The Dissent of Flight 800

...Timothy McVeigh's clothing was found by the FBI to contain traces of PETN, and prosecutors say this links him to the explosion...

...33 T he most compelling evidence for Victoria Cummock's complaints about Gore dates to September 20, the day after he promised the airline lobby that there would be no expensive new anti-terrorist regulations: The Democratic National Committee received a $40,coo contribution from TWA headquarters...

...In other words, the plane was likely brought down by a bomb...

...The vice president was threatening the airlines where it mattered, and the airlines threatened back...

...Terrorists are a real threat to American air travelers," the vice president said...

...In the end she refused to sign the authorization for the Commission's final report, which calls for bomb detectors at only 54 of the country's 450-odd airports...

...American Airlines Chairman Bob Crandall is not known for contributing to Democrats —and no corresponding contributions were made to Republicans...

...Nor was the PETN recovered from the same part of TWA 800 where the dog tests had taken place...

...uments show that the airlines contributed nearly $5oo,000 in soft money to the Democratic Party after Clinton chartered the aviation commission in the days following the crash...

...But this time, she says, Kavaur reneged...

...Such evidence would have allowed them to declare conclusively that a bomb exploded aboard TWA 800...

...Aboard Air Force One—en route to a New York appearance to share the grief of the families of TWA 800's victims —the president convinced Cummock that he sincerely wanted to develop stringent new counter-terrorism measures for America's airlines...

...Gore's staff responded that, because the preliminary September report covered security, there was no need to bring it up again...

...Now Victoria Cummock has filed suit in federal court against Gore and the Department of Transportation, charging that the vice president pressured her to abandon her call for counter-terrorism measures and refused to publish a 42-page dissent she had filed, despite promising her publicly at the Commission's last meeting that her dissent would be included in the official report...

...Cummock may well have a case...

...In the intervening weeks, speculation about a terrorist attack had died down, largely thanks to the NTSB background briefings...

...Yet neither Freeh nor Joe Valiquette— nor anyone at the FBI—has brought any such evidence forward...

...She claims that her fellow commissioners accused her of being a "shill" for unnamed firms who allegedly wanted to sell security technology, such as explosives-detection systems, to the government...

...In any case, Kallstrom maintains, three factors suggest a bomb was responsible for the crash: the flight data recorder contained no hint of mechanical malfunction...

...The senior FBI chemist also acknowledged under cross-examination that no PETN was found at the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing, or in the wreckage of the rental truck that carried the bomb...

...Al Gore, after all, promised Victoria Cum-mock a chance to tell her side of the story...

...The FBI's lead crash investigator, for one, doesn't even buy the dog-test hypothesis...

...The FBI's Joe Valiquette acknowledges that other than a bomb or a missile, the dog test is the only possible explanation for the explosive traces...

...On Election Day, November 6, United gave the DNC $100,000, and Northwest brought its contributions since September up to $53,000...

...Kallstrom still holds open the possibility that a bomb caused the TWA 800 explosion, and hopes that recent test explosions on an Air France 747 hulk carried out in Britain may provide proof...

...When the families' turn to appear before the Commission finally did come, Al Gore stayed away—and sent Jim Hall in his place...

...In fact Hall was a staffer for the vice president's father, a Tennessee senator, and was first appointed to the NTSB with the enthusiastic support of the veep...

...He does not have to do this and publish it as part of the official record...

...The bag-matching scheme alone would have meant unacceptable delays and loss of income...

...passenger planes...

...34 July 1997 • The American Spectator...

...Yet while the FBI was amassing evidence that pointed toward a terrorist bomb, the Gore Commission was producing a tough preliminary report hailed by security advocates...

...This pattern is also consistent with a bomb blast...

...To date, there is not a single piece of wreckage to support the malfunction hypothesis...

...Twenty minutes later, when Gore presented the report to President Clinton, he proclaimed it unanimous...

...But FBI agents held out for more evidence...

...Al Gore, she believes, sold her out...

...The Vice President's action plan goes to the heart of this strategy...

...So I want everyone to understand that whenever this plan says 'the Commission recommends,' you can understand it to mean, 'the President will...

...The president charged Gore with developing initial counter-terrorism recommendations within 45 days —well before the November election...

...The Clinton administration, Gore declared, would take the necessary steps to secure the skies for the American flyer...

...His tough talk about new anti-terrorist measures had drawn praise in the press, but it had also raised the hackles of the airline industry...

