Hillary, Gorelick, and the Corruption of the TWA 800 Case

Hillary, Gorelick, and the Corruption of the TWA 800 Case

By Jack Cashill

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.
On the up side, if Hillary were nominated, the book would be more relevant as she was at the quiet center of the action. On the down side, her nomination would increase the odds that a protective major media would continue to ignore the great untold story of our time.
The media run the risk of being the only adults who do not know this story. 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.”
A week after the crash, Bill and Hillary spent three hours meeting with the victims’ families. Hillary could have made literary hay with a scene this poignant. She chose not to. In her 528-page memoir, Living History, Hillary spent just one-third of a sentence on TWA 800. In his 957-page 2004 memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton gave the “almost war” a paragraph.
The Clintons did not want their fingerprints anywhere near this mess. They preferred to work through the Department of Justice, which Hillary had staked out as her own personal fiefdom. Like just about everything she touched, the DOJ was both highly political and seriously dysfunctional.
Nanny issues sidelined the first two attorney general candidates. Insisting that a woman -- any woman -- head the department, Hillary finally settled on the feckless Miami prosecutor Janet Reno. For the next eight years the Clintons would have to work around her.
Needing someone to work through, they finally found a fixer worthy of the number two position, a little-known DC litigator named Jamie Gorelick. With Gorelick’s appointment as deputy attorney general in February 1994, Hillary had three women occupying the most powerful posts in federal law enforcement, criminal division head Jo Ann Harris being the third.
Heading up Justice’s operation on the ground in Long Island was still another woman, United States Attorney Valerie Caproni. Caproni brought the FBI in immediately to seize control of the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board. As officers of the court, Gorelick and Caproni knew the law forbade this move. They simply ignored the law. The FBI reported to Justice. The NTSB did not.
On August 22, 1996, Gorelick summoned the FBI honcho Jim Kallstrom to Washington for a meeting. The White House did not like the direction the investigation was taking. On August 23, the New York Times summed up that direction in an above-the-fold headline, “Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800.”
The other above-the-fold headline on August 23 read as follows, “Clinton Signs Bill Cutting Welfare.” The signing of this bill three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was hardly a coincidence. There, Clinton hoped to sell the party’s peace and prosperity message. Front page headlines about explosive devices destroying an American airliner, by a bomb or especially by a missile, could make hash out of both peace and prosperity.
Kallstrom returned to Long Island a changed man. Based on his subsequent performance, he seemed to have no more urgent task than to negate the Times reporting on explosive residues. Within a month, the reliably compliant Times had forgotten about the 258 eyewitnesses to a missile strike, the radar data, and the explosive residue. The headline on September 19 read, “New Focus on Malfunctions In Inquiry on T.W.A. Crash.” The investigation was effectively over.
In May 1997, the Clintons found a way to reward Gorelick for her steely performance. They handed this middling bureaucrat with no financial or housing experience the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a sinecure the Washington Monthly aptly called “the equivalent of winning the lottery.”
During her five-plus years with that self-serving enterprise, Gorelick made $26,466,834 in salary, bonuses, performance pay, and stock options. In January 2004, she stepped down to pay her dues, assuming one of only five Democratic seats on the 9-11 Commission.
In March 2004, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet informed the commissioners about “the wall” that prevented the CIA and FBI from cooperating in the run-up to September 11. “Ironclad regulations,” said Tenet, “so that even people in the criminal division and the intelligence divisions of the FBI couldn’t talk to each other, let alone talk to us or us talk to them.”
The task of assigning credit for the wall was left to Attorney General John Ashcroft. “The single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall,” Ashcroft testified before the commission in April 2004. “Full disclosure,” Ashcroft continued, “compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission.”
That member, of course, was Jamie Gorelick. More perversely still, as a newly unearthed treasure trove of CIA documents proves beyond argument, under Gorelick’s watchful gaze the CIA and FBI worked hand in glove to subvert the TWA 800 investigation. The “wall” did not even slow them down.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/hillary_gorelick_and_the_corruption_of_the_twa_800_case.html#ixzz4DZWqiNSu
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Articles: TWA 800: Persecution by Prosecution

