's there's a lot you don't know about that piece. she said in second interview, i had several long island iced tea cocktails at night. and i said in? >> i don't even know what it long island iced tea is. >> it could've been another drink and said no. i don't drink at all. and then i said, so there's something you don't know, and she said there was no second interview. the cia had fully manufactured a second interview that same day to negate her testament on the same day the fbi had of the missile team gave them grief about what they're doing. and then i said to her, there's something something you don't know, you are not the only one. they did that to several key eyewitnesses. to create manufacture new witness statements to justify

the theory they were trying to sell. in a later meeting, this was made public in about 1999 with the cia analyst conceded that only one eyewitness that actually reported seeing the crippled plane or the nose, and they use the man on the bridge. he worked in philadelphia. when they close the case with the fbi in november, 1997 they showed for one time, and many time, and many of you have seen this the animation showing the plane flying the long, the nose blows off in a fuel tank explosion. in the plane shoots up three or

4000 feet feet and confuses the eyewitnesses. the eyewitnesses do not see a missile, sounds like a soviet propaganda. and they built at all, they finally conceded to the ntsb years later rounded testimony of this young man. the man on the bridge. it turns out of course that they base it on the second interview because in the first interview he said exactly what sandy said, he said i sought come off the beach, and in the second interview he said i didn't see come up off the beach, i sought 20 degrees off the rise and when it first saw. it could've been that flight. he just made that up and put it in the record. there was no second interview with mike. there was no set interview with sandy. the fellow who is flying above it, and navy guy saw it out of

his u.s. airplane and said they made up a new interview for him. in his he he said he saw mystical from right to left. and he said he said going left to right. they did to at least three that we know up. there's probably more but these are the ones we've been able to prove. finally, going through cia documents we just found a year or so ago, we find out that this is a quote, for twa 800 host explosion was 14500 feet. they knew that. not just 17000 plus feet they show to the american people. when the fbi close the case in november, nobody in the media even asked what is the cia doing here? let alone, this stuff is nuts. how can how can you be trying to sell us this.

newman sanders, and another one who worked with me on a previous book cost me one day about a year ago and says you will believe what happened. they just sent me the video. and i said the video? and he said they've been sending freedom of information act information for some time. when we get get it look at it we realize it is not the video from july seventeenth, but almost as useful. it is a video we knew about on july 12, 1996. it is a video shot in long island by an amateur. they knew it existed because both the fbi and cia talked about it. it was a video of an apparent missile attack. the. the defense intelligence agency reviewed the video early on and said it was a surface-to-air missile and they talked about the smoke trail and everything. we saw the video we realized it was more than a smoke trail coming up.

we saw the flaming debris coming down. this was five days before twa flight 800 went down. and that was the south coast of long island, an obvious missile test taking place. that would not matter a lot except when the fbi closed its case on november 1997 they said there have been no missile tests in the area for at least two years. they know this happen. they knew about the video. they did not enter the video into evidence. from the cia cia documents we also know that many eyewitnesses saw what looked like a missile test on july seventh, 1996. so, you have july seventh, july twelfth, july seventeenth, you don't have to be a math major to see the sequence. every five days. after my book came out to her from other people who said book came out heard from other people who said i don't know if this matters but on july 7 i was camping and it does matter. that is what was going on.

now from november 1997 on the cases basically close. the ntsb held two hearings, no eyewitnesses were allowed to testify. first time ever, unprecedented, basically they get away with it. the great story of our time. fifty-three of your colleagues died without justice being brought to them or their families. now i will jump ahead a little bit and then take questions and answers and some other useful anecdotes. the the deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation, and may 1997 after this was essentially put to bed he gets a new job, despite that he has no experience in mortgage refinance and named vice-chairman of sally

mae. in in the next five and half years she will make $25 million as vice president of fannie mae. and then he steps down to take a position on the 9/11 commission. so she is basically overseeing the events leading up to september 11. in april 2004, attorney general john ashcroft testified to the 9/11 commission and he says this is a quote, the single greatest structural costs for september 11 was the wall. this is the wall memo that prevented the cia and fbi from speaking to each other. i should know that steve -- the head of the missile team protested broadly about the all

in a run up to september 11. he went public with it because it was a terrorist afoot in america and we can't look form because where the investigators have an intelligence issue. this is nuts. two weeks after he says that he said people are going to die. two weeks later, this fellow joins a team of his buddies and they hijacked the planes and kill 4000 people, because of the wall. and so full disclosure ashcraft continues compels me to inform you that the author of the wall memorandum is a member of this commission. the author of that wall memo was missed jamie correctly. so as the nation learned in the aftermath of 9/11, the wall that was pre-shell to easily to protect the secrets of twa 800 held firmly when it came to

protecting the security of the united states. and that is where we are today. now, i'm now, i'm going to close with one last anecdote because it's a fun anecdote. in the will take questions. when we take questions please speak up because we just picking up the ambient noise. in early july of this year, is an organization of washington hosted a press conference at the national press club on the flight twa hundred and me to speak. i spot spoke to the ntsb board member the night before, vernon gross.

