- My partner, James Sanders and I, have recently received
what may be the single most convincing document proving a conscious government
cover-up of the true fate of TWA Flight 800.
-
- In a government filled with the faint-hearted, it is
always reassuring to find one person who is not afraid to tell the truth.
The person in question is Bogdan Dzakovic. A five-year Coast Guard veteran,
Dzakovic has worked for the Security Division of the Federal Aviation Administration
since 1987 and now works for the Transportation Security Agency. Dzakovic
made the news a while back for filing a Whistleblower Disclosure against
the FAA for events that preceded the attacks on Sept. 11. His complaint
was taken seriously.
-
- The Office of Special Counsel, which handles whistleblower
issues and reports directly to the president, agreed with his assessment
of the FAA and stated that the FAA had indeed executed its aviation security
mission in a manner that was "a gross threat to public safety."
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has publicly honored Dzakovic as a "brave
and dedicated patriot" who "put his career at risk by coming
forward with these revelations, but he did the right thing."
-
- This is not the first time, however, that Dzakovic has
come forward. It is merely the first time that he has been honored for
so doing. In 1996, in the wake of the TWA 800 crash, he tried to do the
same. What follows are the highlights of an extraordinary memo he sent
to retired Adm. Cathal Flynn, the Federal Aviation Administration's associate
administrator for aviation security with copies to the FBI on Sept. 20,
1996 ö a date whose significance he did not then know.
-
- "I do apologize for not providing this document
earlier," Dzakovic writes, "but I have been completely consumed
with aviation security issues, my whistleblower stuff, and merely trying
to survive in this corrupt and unaccountable system."
-
- Dzakovic writes in his 1996 memo to Flynn:
-
- In early August 1996, I was assigned temporary duty at
the FBI's Command Center in Manhattan, N.Y., to assist in the ongoing TWA
800 situation. Among my other assigned duties, I was given the opportunity
to read and take notes on interviews conducted of witnesses who claimed
to have seen a missile strike the aircraft.
-
- This is a revelation. To the best of our knowledge, Dzakovic
is one of only two or three people outside of the FBI to have seen these
witness statements at this stage of the investigation. The FBI has not
revealed that it shared this information with the FAA ö and with good
reason. Unlike the FBI and the New York Times, among others, Dzakovic took
the eyewitnesses seriously. He was doing exactly what they should have
been doing: plotting "the approximate location of each witness and
ascertain[ing] if there are any commonalities between their observations
based on their geographic location in relation to the crash site."
-
- Dzakovic was given access to only 43 eyewitness statements.
Of the 43 witnesses, 24 had seen what appeared to be a missile. He writes
in September 1996, "Subsequently I heard that the FBI may have in
excess of a hundred witness statements." In fact, by Aug. 20, the
FBI had interviewed in excess of 700 eyewitnesses, 270 of whom had seen
likely missiles. At this stage, even with the FAA, the FBI was being coy.
-
- Despite having less than 10 percent of the likely missile
observations at his disposal, Dzakovic came to the following startling
and sophisticated conclusion:
-
- What this indicates is that the missile was flying (generally)
toward the witnesses in the central zone. With an almost head-on view of
the approaching missile, the missile did not have a significant degree
of lateral or sideways movement as it approached the aircraft. In contrast,
most of the witnesses on the periphery ö who viewed the missile from
the side ö saw a significant curvature in the flight. Since the majority
of the witnesses in the central zone did not see this curving, it would
seem to indicate that the missile was moving in a vertical (up and down)
pattern as it approached the aircraft with very little lateral or sideways
movement.
-
- Dzakovic admits he was not offering his conclusions "as
proof of a missile attack" but rather as "enough evidence to
warrant further investigation." The implication of Dzakovic's research
is plain: Had the FBI made the same kind of analysis with the 270 eyewitnesses
who had seen streaking missiles, its agents could have broken the case
wide open by September 1996. This, in turn, may well have saved us the
horrors of September 2001.
-
- There is only one reason the FBI did not follow through
ö its agents weren't allowed to. Dzakovic's 1996 memo holds the key
to understanding how this happened. In early August, writes Dzakovic, "The
FBI was reticent about its criminal investigation files to be reviewed
by a representative of a regulatory agency." This is understandable.
"Nevertheless," Dzakovic adds, "they conceded to our interests
in ascertaining the viability of a possible missile attack on this aircraft."
-
- As Dzakovic has proved, the evidence for a serious probe
into a missile attack was overwhelming, and it grew throughout the early
weeks of August 1996 as the FBI continued to accumulate more eyewitness
information. As Dzakovic has told me in a subsequent conversation, he had
a "good rapport" with the FBI during the first two months of
the conversation but that quickly devolved into "no contact whatsoever."
-
- Dzakovc did not know, however, what was going on behind
the scenes. As we have reported earlier, FBI honcho Jim Kallstrom was called
to Washington on Aug. 22 for a come-to-Jesus meeting chaired by Deputy
Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick, now conveniently one of only five Democrats
on the high-level 9-11 commission. All behavior changed after this day,
just three days before the Democratic Convention. Despite overwhelming
evidence of a missile strike, the FBI was no longer allowed to search for
the truth. Its new mission was to find a plausible scenario other than
a bomb or a missile strike.
-
- On Sept. 20, 1996, the same day Dzakovic sent his letter,
that mission was accomplished. This is the same day that the FBI revealed
that the TWA 800 plane had been the subject of a dog-training exercise
in St. Louis five weeks before the crash. Although this did not explain
the missile sightings, the public was not generally aware that people had
seen missiles. With the FBI's guidance, the New York Times had taken the
lead in discounting all missile sightings. The public had been made aware,
however, that explosive residue was found all over the plane. The dog-training
exercise now explained that.
-
- As we have reported, the dog-training exercise never
took place on the Flight 800 plane. This is easily proved. The FBI was
compelled to offer some explanation, and this was the best they could do.
It made some sense out of National Transportation Safety Board chair Jim
Hall's out-of-the-blue declaration just the day before that the NTSB had
decided to focus on mechanical malfunction as the likely culprit in the
crash.
-
- The lead of the New York Times story explains his improbable
case:
-
- Investigators from the National Transportation Safety
Board, saying they are convinced that none of the physical evidence recovered
from TWA Flight 800 proves that a bomb brought down the plane, plan tests
intended to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical
failure alone.
-
- Weeks before the Times had reported that "the only
good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the
plane off Long Island." In the interim, the evidence for a missile
strike had grown only stronger as more explosive residue had been found
on the plane and more eyewitnesses had been interviewed. Here, however,
Hall refuses to even acknowledge that missiles were a possibility. The
contrast between his claim and Dzakovic's is stunning.
-
- On that same day, Sept. 19, then Vice President Al Gore,
chairman on the airline safety and security commission, sent his infamous
letter to the airline industry's chief lobbyist, Carol Hallett, reassuring
her, ''I want to make it very clear that it is not the intent of this administration
or of the commission to create a hardship for the air transportation industry
or to cause inconvenience to the traveling public."
-
- On the day Dzakovic sent his memo, the airline industry
sent its first check. With $585,000 of airline cash arriving in the mail
before the election, who had time to read?
-
- © 2003
-
- Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer
and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
-
- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34332
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