TWA 800: Persecution by Prosecution

By James D. Sanders

James Sanders was the first investigative reporter to take a serious look at what happened to TWA Flight 800. For his efforts, he, his wife Elizabeth, a TWA trainer, and one of his sources, TWA Capt. Terry Stacey were arrested. The Sanderses were tried and convicted in federal court of conspiracy to steal airplane parts. Learn more in TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5). 
July 12, 1996, Westhampton, Long Island, a repairman using his video camera to film the dawn, instead captured a large missile solid-fuel exhaust plume climbing into the sky. Then something large fell from the sky, on fire, leaving a smoke trail as it descended slowly toward the Atlantic Ocean south of Westhampton.        
Five days later, in the same area of the sky, just after 8:30 pm, the United States Navy fired off another missile that brought down TWA Flight 800. Almost twenty years later I obtained from the FBI the video of the July 12, 1996, shoot-down, but the FBI refused to send me the documents associated with the video.
Newly discovered CIA documents, however, reveal that a cover-up was ordered. A factually-false narrative disguised as analysis was created, but never released to the media. Highly credible witnesses observed a missile take out TWA Flight 800, statements so compelling the FBI and CIA altered these statements to comport with the desired outcome of the investigation: mechanical failure.        
The New York Times reported the story the FBI wanted read by the masses; therefore, not one relevant witness article was published. When the National Security State ordered the FBI to abandon its “bomb” hypothesis, the Times pivoted, cooperating with National Security State wishes, feeding the masses the new propaganda.
About this time, I began my investigation of the government. I was receiving documents from my sources inside the investigation that confirmed the FBI and NTSB were altering the debris field to comport with a mechanical explanation. I also received information that the United States Navy was involved, including its newest submarine, the Seawolf, then undergoing sea trials, and that a massive failure within the Navy’s AEGIS system was responsible for two missiles taking out the TWA 747.
I received the Supervisor of Salvage log for the Red, Yellow, and Green zones. Cross-referencing this with other documents received from inside the NTSB side of the investigation, I was able to confirm and track the NTSB effort to alter the debris field.
I received forensic evidence of a thermite warhead attached to a solid-fuel missile striking TWA 800’s right side at the point where the leading edge of the right wing attached to the fuselage. A few feet away was engine number three, the first large part of the 747 to fall away. The NTSB/FBI moved the engine more than a mile to the east in its debris log to make the explanation for the crash read “mechanical.”
With some help from me, in March 1997, the Riverside, California, Press Enterprise ran a series of articles revealing forensic evidence of a thermite warhead and solid fuel missile. The DOJ then immediately raided the publisher of my TWA Flight 800 manuscript as it was being prepared for publication.
My phone records were seized, along with my financial records. Mail was seized along with my computer. No warrants were issued because that’s the way the National Security State operates when its existence is imperiled. Later, during the trial, the judge said that these illegal National Security State acts were okay because Congress had not attached a criminal penalty to such shenanigans.    
The CIA and FBI created a propaganda cartoon, presenting it to the world’s media November 18, 1997, about two weeks before my wife and I were arrested for receiving forensic evidence exposing federal lawlessness. The cartoon showed TWA Flight 800 flying east toward Paris, France, when suddenly a mechanical event blew off the front end of the 747, causing it to suddenly zoom-climb several thousand feet. FBI and CIA propagandists alleged this was what witnesses observed climbing into the evening air. A deep voice assured the public that no missile was involved.
Unfortunately for the Keystone Cops managing the cover-up, CIA documents have escaped their control. The CIA analysis concluded the zoom-climb did not occur, could not occur. There went the buffoonish cover story. Did the National Security State rush to the judge and manfully confess to the false CIA/FBI propaganda? Of course not.
Federal District Judge Joanna Seybert helped the National Security State by refusing to give my wife and me discovery, thereby guaranteeing that criminal utterances of National Security State propagandists would not be exposed. The judge then interrogated each member of the jury pool. All potential jurors who believed the federal government might engage in a cover-up were removed on the order of the judge. Seybert later confessed she would not allow a jury to sit in her court that did not believe in veracity of the federal government.
On December 22, 1998, prior to the trial, I was given three hours to photograph the reconstructed 747, along with the debris not included in the reconstruction. The path of the thermite warhead blast was photographed, along with altering of the floor of the center-wing-tank. The judge refused to allow a First Amendment defense so my photos of the criminal alteration could not be shown to the jury.
Times reporter John McQuiston wrote: “Captain Stacey appeared as the chief Government witness against the couple, testifying the three of them had conspired to steal the evidence. He told the jury Mrs. Sanders pleaded with him to help provide evidence for her husband’s investigation into the crash.”
Search the trial transcript and you will find nothing to confirm McQuiston’s allegations. Stacey stated the exact opposite: he did not believe he was breaking the law when he on his “own volition” removed red residue samples and sent them to me to test for evidence of a missile. 
In a tape-recorded conversation, the NTSB’s Dr. Merritt Birky confessed that he and the other red residue propagandists lied. They claimed that the red residue was 3M 1357 glue when they knew that to be false. Birky also ordered NASA (Florida) chemist Charlie Bassett to cease testing when Bassett discovered possible explosive residue on crash debris. Seybert would not allow evidence of these criminal acts in her courtroom.
We appealed the inevitable conviction, and Appellate Judge Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court Justice, falsified evidence in order to not overturn my wife’s conviction. DOJ lawyer Valerie Caproni forced the NTSB to violate federal law and turn over witness interviews to the FBI where they would be altered. Like Sotomayor, Caproni would become a federal judge. Reward for supporting the National Security State in its hour of need?
“Reality” is what remains after federal propagandists interpret fact. The shoot-down of a TWA 747 is fact; “reality” is everything the NTSB, FBI, CIA and DOJ said about the shoot-down over the last twenty years.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/twa_800_persecution_by_prosecution.html#ixzz4DZW2GRad
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When Trump Fought the Racists | The American Spectator