so i did not even know he lived in washington so so wanted to come on down. and check it out. so he comes down and we invite him to speak and he speaks for ten minutes. then he says to me after second by the way, tomorrow i'm having lunch with the chairman of the national transportation safety board. you want to to come? and i said yes, sure. well, i go to lunch and i meet the new chairman, chris, and i'm looking for a .. of connection with chris. i try not to push but i'm laying back trying to convince them that i'm saying and this is a story that is worth looking at. and then i realize what it was. he mentioned that that he had been on the board between 1989 and 1992 when clinton replaced him. now, most interesting about that as i had written written about that in the book but i did not know who he was or anything about his background. he had a physics degree from princeton, a law degree from harvard.

and as the washington post pointed out at the time, he was replaced by jim hall who was a whose best qualification was his drivers license. [laughter] this is what the washington post set at the time. and i said i brought about that in my book. and he said, i posted that on my wall. the article from the washington post. so here are two things i do not know about him before he met him. one is that he's a democrat. so they replace replace a democrat with a democrat, they is replaced one with extraordinary credentials to one with no credentials. in the of thing is he is african-american. so to replace a black democrat with a white democrat is an active the far side of the clinton administration. he adds two more people before 1996, both of them political operatives. by the time 1996 comes jim is

now the chairman. you have three of the five board members so when the fbi illegally takes over the investigation, they watched it all happen. and and that is what i found out. and that is how clever in a sense this was otherwise a awkward improvised cover-up. it was done just to kick the can down the road past november and hope for the best. they have kicked it now for 20 years so, thank you very much and i appreciate you coming today. [applause] now you might want to stand up. >> one of the reasons for the cover-up was the military.

>> i would say that when i started this investigation there's a certain thing called confirmation bias. you see a set set of facts and you want them to confirm what you hope will be the outcome. what first got into this in the year 2000, i hope, i hope the outcome would be terrorist. i would was just more comfortable with that. i remember when salinger came for the set was the navy, i thought it was almost on patriotic of him to say. well, fortunately the evidence overwhelmingly points to naval involvement on the night of jul. there have me have been some element that snuck in the, and allied shifted maneuvers, don't know. i do not know, literally who fired the missile, but i know missiles were fired and i know missiles took down flight 800. it hundred. it is overwhelmingly argued for

naval involvement. the smoking gun was there from the beginning. and that is that with everyone acknowledge except for the new york times who chose not to acknowledge anything in that sense, it was the navy -- covering right above twa flight it hundred when it blew up. at the time their technical manuals available. i went back and found him in which the p3 was used as a communications mode in what is called a cooperative engagement capability. there's very shifts and summaries and they cooperate to do a missile test to shoot other missiles out of the sky. it was sitting right there, we also know there are other ships in the area. at least three submarines and one cruiser. so we know they were there. we know that. now who fired what i don't know. but the navy was there. >> in your book -- an article

came out on the internet -- [inaudible] >> i saw that report. it has a ring of credibility to. i tried i tried to check it out. there are a couple of names mentioned who are on the seawall and i tried to contact those people. guess what? they don't return my phone calls. >> i would not rule that out. that was not mentioned as being right, the fbi conceded there are three submarines, when you mentioned and the uss normandy in the vicinity of the crash. we also know that from day one

the navy was lying to the fbi. the navy never came forward. christina who spoke your witnessed one incident where someone asked wise the navy in boston this investigation when they may be the culprit? what they did was pick up and hustled him out of the room. >> i saw two eyewitnesses at that. so that said the navy would not have and cannot have covered this up on its own. it had to come from above. >> -- >> a lot of people asked me if there's anybody on the plane who had his or her own missile, no. the u.s. navy u.s. navy would not shoot down one of our own aircraft's. >> but we know 1988 the u.s. navy did shoot down an iranian airbus. so accidents do happen.

