"As I was writing my new book on TWA Flight 800 --TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy, now available wherever you buy books -- I wondered how Hillary Clinton’s success would affect the book’s.
...It began at 8:19 p.m. on July 17, 1996, when TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York bound for Paris.
At 8:31 p.m., the 747 exploded off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board.
According to Hillary’s logs, at 8:35 p.m. a motorcade whisked the Clintons from a Women’s Leadership Forum nearby to the White House.
Soon after they arrived, Clinton’s chief of staff Leon Panetta called the president with the grim news out of Long Island.By roughly 9 p.m. Richard Clarke, chairman of the Coordinating Security Group (CSG) on terrorism, had called a meeting of the CSG in the White House Situation Room.
The meeting was prompted in no small part by the news out of New York TRACON that “a primary radar return (ASR-9) indicated vertical movement intersecting TWA 800.”
The eyewitness testimony would reinforce the radar data.
The president chose not to join Clarke.
Instead, as retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson confirmed, Bill and Hillary holed up in the family residence with -- Patterson believes -- one other person, Sandy Berger, the deputy national security advisor.
At the time, Patterson carried the nuclear football for the president, which kept him in close proximity.
By 3 a.m. the Clintons had settled on a strategy.
At that fabled hour -- the one Hillary would mythologize in her run against Barack Obama -- Bill called Berger’s boss, National Security Advisor Tony Lake, with the following message: “Dust off the contingency plans.”
For the time being, the president, in private at least, would blame terrorists for the attack, Iran the chief suspect among them.
Clarke would call the aftermath of TWA 800’s destruction, “The Almost War of 1996.”
Read on!
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