When Trump Fought the Racist

When Trump Fought the Racists

• Jeffrey Lord

November 13, 2015, 9:00 am

And so the cry went up.
“Trump is a racist!” was the mocking cry from an off-stage Larry David when Trump recently hosted Saturday Night Live. The David bit was designed to make fun not of Trump but Trump’s critics. In this case a left-wing group calling itself deportracism.com which, without the slightest sense of irony, put together a thoroughly racist ad having children spewing obscenities as they proclaimed their allegiance not to America and its ideals but rather to their race. A chilling reminder of all those fresh-faced young Germans of long ago pledging allegiance to their Aryan race.
All of this is already old news. But there is a much older “old news” story about Trump that has now resurfaced — a story that paints a highly accurate portrait of the real Donald Trump — the guy who has no time for racism and anti-Semitism and stood up in public to fight both.
The story, linked by a group calling itself Zionists for Trump, was published in the Wall Street Journal — in 1997. It revolves around Trump’s purchase and operation of the famous Mar-a-Largo estate, built in the 1920s by Post Cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Trump had recently purchased the sprawling, seaside estate and turned it into a club. This being located in upscale Palm Beach, Florida, there were other prestigious clubs in the area, clubs that catered to the old order of upper crust Palm Beach society. The problem? Quietly, these other clubs had long barred Jews and African Americans — which is to say they practiced a quiet but steely racism.
The Zionists for Trump headline:

How Trump Fought Antisemitism and Racism in Palm Beach Two Decades Ago

The WSJ story that is linked focuses on the battles Trump faced as a new arrival to Palm Beach, including his new competition with the social clubs of the old order. The story, which quotes Abe Foxman, the longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, says, in part, the following:

Mr. Trump also has resorted to the courts to secure his foothold here, and many residents wince at the attention his legal battles with the town have drawn — to the town in general, and to the admission practices at some of Palm Beach’s older clubs in particular.
…The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall, when Mr. Trump’s lawyer sent members of the town council a copy of the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film that deals with upper-class racism. Mr. Trump then approached the town council about lifting the restrictions that had been placed on the club. He also asked some council members not to vote on the request because their membership in other clubs created a conflict of interest.
Last December, after the council refused to lift the restrictions, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans. The suit seeks $100 million in damages.
… Mr. Foxman seems pleased that Mr. Trump has elevated the issue of discriminatory policies at social clubs. “He put the light on Palm Beach,” Mr. Foxman says. “Not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. It has an impact.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Foxman says, the league has received calls from Jewish residents telling of how Palm Beach clubs are changing. Locals concur that in the past year, organizations such as the Bath and Tennis Club have begun to admit Jewish patrons. The Palm Beach Civic Association, which for many years was believed to engage in discriminatory behavior, this month named a Jewish resident as its chief officer.