i would say the reluctance to admit it would have to do with the election 1996. the navy was not going to, they wanted to keep it under wraps. >> [inaudible question] >> [inaudible question] >> for those of you who saw christina borges in here in july, she wrote and directed a documentary called twa flight 800 which was was excellent and

came out three years ago. a few of the people who had at least half a dozen whistleblowers participate with them where the pathologists. when i was watching that i thought you could've made a separate documentary and it would've been a gruesome one on what happened to the bodies. in a fuel tank explosion they are going to burn. it's going to be ugly but they're going to burn. in this case, the dna were fused from one body into another. there pieces of bones flying around like arrowheads sticking into the side of the fuselage. they showed some of this, i know these guys have to have tough stomachs to do this. the injuries were not at all consistent with the fuel tank fire. at least those that were in the place where the explosive devices were most damaging.

>> [inaudible question] >> and the part of the record was reassembled in the hangar in long island where they did the investigation. it has been censorship to the ntsb training facility in virginia. its use in a dumb show for people they welcome through its ac, no holes here, no missiles struck here. its use is very questionable. >> [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible

question] [inaudible question] >> there are allegedly three satellites that had flight 800 and its view. one of the parents from pennsylvania whose daughter was killed in the crash, it was a group of french students, 15 of them who are going to paris that night. , as a family member he is allowed certainly way and he got to talk to them, he said there are three satellites that night and they were all

malfunctioning. and that is literally what he was told. so no, there's never been anything seen from that. then when the cia created its animation of the zoom climb of the nose going off in the plane shooting up, they claimed that infrared sensors on u.s. satellite, but they have never showed images. it didn't show anything like that. >> [inaudible question] >> i know i've talked to a lot of angry people about this one, but let me talk to about boeing first. boeing and twa took the fall basically. you say why would they do that? boeing's case was obvious. they were in the middle of a merger talk with mcdonnell douglas which would give them 100% lock on the american commercial airline market. in the same week and this is at

that time, in the same week that the department of justice approved that merger they turned down a merger between office depot and staples which would've given them a 6% lock on the crucial office-supply market. so boeing if they wanted to survive didn't have much choice. twa, heard a lot of stories about why twa went along. it's probably not the place to go into it all right now, but afterwards we might want to talk. so i've talked to many people about their theories but for a lot of people it could've been the death of the airline. and years later could be out of business. merging with american with american airlines, at least for some unhappy sure. and then moving on. it's unfortunate.

>> [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> i think they had second and took it to virginia reconstructed in. >> [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible

question] >> at the end of the day after four years the spark that sets off the fuel tank is of unknown origin. the overheated and the overheating of the center fuel tanker sitting on the runway jfk and it 71 degrees. >> [inaudible question]

>> and seconds after the whole plane caught fire. >> [inaudible question] >> [inaudible question] >> i've heard that story several times. in fact, nelson demille, has anyone read his book, it's a

very good, it's us opening chapter i just listen to a driving cross country it's based around the missing video and he comes to the same conclusion that i do basically. but he was deeply involved in research on long island and he knew the agent and every time he had that -- the fbi says it was a fuel tank explosion. they stick to their, they had their marching orders and they do it. the fellow on the missile team that i referred to earlier said he had 20 years and got out. i think that's because for some people that kind of culture is really difficult to abide when something's going on.

>> [inaudible question] >> [inaudible question] >> [inaudible question] >> [inaudible question]

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> here's my best answer. on the night of july 17, 1996 they panicked and they kick this can down the road, it it was a start kicking it you can kick it back and then you're covering for yourself and despite all of the people who seem to be involved, i don't think other than a couple people in the navy, don't think there is 60 mac ten civilians who really know what happened that night. . .

hillary clinton wrote a 500 page book, one third of a sentence, head of the fbi at the time, two sentences. the senate select committee on intelligence which covers all of those matters, certainly everything that's involved with the cia from 1996 - 97 doesn't mention it. it's a conspiracy of of silence. they've kicked it down the memory hall. my hope is that one person of conscience and all of this who suffered most and having to live with this was the head of the fbi investigation who is now on fox as the terrorist go to guys

which means fox won't talk about this. i know he is tortured. i know family members have come up to him in his face and said you are lying. he is the public face of this investigation. if anyone has an interest in coming forward and clearing the air it would be he. what i would recommend, i would say what you need is a truth and reconciliation commission where you just waive all punishment and hope this doesn't happen again. [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> had they really thought of the fuel take explosion they would grounded all the 70s 47. certainly air air force one is a 747, but that didn't happen.

