The National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, has
secretly sent a large part of the wreckage of TWA Flight
800 to a Long Island junkyard for recycling.
Millions of dollars were spent recovering the
wreckage from the ocean and transporting it to
Calverton, where the fuselage was assembled as a mock-up
to impress the public with what a thorough job the
investigators – the NTSB and the FBI – were doing.
That was for show, but there was other wreckage that
they didn't want shown. Journalists and private
investigators were not allowed inside the Calverton
hangar to inspect the bulk of the recovered wreckage,
but even members of the official investigating team were
not allowed into a special area where the FBI secreted
items that they didn't want the representatives of the
NTSB, TWA, Boeing and the interested unions to see.
The fuselage mock-up will be preserved, together with
one of the four engines. The destruction of the rest was
carried out in July and August of this year. The
recycler says that he had to pledge to keep it secret to
get the contract. Long Island's News Channel 12 learned
about it only recently.
The NTSB claims that all interested parties were told
what they intended to do. The parties who are most
interested, those who have carried out their own
investigations and are convinced that the government's
explanation of the cause of the crash is bogus, were not
notified.
The NTSB denies that it kept the demolition secret,
but it's clear that it did so. It knew that there were
many people interested in the TWA 800 case who would
have strenuously objected to the destruction of evidence
that they believed would prove the NTSB and FBI had
covered up the real cause of the crash – hits by
missiles that were seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses.
The FBI was so nervous about what some of the
recovered wreckage revealed that it would not allow
non-FBI members of the official investigating team to
see it. It was kept in a special room that only FBI
special agents could access.
Other investigators complained that evidence was
taken to that room and never seen again. Now we will
never know what vital bits of evidence were hidden in
that room.
One of them may have been part of the tail assembly
of a drone manufactured by Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical,
TRA, in San Diego. We know from a misdirected fax that
the FBI asked TRA to send an official to Calverton to
see if he could identify some bright orange wreckage.
After seeing it, the official asked his office to
send him a parts list and drawings of the tail assembly
of the BQM-34 Firebee 1. When I questioned him, he first
said it was just junk, but he then switched and said he
saw a part similar to a TRA product and that he sent for
the drawings to prove that it wasn't theirs.
If it wasn't from a Firebee, it must have been from
another drone, evidence the FBI hid and the NTSB has
destroyed.
Maj. Fritz Meyer was piloting an Air National Guard
helicopter when he saw TWA Flight 800 hit by missiles.
Later he viewed the wreckage in the Calverton hangar and
was struck by the heavy damage done to a nose wheel and
tire. An NTSB official with him remarked that experts
told him it was caused by a bomb.
The "bomb" must have been attached to a missile. That
was also evidence that had to be destroyed.
When part of the leading edge of the right wing was
tested for explosive residue by an Egis machine, 12
positive hits were registered. Maj. Meyer flew the wing
section to Washington to be retested by the FBI crime
lab, which reported that all but two of the 12 hits were
false positives.
Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, the FBI's top explosives
expert until he was assigned to a different job when he
became a whistle-blower, says that the lab failed to
follow proper procedures in retesting the wing.
In any case, there were two positive hits for
explosive residue, evidence that a missile had exploded
near the plane. That evidence was a serious threat to
the government's theory of the cause of the crash.
The destruction of so much evidence that could be
used to prove that the government has covered up the
real cause of the crash of TWA 800 may have been legal.
However, those who ordered it apparently feared they
might not have been allowed to get away with it if they
did so openly, because it is morally outrageous.
Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media.
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