“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” — Winston Churchill, speaking in an entirely different context.

The case of the crash of TWA 800 back in 1996—whatever its cause may have been—has relevance today because it highlights the shortcomings of a fawning, biased, and credulous media more than willing to suppress—or at least actively ignore—inconvenient facts that would have cast the Clinton administration in a bad light. This remains relevant because many key members of the Obama administration are Clinton-era retreads, meaning they’ve had considerable experience in erecting a bodyguard of lies around their leader.

It’s unfortunate that, to be effective, a bodyguard of lies needs a bodyguard of liars. As an Accuracy in Media podcast notes,

. . . the media has acted, collectively, as one would expect a public relations department for the government to act.  I mean, to show this ludicrous video from the beginning, back in November of 1997, without getting any independent advice as to whether or not it was even possible, is ludicrous. Besides, there are—673 eyewitnesses called the FBI to tell them, to report what they’d seen.  So there are probably over a thousand witnesses.  Now, we know that many, many of those witnesses contacted The New York Times, and contacted other newspapers, to try to explain what it was that they had seen, but The New York Times didn’t publish it.  So think about it: This is homicide. These are 230 counts of homicide within the eyesight of a thousand people.  Now, if the government can get away with that, because of the news media, they can really get away with—then, really, it sort of tells us that this country, the population, is kind of losing touch with reality.

Jack Cashill addressed this on WorldNetDaily a couple of years ago:

What makes this whole event so astonishing is that TWA Flight 800 went down with 230 good souls on board in full view of literally hundreds of eyewitnesses on Long Island’s affluent south shore.

Even more astonishing, although 270 of those eyewitnesses – pilots, fishermen, surfers, military people – gave the FBI detailed accounts, many with illustrations, of a likely missile attack on the aircraft, The New York Times interviewed not a one of them. . . .

In the seven years I have been involved in the case, however, I have come to see the TWA 800 cover-up less as a scandal of government than as a scandal of media.

If The New York Times chose to pursue this story, it could break it open in a week. A TV network could break it in a month. And yet none of them do. None of them likely will.

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Resources:

An article at Accuracy in Media.

A podcast (with a transcript) at Accuracy in Media. Audio only: 27 minutes 22 seconds.

Jack Cashill’s WND article.

—Mike Gray