In other words? In other words, long before he was running for president, there was Donald Trump battling racism and anti-Semitism in Palm Beach society. Using every tool at his disposal.
The film he chose to send the Palm Beach town council was no accident. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released in 1967 and starred film legends Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier. The Oscar-winning story revolved around a liberal, upper-class older couple who are stunned and discomfited when their daughter, played by Katharine Houghton, brings her new fiancé — Poitier — home to dinner and an introduction to her white parents. As liberals, her parents were staunch supporters of racial equality and had raised their daughter accordingly. Yet suddenly, in comes the very personal reality of equality when their daughter waltzes in the door after a vacation with husband-to-be Poitier, a black widower and doctor. Soul searching about just how devoted to equality they really are ensues.
Thus it was no accident that Trump selected this movie to tweak the members of both the Palm Beach town council and the larger white society it represented. Trump understood exactly what the game was and he would have none of it. In addition to sending a copy of the movie, he launched his lawyers, who filed that $100 million lawsuit “alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans.”
This is the same Donald Trump who employs hundreds of Hispanics in the Trump Organization at its various properties across America and around the globe.
Yet here comes the utterly predictable charge of racism from deportracism.com
One has to ask the obvious. Who are the real racists here? The Democratic Party, as we have noted in this space repeatedly, has a long and disgraceful history of out and out racism. Right from the beginning of its history, what became the American Left was on-record supporting slavery, segregation, lynching and, as noted by historians, used the Ku Klux Klan as the military arm of the party to enforce its racism. It was Franklin Roosevelt who issued the infamous Executive Order 9066 that rounded up Japanese-Americans — which is to say legal American citizens — and sent them to internment camps merely because of their race. When a Japanese-American fought the internment in the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, six of FDR’s liberal court appointees upheld the racist executive order. The opinion, in fact, was written by Justice Hugo Black — who held a “golden passport,” a lifetime membership, in the Ku Klux Klan.
In today’s world the Left demands racial quotas and supports illegal immigration. What all of these things have in common is that they are designed to divide Americans by race, to divide by skin color. Which is precisely what Donald Trump stood up and fought against when no one other than Palm Beach society was paying attention.
The harsh reality of the racism charge against Trump is not only that it is bogus, utterly false from start to finish. The reality is the charges of racism against Trump are coming from the one political force in the country that has a long, deep, and immutable history of racism. A racism that is no relic of a long ago past but both current and visceral, used now as it has always been used — to divide and judge by skin color for political profit.
The good news here that in Donald Trump someone — finally — is standing up to fight back. Just as he fought back all those years ago in Palm Beach when no one was looking.

The best high school basketball arena of all - Review of Wharton Field House, Moline, IL

The best high school basketball arena of all - Review of Wharton Field House, Moline, IL 

“The best high school basketball arena of all”

 

March 7, 2015 

 

Growing up in a Chicago suburb and following high school basketball since the 1950s, I had heard many stories about Wharton Field House in Moline. Several coaches told me of their experiences, taking their teams to play in the venerable and historic arena. So when I was planning research for my first book, "Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: High School Basketball in Illinois," I scheduled a trip to Moline and Wharton Field House. Located at 1800 20th Avenue in the heart of the city, it was built in 1928 adjacent to Browning Field, Moline's historic football facility. The home court for the Moline Maroons basketball team, it has a capacity of 6,000 but has held many more for Moline/Rock Island and Moline/Galesburg and Moline/Quincy basketball games. It retains its old-time atmosphere with a raised playing surface. In 2004, USA Today named it as one of the top places to watch high school basketball. But old-timers acknowledged that fact in the 1930s and 1940s. Wharton was home to the NBA's Tri-Cities Blackhawks from 1946 to 1951. Legendary Hall of Fame coach Red Auerbach was the Blackhawks' head coach in 1949-50 before accepting the same position with the Boston Celtics. Wharton also was home to the Quad City Thunder of the Continental Basketball Association from 1987 to 1993. The 87-year-old landmark no longer is a mecca for show business personalities or politicians or exhibitors. Instead, it continues to fulfill one of its original intended uses--as a showplace for high school basketball. Wharton was designed by William H. Schulzke, a prominent Moline architect. It is named after Theodore Finley Wharton, the secretary-treasurer of Deere & Co. and longtime education booster, who sold $175,000 in bonds to finance the project. Among the entertainers who performed at Wharton were Gene Autry, Bill Haley and his Comets, Johnny Cash and Harry Belafonte. Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy and Barry Goldwater drew huge crowds, too. But Moline basketball stirs most memories in this town. Former two-time All-State player and longtime coach Whitey Verstraete showed me around the field house, where Earl Lloyd, the first African-American to play in the NBA, once played. Wharton also hosted dog shows, concerts, wrestling and boxing matches, car shows, farm shows and flower and garden shows. But the one event that most old-timers remember is the 1956 supersectional game between West Rockford and Galesburg. West Rockford, en route to its second state championship in a row, won 66-64

