No
Claims?
Several claims, including an unspecific warning,
were made about TWA 800. All of them were in the name of Islamist
terrorist organizations and groups. The validity of these claims must
be examined in the context of known relationships with terrorism - sponsoring
states. Such spectacular terrorist strikes are always launched in the
context of long-term strategies and national interests.
The Islamist terrorists did not arrive
lightly at considerations of using weapons of mass destruction.
International terrorism is in the midst of a quest for the super spectacular
terrorist strike. The case of TWA 800 served as a turning point because of
Washington's determination and to a great extent ability to suppress terrorist
explanations and float "mechanical failure" theories. To avoid such suppression
after future strikes, terrorism sponsoring states must raise the ante so
that the West cannot ignore them."
Yossef Bodansky - "bin Laden - The Man
Who Declared War on America"
Bodansky is the Director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a July 10, 1997 Aviation Subcommittee document - "Status of the Investigation of the Crash of TWA 800 and the Proposal Concerning the Death on the High Seas Act" - it is stated ......
Despite a massive and costly recovery and investigative effort by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the FBI, the cause of the crash has not yet been pinpointed. .... Originally, the conventional wisdom was that the crash was caused by a terrorist attack. This explanation was supported by witnesses who said that they saw a streak of light in the sky, considered to be a missile, heading towards the plane just before it exploded. .....So far, no terrorist group or person has come forward with a credible claim of responsibility......
Yet the judge gave an admonition ....
July 20, 1996 London
Times.
New York: Jurors at the trial here of the alleged mastermind of the
World Trade Centre bombing, who is accused
of plotting to attack US airliners over Asia, were told to ignore reports
about the crash while considering the case against
Ramzi Yousef, arrested in Pakistan last
year.
The United States gave missiles to Moslem guerrilla forces which later gave them to terrorist groups.
July 21, 1996, The Jerusalem Post
French Defense Ministry experts say it is possible that the TWA Boeing 747
which exploded Thursday was accidentally hit by a missile fired by a US Army
unit. According to information reaching The Jerusalem Post, the French experts
believe that if reports about a surface-to-air missile hitting the plane
are confirmed, the infrastructure needed to fire a missile powerful enough
to hit a plane at that altitude is only possessed by army units. They ruled
out the possibility that a Stinger missile could hit the plane.
Such missiles were delivered by the US to Moslem
guerrilla forces in Afghanistan, and later according to several intelligence
reports were transferred to Moslem fundamentalist terrorist groups.
According to the experts, human or technical error could have
led to the TWA disaster. They noted the incident in which a US Navy plane
shot down an Iranian civilian plane over the Persian Gulf a few years ago,
killing some 180 passengers. The experts added that if the TWA plane was
accidentally shot down by a military unit, it is unlikely that the US army
will admit it. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called US President
Bill Clinton on Thursday and offered Israel's help in the war against terror.
However, the US government said there was still no evidence that would favor
the terror theory as the cause of the TWA explosion. ..... Israeli terrorism
experts are looking for possible links between Moslem militants and the explosion
of TWA flight 800, the newspaper Ha'aretz said on Friday. The paper quoted
an unidentified senior security source as saying Israel was helping US
intelligence agencies and the FBI in every way it could in their investigation
of the crash. Netanyahu's office declined comment on the report. But Israeli
security sources told Reuter that Israel routinely cooperates on such matters
with the US. TWA said flight 800 used to go on from Paris to Tel Aviv, but
the Israel leg was discontinued in January. Israeli officials have not drawn
any connection between the air disaster, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. They
say they have yet to determine whether it was an accident or an attack. "We
still don't know if this is an attack," Brig.- Gen. Yigal Pressler, Netanyahu's
adviser on counter- terrorism, told Israel Radio. But he cited previous attempts
he said involved Iran, Syria and Libya. He said some airports and airlines
were not as diligent as Israelis in conducting security checks. In Paris,
TWA spokesman Gilbert Dennemont ... described as "pure speculation" French
media reports which said investigators were increasingly convinced the plane
was the target of an attack, possibly downed by a surface-to-air missile
fired from the American coast or from a ship at sea. The senior security
source cited unspecified recent warnings of a possible attack on a plane
And the Israelis sent a warning ....
