Note: Jack Cashill's "Mega Fix" DVD is now available

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

On Sept. 9, 1996, in the wake of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, a committee chaired by Vice President Al Gore submits 20 serious recommendations to strengthen aviation security – the kind the nation got for real after Sept. 11, 2001.

But within days, the whole industry jumps all over Gore. On Sept. 19, he sends a letter to the president of the industry's trade group telling her not to worry. The airlines will get to review everything, and the "recommendations" will be just that.

On that same day, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, a Tennessee hack named Jim Hall – "a personal retainer" to the Gore family – tells the New York Times and the Washington Post that mechanical failure was the likely cause of the disaster. He is the first official to make this claim.

Hall, however, cannot account for the explosive residue found all throughout the aircraft. No problem. The next day, Sept. 20, the White House advances a new story. A careless African-American police officer in St. Louis spilled the explosive residue during a dog-training exercise some five weeks before the crash.

So much for bombs or missiles. The media do not like terrorism talk six weeks before the presidential elections any more than the Clintons do. The airline checks start rolling in to the Democratic National Committee the very day that the new story breaks – $650.000 worth in the next six weeks.

One other thing. The Clintons break this story before the FBI talks to the St. Louis cop. I caught up with the cop a few years later. First thing he says, "I am still pissed off to this day by what they did to me." He should be. As is easily proved, when he and his dog are doing their exercise aboard an empty 747, the Flight 800 plane is preparing to leave for Hawaii with 400 passengers on board. The only record the cop kept was his time. Besides that, neither the nature of the training material nor the placement of that material matches what was found on the wreckage of TWA Flight 800.

Now that the Clintons have explained away the explosive residue, it's relatively easy to corrupt, conceal or lose the rest of the physical evidence, just like at Oklahoma City.

Still, one block of evidence proves tamperproof, and that's the testimony of those eyewitnesses – 270 of them who told the FBI that they saw streaking, zigzagging objects that seemed to be attacking the airplane. Here, Richard Clarke proves his ingenuity again.

All evidence points to him as the man who bridges the famous wall between the FBI and the CIA and persuades the CIA to produce the infamous animation that turns a nose-less 747 into a streaking missile. In his retelling of the story in "Against All Enemies," Clarke pads the plane's last recorded altitude to 17,000 feet to accommodate its imagined post-explosion ascent.

The rank-and-file guys in the NTSB thought the explanation was hogwash. It took them two years to get an interview with the CIA. Under questioning by the NTSB, the CIA finally admits it based this animation on one observation from just one of the hundreds of witnesses – a mechanic from Philadelphia, named Mike Wire.

The CIA analyst – and this conversation is part of the official record – tells the NTSB that in his original description, Mike Wire reported that he had seen object come up off the horizon, and that if he had, well the CIA's whole ascending plane theory is blown.

So the CIA sends the FBI back to re-interview Wire, and in this later interview Wire admits that he first saw the light at about 20 degrees above the horizon right about where TWA Flight 800 would have been, and yes the CIA was probably right. "Now, when the FBI told us that," says the CIA analyst, "we got even more comfortable with our theory."

Follow me here. The first time, Wire tells the FBI he saw the object come up off the horizon and behave very much like a missile. In the second interview he tells the agents that he first saw the object right where TWA would have been, and, yes, that object must have been TWA rocketing upward in crippled flight.

When my partner, James Sanders, first talked to Wire, he asked him why he changed his story from the first interview to the second interview.

Said Wire, "What second interview?"

The FBI never contacted Mike Wire after July 1996. He never changed his account, and there is no new 302 in his file. Someone made up this new interview out of whole cloth. That the CIA and FBI cooperated in its fabrication points in the general direction of Richard Clarke, and Clarke neither denies nor affirms.

As to the motive for devising an "exit strategy," Clarke provides this as well. He tells us that while driving to the White House to convene the post-crash meeting on July 17, "I dreaded what I thought was about to happen. The Eisenhower option." After the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks earlier, Clinton told Clarke and his colleagues that "he wanted a massive attack," presumably against Iran, if provoked again.

Had Iran been behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 – or Iraq for that matter, or al-Qaida – the president would have to respond. In fact, Clarke labels this chapter of his book, "The Almost War, 1996." The Olympic bombing is in this chapter as well.

At this stage, however, Clinton has re-election locked up. A war can only put it at risk. So just as at Oklahoma City and later at Olympic Park, the White House diverts the investigation away from Islamic terrorism.

The Clintons have learned how easy it all was at Oklahoma City. You just lose or corrupt all the physical evidence – including, in this case, the radar, the satellite data, the info from the black boxes, and the explosive residue found all over the plane – and then, trickiest of all, you ignore the eyewitnesses.

It always helps to have the New York Times in your pocket. Of the 270 eyewitnesses who tell the FBI that they have seen streaking projectiles, the New York Times will interview a sum total of none. Zero.

In the run up to the 1996 election, that's how simple the Mega Fix was.

And the Times, like every other major media outlet, swallows the CIA animation whole and never even asks why the CIA is involved in the first place.

So despite what the eyewitnesses see, and what the radar tracks, at the end of the day the Clintons tell the American people that those are all optical illusions or technical glitches and that in fact – at exactly the same moment these glitches and illusions are taking place – for the first time in the 75-year history of commercial aviation, a plane self-destructs because of a fuel tank problem ... and the amazing thing is that they get away with it.

At least until Sept. 11.