 in two overtimes. There is so much history to the place. In 1943, Moline snapped Paris' 39-game winning streak at Wharton. Verstraete's team snapped Lyons' 44-game winning streak in 1954. Glenn "Doc" Rivers' Proviso East teams played at Wharton for four years in a row. Other great teams from Quincy, King, Du Sable, Galesburg, Proviso East, Collinsville, Bloom, Lockport and Decatur played there, too. It also is home to the Moline/Rock Island series, the oldest high school basketball rivalry in Illinois. Most of the great old gyms, like Huff Gym in Champaign, are gone or largely forgotten today. But Wharton remains as imposing as ever.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g36382-d7784682-r258265842-Wharton_Field_House-Moline_Illinois.html#

This Is A MUST Read: Take A Gander At This Amazing, But Little Known, 9-11 Story

This Is A MUST Read: Take A Gander At This Amazing, But Little Known, 9-11 Story

Days with Lorna Subritzky Friday, 11 September 2015, 10:16AM

This incredible story is from a flight attendant on Delta Flight 15:
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, we were about 5 hours out of Frankfurt, flying over the North Atlantic.
All of a sudden the curtains parted and I was told to go to the cockpit, immediately, to see the captain.
As soon as I got there I noticed that the crew had that “All Business” look on their faces. The captain handed me a printed message. It was from Delta’s main office in Atlanta and simply read, “All airways over the Continental United States are closed to commercial air traffic. Land ASAP at the nearest airport. Advise your destination.”
No one said a word about what this could mean. We knew it was a serious situation and we needed to find terra firma quickly. The captain determined that the nearest airport was 400 miles behind us in Gander, Newfoundland.
He requested approval for a route change from the Canadian traffic controller and approval was granted immediately — no questions asked. We found out later, of course, why there was no hesitation in approving our request.
While the flight crew prepared the airplane for landing, another message arrived from Atlanta telling us about some terrorist activity in the New York area. A few minutes later word came in about the hijackings.
We decided to LIE to the passengers while we were still in the air. We told them the plane had a simple instrument problem and that we needed to land at the nearest airport in Gander, Newfoundland, to have it checked out.
We promised to give more information after landing in Gander. There was much grumbling among the passengers, but that’s nothing new! Forty minutes later, we landed in Gander. Local time at Gander was 12:30 PM …. that’s 11:00 AM EST.
There were already about 20 other airplanes on the ground from all over the world that had taken this detour on their way to the US.
After we parked on the ramp, the captain made the following announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, you must be wondering if all these airplanes around us have the same instrument problem as we have. The reality is that we are here for another reason.”
Then he went on to explain the little bit we knew about the situation in the US. There were loud gasps and stares of disbelief. The captain informed passengers that Ground control in Gander told us to stay put.
The Canadian Government was in charge of our situation and no one was allowed to get off the aircraft. No one on the ground was allowed to come near any of the air crafts. Only airport police would come around periodically, look us over and go on to the next airplane.
In the next hour or so more planes landed and Gander ended up with 53 airplanes from all over the world, 27 of which were US commercial jets.
Meanwhile, bits of news started to come in over the aircraft radio and for the first time we learned that airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon in DC.
People were trying to use their cell phones, but were unable to connect due to a different cell system in Canada . Some did get through, but were only able to get to the Canadian operator who would tell them that the lines to the U.S. were either blocked or jammed.
Sometime in the evening the news filtered to us that the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed and that a fourth hijacking had resulted in a crash. By now the passengers were emotionally and physically exhausted, not to mention frightened, but everyone stayed amazingly calm.
We had only to look out the window at the 52 other stranded aircraft to realize that we were not the only ones in this predicament.
We had been told earlier that they would be allowing people off the planes one plane at a time. At 6 PM, Gander airport told us that our turn to deplane would be 11 am the next morning.
Passengers were not happy, but they simply resigned themselves to this news without much noise and started to prepare themselves to spend the night on the airplane.
Gander had promised us medical attention, if needed, water, and lavatory servicing.
And they were true to their word.
Fortunately we had no medical situations to worry about. We did have a young lady who was 33 weeks into her pregnancy. We took REALLY good care of her. The night passed without incident despite the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.
About 10:30 on the morning of the 12th a convoy of school buses showed up. We got off the plane and were taken to the terminal where we went through Immigration and Customs and then had to register with the Red Cross.