July 23, 1996 The London Times
The Tel Aviv paper Yediot Ahronot disclosed yesterday that Israel had been
asked by the CIA to check the Athens-New York passenger list of TWA Flight
800. The involvement of Mossad, Israel's secret service, emerged after it
was made known that the Israelis warned US Intelligence
before the disaster that an American aircraft would be the target of "sabotage
or hijacking" by Islamic extremists. "The American
intelligence agency gave Mossad the passenger list of the TWA plane from
Athens to New York and asked that it check the passengers' backgrounds to
reveal if one of them had connections to a terror group," reported
the paper, which has close links to the Israeli security services. .... Earlier
this month, a Mossad officer monitoring Middle East terrorist groups passed
an unspecific warning to his American counterpart in TelAviv. The officer
said: "The threat of sabotage or a hijacking against
an American plane was analysed and considered serious enough for us to pass
on to the Americans. It was then up to the Americans to assess the dangers
and decide whether to pass it on to their airlines."
September 22, 1996 The New York Post
Investigators are reviewing an anonymous threat received after the October
1, 1995 conviction of radical sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman .... the threat was that a New York airport or jetliner
would be attacked in retaliation ........
August 25, 1996 Times of London
U.S. officials are investigating reports that Islamic terrorists have smuggled
Stinger ground-to-air missiles into the United States from Pakistan.
Senior Iranian sources close to the fundamentalist
regime in Tehran claimed this weekend that TWA flight 800 was shot down last
month by one of three shoulder-fired Stingers of the type used by Islamic
guerrillas during the Afghanistan war. The sources said the missiles
arrived in America seven months ago after being shipped from Karachi via
Rotterdam and on to the Canadian port of Halifax. They claimed an Egyptian
fundamentalist group backed by Iran was responsible for smuggling the weapons
across the Canadian border into the United States. The group, the Gama'a
al-Islamiya, comprises followers of Sheik Omar
Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric jailed in the United States
over the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing. A senior White House official
responsible for counter-terrorism told The Sunday Times this weekend that
he had seen a report that a Stinger missile had been smuggled into the United
States from Pakistan. The official, who is involved in collating intelligence
relating to the TWA inquiry for the White House, said investigators were
aware of reports that Stingers may have been smuggled into the country....
If a Stinger was the cause of this, our first theory would be that it came
from Afghanistan." The official was commenting on reports from Tehran
that claimed several groups funded by the religious authorities in Iran are
active in the United States. The reports claim one previously unknown underground
group called Falakh may have as many as 50 highly trained terrorists in the
country.
July 19, 1996 CNN Web posted at: 10:50 a.m. EDT
A main investigator in the case on Friday said terrorism had not been ruled
out as a cause of Wednesday night's crash of the Paris-bound Boeing 747.
"We are looking at mechanical malfunction and at
a criminal act," said Robert Francis, vice president of the National
Transportation Safety Board. "Certainly the possibility
of a criminal act is a distinct one." ... Two parallel investigations
-- one looking into accidental causes and the other into possible criminal
activity-- are under way. The FBI will continue its probe into the crash
until the possibility of criminal activity is ruled out as a cause, said
Jim Kallstrom with the agency's Anti-terrorism Task Force.
"We will get to the bottom of this, whatever the
bottom is," he vowed. The CIA's Counter-terrorism Center also
has begun a worldwide search for any clues that terrorism may have been involved
in crash. But so far, a CIA official said, "We have
nothing that points us in one direction or another." There was
some speculation that a surface-to-air missile, perhaps fired from a boat
off the coast of Long Island, could have brought the plane down.
A top Pentagon intelligence official told CNN such
a possibility has been ruled out. The reason: a stinger missile is heat-seeking,
and analysts concluded it would have had to make too sharp a turn
(See Musing "No Kidding"
below) to hit the TWA flight
..... Counter- terrorism analysts in Washington assigned to the case also
looked into several calls claiming responsibility for the crash, but all
but one such claim has been ruled out. The source declined to discuss the
nature of the possible threat they were still looking at. Attorney General
Janet Reno said Thursday two calls claiming responsibility for the crash
had been received after the plane went down, but she said there are
"no indications" yet of terrorism.