[inaudible] work in a ground our whole fleet, pull wiring out and we found one wire. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> that's why at the end of the investigation, they concluded, they don't know where the spark came from. then they found out by way of the cia documents is that the head of their documents, a guy

named david mayer was working with the cia. he worked with him for 16 months the ntsb is working with the cia , there are people in the ntsb who are problematic. most the people, 99% were doing the right thing or trying to, including most of the fbi but there are few people in positions that were not. they just allowed things to happen. when you meet, the fact that i was just talking to us air traffic control guy that i talked about earlier, you are right to mention pension because i said. [inaudible] it guarantees silence. i worked 38 years as an air traffic controller. if they they take that away from me, i'm finished. for people who work in and around government as a great

silencer, also what happens is some of these people end up working for defense contract and if they go public they not only risk there'd tension and freedom and so there's a lot of low-level fear among people who know stuff. there's only a handful of people involved but a lot of people are afraid to speak out. >> the captains of the coast guard, i do not know about that. i will say, one angle we have not talked about is on the night of july 17, 1996, the coast guard went out there and many of them heard the distinctive ping from the black boxes, the flight data recorder, there actually orange boxes, but so there was

only 120 feet of water, it water, it was calm. other than the bodies, it's the first thing that gets picked up. it's them a week to retrieve them. during that week they were putting out various stories. there must be damage, there must be. [inaudible] when they tested them, they revealed nothing. one of the family members was able to bring in and expert and the final seconds had been edited out. the ntsb didn't even agree with that. so many things were removed,

stolen, covered up, destroyed, but the one thing they could not find where the eyewitnesses. they were the most critical part of this testimony and they are continuing to speak out. let me take one more question and then equipped a rapid up. [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> i met james and elizabeth sanders who came to. >> guest: a group and you're right, sanders and the investigative reporter working the investigation and the first thing that happened and 53

employees were trained in that crash she was heartbroken. she went from one memorial service to another. she runs into stacy and stacy said his ear's husband still an investigative reporter. she said yes. she said have him talk to me. stacy and sanders get together and the first thing stacy tells sanders is there's a cover-up going on. they started collaborating to get information out of the investigation into the mainstream. one thing that he was about was this orange residue and in one section of the plane they asked him to scrape off the residue. it doesn't scrape. he takes a pinch of rubber and sends it to sanders, sanders has it tested and as a result of that, they are hounded and get

arrested and elizabeth and james are tried and convicted in a federal court of conspiracy to steal airplane parts. not a single person in the media raises this as a first amendment issue. that's when i said maybe i better get in the pit i want to thank you all for coming out. it was excellent. [applause] if you want to stick around later to ask questions, i will stay say this, if you know anybody who has information, have them go to my website and talk to me and we will communicate through that. i appreciate it.

[inaudible conversation] cspan can have a longer conversation and delve into their subject. >> tv weekend, they bring you author after author after author it's like the work of fascinating people. i love book tv and i am a cspan fan. >> book tv takes hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. here's a look at some of the of the events we will be covering this week. on monday at the national constitution center in philadelphia, the u.s. court of

appeals for the first circuit will provide a history of the debate between the legislative and executive branch on a constitutional right to declare war. later that evening at the museum of flight in seattle they will report on the privatization of spaceflight. wednesday they will recall albert einstein's contentious relationship with their contemporaries late in their life. will be joined in conversation with pulitzer prize at the rubin museum of art in new york city. then on thursday at the national press club in washington d.c., st. louis dispatch washington correspondent recalls the death on the first day of the battle of gettysburg. then we are live from the wisconsin book festival in wisconsin with a full day of author programs.

catherine cramer on the. [inaudible] and jeff chang on race in america. that's a look at some of the author programs book tv is covering this week. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the future on book tv on cspan two. >> we are joined now by jamesoi byron, the author of supremely partisan, how rob politics tips the scales in the supreme court. he is here to discuss his book which argues that the supreme court has become increasingly partisan in the cases he says were politicized to undermine. >> thanks for joining us. >> i'm delighted to be here. >> what inspired you to write this book? >> as a practicing lawyer i followed the supreme court for many years and i became alarmed

in recent years, reading thedecw cases in the decision that seem to be decided along partisan lines so that i have the liberal wing of the court and all justices appointed by democratic presidents on the conservative wing and they were taking political positions which couldh easily be identified with the ideas of the respective parties that appointed them. it doesn't apply across the board but it does apply to many issues and many social issues that we care about with affirmative action.. reproductive rights and on on. let's take a look at one of the excerpts from your book. you talk about the court's dramatic polarization in recent years is a recipe for uncertainty.y. governmental dysfunction and declining