After that we (the crew) were separated from the passengers and were taken in vans to a small hotel.
We had no idea where our passengers were going. We learned from the Red Cross that the town of Gander has a population of 10,400 people and they had about 10,500 passengers to take care of from all the airplanes that were forced into Gander!
We were told to just relax at the hotel and we would be contacted when the US airports opened again, but not to expect that call for a while.
We found out the total scope of the terror back home only after getting to our hotel and turning on the TV, 24 hours after it all started.
Meanwhile, we had lots of time on our hands and found that the people of Gander were extremely friendly. They started calling us the “plane people.” We enjoyed their hospitality, explored the town of Gander and ended up having a pretty good time.
Two days later, we got that call and were taken back to the Gander airport. Back on the plane, we were reunited with the passengers and found out what they had been doing for the past two days.
What we found out was incredible…..
Gander and all the surrounding communities (within about a 75 Kilometer radius) had closed all high schools, meeting halls, lodges, and any other large gathering places. They converted all these facilities to mass lodging areas for all the stranded travelers.
Some had cots set up, some had mats with sleeping bags and pillows set up.
ALL the high school students were required to volunteer their time to take care of the “guests.”
Our 218 passengers ended up in a town called Lewisporte, about 45 kilometers from Gander where they were put up in a high school. If any women wanted to be in a women-only facility, that was arranged.
Families were kept together. All the elderly passengers were taken to private homes.
Remember that young pregnant lady? She was put up in a private home right across the street from a 24-hour Urgent Care facility. There was a dentist on call and both male and female nurses remained with the crowd for the duration.
Phone calls and e-mails to the U.S. and around the world were available to everyone once a day.
During the day, passengers were offered “Excursion” trips.
Some people went on boat cruises of the lakes and harbors. Some went for hikes in the local forests.
Local bakeries stayed open to make fresh bread for the guests.
Food was prepared by all the residents and brought to the schools. People were driven to restaurants of their choice and offered wonderful meals. Everyone was given tokens for local laundry mats to wash their clothes, since luggage was still on the aircraft.
In other words, every single need was met for those stranded travelers.
Passengers were crying while telling us these stories. Finally, when they were told that U.S. airports had reopened, they were delivered to the airport right on time and without a single passenger missing or late. The local Red Cross had all the information about the whereabouts of each and every passenger and knew which plane they needed to be on and when all the planes were leaving. They coordinated everything beautifully.
It was absolutely incredible.
When passengers came on board, it was like they had been on a cruise. Everyone knew each other by name. They were swapping stories of their stay, impressing each other with who had the better time.
Our flight back to Atlanta looked like a chartered party flight. The crew just stayed out of their way. It was mind-boggling.
Passengers had totally bonded and were calling each other by their first names, exchanging phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses.
And then a very unusual thing happened.
One of our passengers approached me and asked if he could make an announcement over the PA system. We never, ever allow that. But this time was different. I said “of course” and handed him the mike. He picked up the PA and reminded everyone about what they had just gone through in the last few days.
He reminded them of the hospitality they had received at the hands of total strangers.
He continued by saying that he would like to do something in return for the good folks of Lewisporte.
“He said he was going to set up a Trust Fund under the name of DELTA 15 (our flight number). The purpose of the trust fund is to provide college scholarships for the high school students of Lewisporte.
He asked for donations of any amount from his fellow travelers. When the paper with donations got back to us with the amounts, names, phone numbers and addresses, the total was for more than $14,000!
“The gentleman, a MD from Virginia , promised to match the donations and to start the administrative work on the scholarship. He also said that he would forward this proposal to Delta Corporate and ask them to donate as well.
As I write this account, the trust fund is at more than $1.5 million and has assisted 134 students in college education.
“I just wanted to share this story because we need good stories right now. It gives me a little bit of hope to know that some people in a faraway place were kind to some strangers who literally dropped in on them.
It reminds me how much good there is in the world.”
“In spite of all the rotten things we see going on in today’s world this story confirms that there are still a lot of good people in the world and when things get bad, they will come forward. Let’s not forget THIS fact.