...Specifically, they wanted to find the characteristic signs of an explosion, and hoped to find residues of PETN and RDX blasted into the metal...

...The resulting New York Times and Washington Post headlines—"A Shift in Focus for Crash Inquiry, Safety Board Tests to Focus on Malfunction...

...At the final public meeting of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security on February 12, Gore promised several times that he would leave room in the final report for Cummock's dissenting comments...

...and PETN and RDX are ingredients of Semtex, a Czech-made plastic explosive favored by terrorists...

...When the public hearing at the Commerce Depaitment was over, Cummock and the other commissioners met backstage before going to the White House to present the report to Clinton...

...In the next two months, airline contributions grew even more dramatically...

...Her suit demands access to the internal memos and files she claims Gore's staff withheld from the commissioners, so that if necessary a new dissent can be prepared...

...The DNC's Amy Weiss Tobe did not return our calls...

...She agreed to join...

...The only way out, it seemed, was if investigators were to determine that the crash of Flight 800 had not been a terrorist act...

...The other commissioners were to travel in vans...

...30 THE DISUNT OF FLIGHT SOO When he was putting together his White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security late last July, after the explosion of TWA 800, Bill Clinton took the trouble to call Victoria Cummock personally and ask her to join...

...Perhaps not coincidentally, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) head Jim Hall emerged not long after to announce that the crash of Flight 800 was due to mechanical failure —the one hypothesis for which there is as yet no physical evidence...

...he further claimed that, since the Pan Am 103 bombing, the government had been aware of security vulnerabilities in the handling of cargo and mail shipments aboard passenger jets...

...The FBI, though, has not always demanded such "conclusive" evidence...

...The FBI claimed that the test aircraft was that of TWA 800, but all it had to go on was the airport's gate number...

...The promise of much tighter security, however, was tantamount to a declaration of war against the airline industry...

...All the security measures from the preliminary report had disappeared...

...Was there some kind of cover-up going on...

...Moreover, the FBI had already admitted having found the PETN and RDX explosive residues...

...As it happens, September 20 was also the date Gore had promised relatives of crash victims that they could testify publicly before the Commission...

...Such a device, if directed away from the jet's hull, would still have the force through what experts call a "cutting lens" effect to cause a catastrophic collapse of the aircraft's aluminum skin and spark the center fuel tank explosion...

...According to Fenster, no administration has ever been sued before by a federal advisory commission member...

...Saying that the plane had recently been used in a "routine recertification test" for bomb-sniffing dogs, the FBI claimed that chemical explosives had been placed on the plane "which could possibly relate to the trace residues previously identified...

...According to prosecutors, he planned to blow up twelve U.S...

...It was just that technique, for example, that narco-terrorists used to bring down an Avianca Airlines jet in 1989, according to the NTSB...

...Dissension within the Commission threatened to flare publicly, so Gore's staff withdrew the draft and soon began circulating a new one...

...As one associate of the chairman puts it, Hall has known Al Gore all his life and is "more like a personal retainer to the Gore family...

...During a January 9 Commission conference call about the final draft, CIA Director John Deutch questioned the lack of anti-terrorism measures...

...A very small bomb over an aircraft's center fuel tank...

...So why is the FBI suggesting the presence of PETN residue is necessary to conclude that TWA 800 was brought down by a terrorist bomb...

...Cummock, who had lost her husband over Lockerbie on Pan Am 103 eight years before, seemed a solid, logical choice...

...No one reads interim reports, they warned...

...Yet despite the long immersion in the waters off Long Island, some of the recovered wreckage still showed traces of the explosives PETN and RDX— which suggests that when the plane exploded, rather large quantities of those explosives were present...

...The vice president's office has refused to comment, but the government's apparently new position on the investigation was strengthened the following day, when the FBI issued an astonishing press release discrediting the bomb theory...

...After Kavaur's February 20 turnabout, Cummock asked attorney Herb Fenster to determine whether Gore was violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1979, which established strict rules for advisory groups...

...When Kallstrom disavowed the dog-test theory, senior NTSB officials, speaking anonymously, told reporters he was wrong and said they could simulate the center fuel tank explosion...

...And luggage and passengers wouldn't be fully matched, because the airlines' hub system can't accommodate such a measure without costly delays...

...But Deutch and others disagreed...

...By itself the bomb, although it kills or maims nearby passengers, won't destroy the plane...

...These Election Day bonuses brought the airline industry total to nearly $500,000 — all of it donated after the formation of the aviation security Commission...