One of the calls mentioned by Reno was received
at Tampa, Florida, television station WTSP from a man who identified himself
as a member of a "Jihad," a station official said. Jihad, meaning "holy war,"
is a word used by Islamic militant groups. The WTSP spokesman said the caller
gave no name and offered no motive.
Newsday.com
http://www.newsday.com/jet/jet9main.htm
In the absence of explanations, theories abounded. One focused on a fax sent
Wednesday to an Arabic language newspaper in Beirut warning of an attack.
State Department and CIA officials confirmed they had received copies of
the fax Thursday. The message said "tomorrow morning
we will strike the Americans in a way they do not expect and it will be very
surprising to them," according to one official. A
counterterrorism source familiar with the fax said that it was sent at 11
a.m. New York time Wednesday, more than nine hours
before the bombing. But a CIA source said that the agency
"does not attach too much significance"
to the fax.
The fax, written in Arabic, ends with the following threat: "The Mujahadeen will respond harshly to the threats of the stupid American president. All will be shocked by the magnitude of the response. The determining of the place and time are in the hands of the Mujahadeen. The invaders must get ready to leave alive or dead; and their rendezvous will be morning, and isn't morning near." U.S. News and World Report magazine, in the July 29, 1996 issue, identified the group who sent the fax as, "The Movement of Islamic Jihad/The Jihad Wing of the Arabian Peninsula."
October 4, 1998 New York Times
Islamic Jihad .... receives money and sponsorship
from bin Laden and has been absorbed into his terror network...
July 19, 1996 Reuters
Attorney General Jane Reno said she was unaware of any threats before the
crash but there were "some calls''
afterward claiming responsibility. ABC News reported that an Arabic
newspaper received a warning of an attack on an American target Wednesday
from the same group that claimed responsibility for a bomb attack that killed
five Americans in Saudi Arabia in November. But the State Department said
it had viewed the warning letter as a political tract and not as a specific
threat of an extremist attack. "To us it seemed to be a general political
tract. We don't see it as a specific threat,'' State Department spokesman
Nicholas Burns said of the letter sent to Al Hayat,
an Arabic language newspaper published in London.
http://twa800.com/alhayat/alhayat.pdf
London reminds one of an individual who has connections to Florida and Britain ..
July 19, 1996 New York Times.
A specific warning about the flight had been sent by an extremist Saudi
organization called the Movement of Islamic
Change, the organization that claimed responsibility for blowing
up US military personnel in Saudi Arabia last November.
"Late this morning we got a copy of a letter in
Arabic that we then had translated, and got it to the FBI" said
a State Department spokesman ... "It's a ... statement
that seems aimed at the Saudi regime or the American presence in Saudi
Arabia"......... Officials said they were reviewing a telephone
call placed to a Tampa, Florida
television station yesterday morning from a man who identified
himself as a member of a jihad and claimed
responsibility for the crash.
Note the reference to Florida which links to the item below and a reference to Britain which also closes the loop back to Rahman - all under the umbrella of Islamic Jihad......
November 1, 1995 Electronic Telegraph World News
A British-educated economics lecturer, Ramadan Shallah, yesterday made his
first appearance as the new leader of the militant
Islamic Jihad movement, whose founder,
Fathi Shiqaqi, was assassinated in Malta last week. Mr Shallah, 38, was at
Damascus airport with other leaders of the rejectionist Palestinian world
to receive Mr Shiqaqi's coffin.. (Shallah's) office in Damascus and the group's
members in the Gaza Strip refuse to confirm basic details of his background
..... From the differing accounts of his life, it seems that Mr Shallah was
born in 1957 in Gaza City's Shajaiya neighbourhood. Believed to have headed
Islamic Jihad's fund-raising operations in Britain. He had been a student
with Mr Shiqaqi at Zaqazik university in Egypt, where they joined Egyptian
radicals in forming the Egyptian wing of Islamic Jihad, which assassinated
President Sadat in 1980 after he made peace with Israel. .... The Palestinian
wing of Islamic Jihad became known in the 1980s for its attacks on Israeli
targets and was among the early proponents of suicide bombings .....He taught
economics in Gaza and left in the mid- 1980s, apparently taking up studies
in Egypt and America. He went to Britain in
1986 and received his doctorate in economics at Durham University in 1991.
