Writer and documentary producer Jack Cashill has a Ph.D. from Purdue, and has taught as a Fulbright professor in France. In the first half, he discussed TWA Flight 800 which crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from JFK airport on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 passengers on board. Although initial reports suggested a terrorist attack, FBI and NTSB investigators blamed a fuel tank explosion. But skeptics have long questioned the official story, and new evidence has surfaced that suggests a conspiracy. Starting within hours of the incident, the FBI and the CIA began to collaborate on what would become one of the greatest cover-ups in American peacetime history, Cashill contends.

From studying previously unseen CIA memoranda, he learned that within two weeks of the disaster, FBI agents had interviewed 144 "excellent" eyewitnesses to a missile strike and found the evidence for such a strike "overwhelming." Yet, the CIA discouraged the FBI from coming forward with the evidence, and the story was revised to say there were only a few credible eyewitnesses of a missile, Cashill recounted. One of the witnesses, who was on a bridge in Westhampton, Long Island felt the bridge actually shake at the time of disaster, he added.

A large US Navy ship was picked up on radar, three miles from the crash when it happened, and was detected quickly leaving the scene. Although the FBI would claim that the Navy had not tested missiles in the ocean south of Long Island for at least two years, a recently acquired video shows a test in those same waters on July 12, 1996, five days before TWA 800's destruction, Cashill reported. While the evidence points to the plane purposefully or accidentally being shot down by the US Navy, and then covered up, some type of terrorist angle cannot be ruled out entirely, he admitted.

----------------------

Midweek Open Lines followed in the latter half. Preston from Daytona Beach, who served in the Army, weighed in on the Flight 800 mystery, suggesting that safety systems would have prevented the Navy from carrying out a missile launch on an American jet. Jeremy from Detroit shared a story of his "passport miracle," when he was mysteriously handed the cash he needed to get his passport by a stranger at the post office. Kyle warned about the dangers of sleep apnea, while Annie argued for immediate action on insulating the power grid. Don in Williamsburg, VA recalled a childhood story, of how late one night, his grandfather suddenly appeared in a rocking chair in his bedroom. It turned out that his grandfather had died that night.

News segment guests: Catherine Austin Fitts, Dr. Peter Breggin