First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America

For conspiracy buffs and skeptics alike, Cashill and Sanders' reconstruction of the investigation into the July 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 is a real page-turner. The authors, who also produced the video Silenced: Flight 800 and the Subversion of Justice, contend that the U.S. government, from the White House to the NTSB, FBI and CIA, systematically tried to obscure the real cause of the explosion with a false theory of mechanical failure. The cover-up, the authors maintain, was motivated by then-incumbent President Clinton, who decided that ""only a catastrophe...could prevent his reelection in November. He would not let Flight 800 be that catastrophe."" Cashill and Sanders make use of evidence from FBI witness summaries, transcripts of agency meetings and reports, conflicting press coverage, scientific data and their own interviews with witnesses and experts to conclude that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a Navy missile, whose intended target was a terrorist plane on a collision course with the passenger aircraft. Throughout the book, the authors make much of what they cast as the mainstream media's collusion with government agencies in parroting the official (read: Democratic) party line on the investigation, such that ""no newsroom more influential than the Riverside, California, Press-Enterprise would dare to look beneath the surface."" But Cashill and Sanders are by no means above politics, and often cannot conceal their contempt for Clinton and his sympathizers: ""Two decades spent abusing the power with which [Clinton] had been entrusted had permanently corroded his character,"" they write. Whether such sentiments enhance or detract from the authors' argument depends on the personal leanings of the reader, of course. But sadly, whatever one's political views, in a post-9/11 world, a terrorist-related theory regarding Flight 800 sounds much less far-fetched than it may have to many in the comparatively innocent days of 1996. (Mar.)