He is believed to have headed Islamic Jihad's fund-raising operations in
Britain. He is also thought to have been
involved in militant Islamic activities in
Florida. ....
May 7, 1999 Company Press Release The Journal of
Counterterrorism & Security International
NPR has not broadcast any in-depth story about the investigative findings
and incriminating documents released by the FBI in its ongoing investigation
into the secret headquarters of the Islamic Jihad
that operated out of the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa
between 1990 and 1995.
August 6, 1999 The New York Times
A Federal judge in Manhattan refused Thursday to release a man who was jailed
in May for refusing to testify, on religious grounds, before a Federal grand
jury investigating Osama bin Laden and
the bombings of the United States Embassies in Africa last August. The witness,
Ihab M. Ali, a taxi driver from
Orlando, Fla., ....said he feared that
if he testified, bin Laden would retaliate against him, or his family in
Egypt.
August 8, 1999 The New York Times
The Government has not said why it wants to question Ali.
The most recent indictment in the case shows that
prosecutors suspect that some of bin Laden's associates have been active
in Florida.
And The American Spectator seems to have a strong opinion too ....
September 1997 The American Spectator
Letter from John B. Roberts II in reply to an earlier one from James
Hall - Chairman of the NTSB
Early this summer Hall testified before Congress that a meteorite may have
blown up TWA, an event about as likely as an attack by a UFO.
Apparently, Mr. Hall is prepared to got to any length
to avoid confronting evidence of terrorism in the crash of TWA
800..... minute traces of PETN and RDX were found in TWA 800.
Hall would have us believe they came from a bomb-sniffing dog test. But the
St. Louis Police Department test record says only that a "wide-bodied jet"
was used in the test, and provides no serial number for the aircraft......As
TWA's 800's debris was being hauled ashore, it was being tested by the EGIS
high-tech explosives detection system operated by FBI technicians and BATF
bomb experts. Within five days of the crash, EGIS registered the first of
more than a dozen "hits" for PETN on the aircraft. The FBI laboratory--whose
work, even before it was subsequently criticized by the Justice Departments's
inspector general, was questioned by FBI agents working on EGIS--confirmed
only two findings. Do the EGIS findings mean that there was once much more
explosive residue .... Whether there were two positive findings or a dozen,
the dog-test explanation is almost as zany as Hall's meteorite theory.....
Hall states that the U.S. lacks intelligence leads,
but at least one terrorist has claimed credit for the TWA 800 bombing. World
Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef told authorities his group is responsible.
Yousef's claim has not been made public, but it is in the FBI file.
The sons of his partner-in-crime have linked up with .....
November 8, 1998 CNN
Two sons of an Egyptian cleric convicted of plotting terrorist attacks in
New York City have joined the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden,
which is suspected of carrying out deadly bombings against two U.S. embassies
in east Africa, CNN has learned. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, serving a life
sentence in a federal prison, also has written a will calling on his sons
to seek revenge against the United States, according to sources who have
seen it. .... Abdel-Rahman's two sons, Omar and Asim, both in
their late 20s, were among those present when bin Laden held a press conference
near Khost, Afghanistan, in May. It was at that press conference that bin
Laden publicly unveiled his International Islamic Front and talked about
an edict he issued in February, calling for a jihad, or holy war, against
American civilians anywhere in the world. A person who spoke to one of
Abdel-Rahman's sons told "NewsStand" that "he said
that he would follow into the footprints of his father and he would continue
the jihad."
The American Spectator's claim was backed up in writing by two individuals who tried to bomb a Brooklyn subway ....