...Her refusal to sign on to the report elicited a fax from the Commission's executive director, Gerry Kavaur, a civilian on loan from the Air Force, asking her to relent and promising that, if she submitted her formal dissent before February 20, 1997, the Commission would include that dissent as part of its final report...

...0 ne of the few facts about Flight 800 on which the FBI and the NTSB now agree is that an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank caused its mid-air disintegration...

...Even at these airports, only suspicious bags would be put through the detectors...

...In verifying the plane's whereabouts in the weeks before the explosion, the FBI came across a police record noting that a dog re-certification test took place at the St...

...Tests have shown that, after three weeks in salt water, explosive residues and the distinctive trace evidence of pitting and rippling of aircraft aluminum caused by a small bomb will literally wash away...

...On September 19 he sent a letter to lobbyist Carol Hallett, head of the Air Transport Association, that 32 July r 9 9 7 • The American Spectator promised the security Commission's recommendations would not cause the airlines any loss of revenue...

...Instead the airlines began contributing money to the Clinton-Gore coffers—and Gore abandoned his call for new anti-terrorism measures...

...The gift was almost 400 percent greater than the total the airline had given in the previous nine months, and kicked off what appears to be a highly unusual airline donation spree...

...So why did the FBI issue this highly unusual press release that seemed to discredit the bomb theory...

...Hall took the unusual step of giving background briefings to reporters at major newspapers to help spread the mechanical failure hypothesis...

...Instead it ignites fuel vapors in the center fuel tank, causing a secondary explosion—that later blast destroys the aircraft completely...

...Soon enough the vice president began to backpedal...

...iraculously enough—also on September 19, the M date of Gore's promise to the airline lobby—the Washington Post and New York Times ran front-page reports claiming just that...

...If Gore was involved, how will he explain that he sold out his commission to benefit his re-election campaign...

...On March 5 Fenster sent a letter to Gore inquiring about the procedures used by the Commission staff, alerting the White House to a potential lawsuit...

...But Steven Burmeister, the FBI scientist who testified in the McVeigh trial, found no PETN traces in McVeigh's car...

...Louis airport in a plane identified only as a "wide-bodied jet...

...Many other planes, of course, had been at the same gate that day...

...He wants to compare the sounds the test explosions made on a flight data recorder with the tapes from TWA 800, to determine whether the bomb noise matches the sounds from the flight's tape recorders...

...Cummock claims she refused the ride, saying she couldn't sign the transmittal letter until speaking with others in the family group and filing a dissent...

...As one former military expert who was on Bush's Pan Am 103 Commission put it, 'The families [of the victims] should have been contacted and told that [wreckage] recovery is critical...

...but he says the FBI cannot confirm the type of explosive used in the test, nor how the relatively small amount routinely used in The American Spectator • July 1997 such tests could have remained on the aircraft after weeks of saltwater immersion...

...But suddenly Gore rescheduled the public hearing for two months later—until well after election day...

...Gore was in a politically impossible situation...

...Cummock agreed to the deadline, and submitted her 42-page dissent that included specific counter-terrorism recommendations, deadlines for their implementation, and a detailed analysis of terrorist attacks and security precautions that might prevent them...

...jets on a single day...

...What the reports failed to question is that the briefings were not delivered by investigators at the New York crash site —the reporters were briefed at NTSB headquarters in Washington—and had been orchestrated directly by NTSB chairman Jim Hall...

...Despite months of tests, however, the NTSB has failed to simulate a center tank explosion...

...White House spokesperson Ginny Terzano won't confirm or deny that Gore solicited the airline contributions himself...

...Mail contracts are worth more than $1 billion annually to the airlines, and cargo operations are more lucrative still...

...Because the TWA 800 recovery effort focused first on bringing up victims, most of the evidence of a bomb would have been lost before the crash probe began in earnest...

...Within ten days," says Victoria Cummock, "the whole industry jumped all over Al Gore...

...What has so far gone largely unreported is that a center fuel tank explosion is a sign of terrorist involvement About a month before TWA 800 went down, Pakistani-born terrorist Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was on trial as the alleged architect of the World Trade Center bombing...

...But in Washington I don't know what it means...

...These news stories were the direct result of background briefings given to reporters at the Post and Times by the NTSB...

...Unless the intent had been to generate headlines (which it did), it is difficult to imagine why the FBI would have made such a startling claim — especially since there was no physical evidence to support the other theory...