July 12, 1998, NY Times No Flight 800
Connection
Abu Maizar and Khalil, 23, were arrested last July when the police raided
an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and found what they described as a
pipe bomb "fully rigged and ready to be detonated," along with a rambling
note that threatened attacks against Jewish and American interests if various
demands were not met. The demands included the release
of imprisoned Islamic militants including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted
of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Lawyers for Abu Maizar have suggested that he did not intend to set off the
bomb but rather planned to use it as a prop in some hazy plot to defraud
a government anti-terrorism program of reward money. Khalil's lawyer has
not yet addressed the jury, but Khalil insisted after his arrest that he
had not known about the bomb's existence. The note -- it was typed on lined
yellow paper and rife with grammatical and spelling and punctuation errors
-- not only warned that Islamic militants were
"ready to hit everywhere" with suicide
bombs, but also claimed responsibility for the crash
of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 in July 1996, in which 230 people died.
Whether Abu Maizar and Khalil are guilty of plotting a subway
calamity will be decided by the jury at their trial, but the note's claim
of responsibility for the Flight 800 catastrophe will not require a trial,
an FBI spokesman indicated. The claim was one of the
"thousands of leads" the bureau pursued
in its investigation of the TWA crash, the spokesman, Joseph Valiquette,
said on Friday. "We are comfortable with our
announcement last November that we have found no evidence that a criminal
act was responsible for the plane going down," he said.
Well Mr. Valiquette may be comfortable, but apparently the U.S.Government was also warned about bombings to take place in Africa under bin Laden's sponsorship and were equally comfortable in their denials of this warning after the fact .....
October 23, 1998 NY Times
Nine months before the attack on the American Embassy here, United States
intelligence officials received a detailed warning that Islamic radicals
were plotting to blow up the building, according to Kenyan and American
officials. The warning forecast the Aug. 7 bombing in several
particulars, the officials said. It came from an Egyptian man who American
officials now believe was involved in the simultaneous terrorist assaults
on the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. ....
Since the bombings, the State Department has maintained
that it received no specific warnings about threats to its embassies in East
Africa. But late Thursday, a spokesman acknowledged that the C.I.A.
had sent the State Department two reports about Ahmed which prompted the
embassy in Kenya to step up security for several weeks. .... According to
American officials, Ahmed walked into the Nairobi embassy last November and
told American intelligence officials that he knew of a group that was planning
to detonate a bomb-laden truck inside the diplomats' underground parking
garage. .... Analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency were unable to link
Ahmed to any terrorist group but they nonetheless sent two reports last November
about his statements to various Government agencies. ....
A Clinton Administration official acknowledged that
the embassy in Kenya had received a specific warning about an attack....
Several non-American diplomats in the region speculated that the United States
is allowing the Tanzanians to try Ahmed because they fear his trial in America
might bring to light his dealings with American authorities and other Western
intelligence services.
Cold comfort, Mr. Valiquette! Perhaps you should read Yossef Bodansky's book - "bin Laden - The Man who Declared War on America". Bodansky is the Director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and in this capacity is a key advisor to the highest echelons of the U.S. Government. In his book Bodansky writes that there were two key events "on the eve" of the TWA 800 downing.
First he describes an editorial in the London Islamist paper 'al-Quds al-Arabi' that spelled out the reasons behind the escalating terrorist attacks on the United States which concluded by mentioning the bombings in Riyadh and Khobar as the beginning of these attacks. The editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, Abdul-Bari Atwan, is personally close to Osama bin Laden.
Bodansky indicates that the second key event was a fax received by al-Hayah in London through al-Safir in Beirut in which on July 16 the Islamic Change Movement - the Jihad Wing in the Arabian Peninsula took credit for both the Riyadh and Khobar Towers bombings . A warning was then issued by the same group on July 17 stating that "the mujahideen will give their harshest reply to the threats of the foolish U.S. President. Everybody will be surprised by the magnitude of the reply. ... The invaders must be prepared to leave, either dead or alive. Their time is at the morning-dawn. Is not the morning-dawn near?". TWA 800 exploded in the early morning in the United Kingdom. On July 18, this group issued a statement accepting responsibility for the TWA 800 downing. The leaders the Islamic Change Movement had participated in a June 1996 terrorist planning meeting held in Tehran and on July 20, 1996 it attended a follow-up conference in Tehran in which the Islamic Change Movement was singled out for "recent achievements".
We can guess what the "recent achievements" were!