...Since her husband's death she had devoted so much time and effort to improving airline safety that Newsday labeled her "the airlines' most tenacious foe...

...We have to continue to fight terrorism on every front," Clinton declared...

...There were irreconcilable differences between commissioners who wanted clear anti-terrorism security mandates with firm deadlines for implementation and funding, and those who favored vague recommendations without timetables...

...It may be a coincidence, but on May 4, four days before Cum-mock filed her suit in federal court, FBI director Louis Freeh appeared on "Meet the Press" and hinted that the government's evidence about Flight 800 supported the mechanical malfunction theory...

...the way in which the body of the plane broke apart matched that of other 7475 that had been bombed...

...TWA 800's Enduring Mystery: Lacking Bomb Evidence, Probers Look for Malfunction" — reinforced the impression that mechanical malfunction caused the crash...

...Sources familiar with the reconstructed wreckage of TWA 800 say that most of the still-missing pieces of the aircraft-90 percent of which was recovered —were located in and around a small area near row 23 of the plane...

...Congress had raised some of these concerns in its 1990 Aviation Security Act, but the only restriction had been the banning of mail aboard passenger planes in the six months after the Gulf War...

...FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette confirms that the explosive residue dissipates quickly in seawater: "That's one of the risks of not getting that debris out of the water sooner...

...What none of these papers reported is that the NTSB chairmanship is a political appointment—and that Hall is a longtime Gore crony...

...It was recovered from a section of the aircraft cabin between the wings, over the center fuel tank...

...American Airlines donated $250,000 over a three-day period—in equal amounts of $83,333...

...At a September 9 press conference, Gore reiterated the need for these changes...

...Then, in early January, Gore's staff circulated a draft of the commission's final report...

...The final report should contain both the previous and new terrorism measures...

...Victoria Cummock considered breaking publicly with the Commission, but decided the best course was to battle it out internally...

...Nor will the airlines say how they came to make their generous offerings...

...Did Al Gore sell out the Commission for a few more campaign bucks...

...BY JOHN B. ROBERTS II July 1997 The American Spectator U U O THE REPORTS FAILED TO NOTE THAT THE BRIEFINGS HAD BEEN ORCHESTRATED BY NTSB CHAIRMAN JIM HALL—WHO IS DESCRIBED BY AN ASSOCIATE AS "A PERSONAL RETAINER TO THE GORE FAMILY...

...From where I come from, the guy was lying," she says...

...Among other measures, it called for the matching of all bags with passengers to prevent bombs in unaccompanied luggage...

...Why had the agency, normally so tight-lipped, especially during a criminal probe, released such a statement...

...Kallstrom clings to his belief that a small plastic explosive could have been responsible, and not have left many traces, if it had been a specialized kind of bomb called a "shaped charge...

...She lost her husband over Lockerbie, and remains resolute in her goal not to roll over for the airline lobby—or the vice president...

...The papers cited unnamed NTSB officials who now maintained that, indeed, some kind of malfunction appeared to be the cause of the center fuel tank explosion...

...Those internal hearings, she says, were brutal...

...The vice president is not obliged to publish your dissent," she says he told her...

...TWA, Northwest, United, and American gave a total of $95,000 to the Democratic Party in September alone...

...Not a single piece of the recovered wreckage points to a mechanical malfunction as the explanation for the crash...

...But such recommendations might well have led to sweeping new security measures that could have cost the airlines as much as $1 billion...

...They should do all the tests in the world to try to ascertain what caused this," says James K. Kallstrom, "just as we should do, from the standpoint of our bomb technicians and our forensic people...

...Vice President Al Gore, he added, would head the new Commission...

...Gore asked Cummock to sign the official transmittal letter, and offered her a ride in his limousine back to the White House...

...Yousef had also been accused of bombing a Philippine Airlines jet and conspiring to destroy U.S...

...Still the FBI maintains McVeigh's guilt...

...President Clinton praised the Gore Commission's preliminary report...

...In early September, Gore formally presented Clinton with the report, which called for sweeping new anti-terrorism measures that would have given American flights nearly the same legendary level of safety as Israel's El Al airlines...

...Federal Election Commission (FEC) docJOHN B. ROBERTS II, who worked in the Reagan administration, is a television producer and freelance journalist...

...But much of the plastic explosive residue would be blown sideways out of the aircraft...

...His method...

...If they could have found a way to publicly discredit me," Cum-mock says, "they would have done it...

...In the meantime Cummock prepares to do battle with Gore in the federal courts...