Are Scientists Preparing for a FlipFlop Back to Global Cooling Predictions? 

Are Scientists Preparing for a FlipFlop Back to Global Cooling Predictions?

Eric Worrall July 2, 2016

Graph from p3768 of J. Hansen et al.: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The alleged weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be triggering a growing amount of speculation about abrupt cooling, like the plot of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”.

Crippled Atlantic currents triggered ice age climate change
The last ice age wasn’t one long big chill. Dozens of times temperatures abruptly rose or fell, causing all manner of ecological change. Mysteriously, ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show that these sudden shifts—which occurred every 1500 years or so—were out of sync in the two hemispheres: When it got cold in the north, it grew warm in the south, and vice versa. Now, scientists have implicated the culprit behind those seesaws—changes to a conveyor belt of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
These currents, which today drive the Gulf Stream, bring warm surface waters north and send cold, deeper waters south. But they weakened suddenly and drastically, nearly to the point of stopping, just before several periods of abrupt climate change, researchers report today in Science. In a matter of decades, temperatures plummeted in the north, as the currents brought less warmth in that direction. Meanwhile, the backlog of warm, southern waters allowed the Southern Hemisphere to heat up.
AMOC slowdowns have long been suspected as the cause of the climate swings during the last ice age, which lasted from 110,000 to 15,000 years ago, but never definitively shown. The new study “is the best demonstration that this indeed happened,” says Jerry McManus, a paleo-oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and a study author. “It is very convincing evidence,” adds Andreas Schmittner, a climate scientist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “We did not know that the circulation changed during these shorter intervals.”
…
Another question is whether the AMOC—currently known to be in decline—could drop off suddenly today, as depicted in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, causing temperatures to plummet across northwestern Europe. Schmittner says the past provides an eye-opener. “It’s evidence that this really did happen in the past, on short time scales.” But McManus says that studies looking deeper into the ice ages have found that the 1500-year climate oscillations tend not to be nearly as strong during interglacial periods. “It would suggest that this kind of thing isn’t so likely to happen today,” he says. On the other hand, he adds, “In most interglacials, Greenland didn’t melt … and Greenland is currently melting.”

Read more: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/crippled-atlantic-conveyor-triggered-ice-age-climate-change
The abstract of the study;

North Atlantic ocean circulation and abrupt climate change during the last glaciation
The last ice age was characterized by rapid and hemispherically asynchronous climate oscillations, whose origin remains unresolved. Variations in oceanic meridional heat transport may contribute to these repeated climate changes, which were most pronounced during marine isotope stage 3 (MIS3), the glacial interval twenty-five to sixty thousand years ago. We examined climate and ocean circulation proxies throughout this interval at high resolution in a deep North Atlantic sediment core, combining the kinematic tracer Pa/Th with the deep water-mass tracer, δ13CBF. These indicators suggest reduced Atlantic overturning circulation during every cool northern stadial, with the greatest reductions during episodic Hudson Strait iceberg discharges, while sharp northern warming followed reinvigorated overturning. These results provide direct evidence for the ocean’s persistent, central role in abrupt glacial climate change.

Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/06/29/science.aaf5529
Is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowing? Models suggest it should be – but observation based studies have not found evidence of a slowdown.
Who else is speculating about abrupt cooling? One name which might surprise you is former NASA GISS director James Hansen. From Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous p3774;

… Global temperature becomes an unreliable diagnostic of planetary condition as the ice melt rate increases. Global energy imbalance (Fig. 15b) is a more meaningful measure of planetary status as well as an estimate of the climate forcing change required to stabilize climate. Our calculated present energy imbalance of ∼ 0.8 W m−2 (Fig. 15b) is larger than the observed 0.58 ± 0.15 W m−2 during 2005–2010 (Hansen et al., 2011). The discrepancy is likely accounted for by excessive ocean heat uptake at low latitudes in our model, a problem related to the model’s slow surface response time (Fig. 4) that may be caused by excessive small-scale ocean mixing.
Large scale regional cooling occurs in the North Atlantic and Southern oceans by mid-century (Fig. 16) for 10-year doubling of freshwater injection. A 20-year doubling places similar cooling near the end of this century, 40 years ear- lier than in our prior simulations (Fig. 7), as the factor of 4 increase in current freshwater from Antarctica is a 40-year advance.
Cumulative North Atlantic freshwater forcing in sverdrup years (Sv years) is 0.2 Sv years in 2014, 2.4 Sv years in 2050, and 3.4Sv years (its maximum) prior to 2060 (Fig. S14). The critical issue is whether human-spurred ice sheet mass loss can be approximated as an exponential process during the next few decades. Such nonlinear behavior depends upon amplifying feedbacks, which, indeed, our climate simulations reveal in the Southern Ocean. …

Read more: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/acp-16-3761-2016.pdf
Naturally most of the climate scientists who make such predictions expect the cooling to occur over a relatively short timescale, before the ice melt forcing which causes the predicted cooling is overwhelmed by our continued sinful emissions of CO2. But a fallback prediction of imminent abrupt cooling does conveniently make it rather difficult to falsify anthropogenic climate theories based on temperature alone, should global temperatures suddenly drop.

Law Enforcement Sources: Gun Used in Paris Terrorist Attacks Came from Phoenix

Law Enforcement Sources: Gun Used in Paris Terrorist Attacks Came from Phoenix

Law Enforcement Sources: Gun Used in Paris Terrorist Attacks Came from Phoenix

JUNE 29, 2016

One of the guns used in the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks came from Phoenix, Arizona where the Obama administration allowed criminals to buy thousands of weapons illegally in a deadly and futile “gun-walking” operation known as “Fast and Furious.”
A Report of Investigation (ROI) filed by a case agent in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) tracked the gun used in the Paris attacks to a Phoenix gun owner who sold it illegally, “off book,” Judicial Watch’s law enforcement sources confirm. Federal agents tracing the firearm also found the Phoenix gun owner to be in possession of an unregistered fully automatic weapon, according to law enforcement officials with firsthand knowledge of the investigation.
The investigative follow up of the Paris weapon consisted of tracking a paper trail using a 4473 form, which documents a gun’s ownership history by, among other things, using serial numbers. The Phoenix gun owner that the weapon was traced back to was found to have at least two federal firearms violations—for selling one weapon illegally and possessing an unregistered automatic—but no enforcement or prosecutorial action was taken against the individual. Instead, ATF leaders went out of their way to keep the information under the radar and ensure that the gun owner’s identity was “kept quiet,” according to law enforcement sources involved with the case. “Agents were told, in the process of taking the fully auto, not to anger the seller to prevent him from going public,” a veteran law enforcement official told Judicial Watch.
It’s not clear if the agency, which is responsible for cracking down on the illegal use and trafficking of firearms, did this because the individual was involved in the Fast and Furious gun-running scheme. An ATF spokesman, Corey Ray, at the agency’s Washington D.C. headquarters told Judicial Watch that “no firearms used in the Paris attacks have been traced” by the agency. When asked about the ROI report linking the weapon used in Paris to Phoenix, Ray said “I’m not familiar with the report you’re referencing.” Judicial Watch also tried contacting the Phoenix ATF office, but multiple calls were not returned.
The ATF ran the Fast and Furious experiment and actually allowed criminals, “straw purchasers,” working for Mexican drug cartels to buy weapons at federally licensed firearms dealers in Phoenix and allowed the guns to be “walked”—possessed without any knowledge of their whereabouts. The government lost track of most of the weapons and many have been used to murder hundreds of innocent people as well as a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, in Arizona. A mainstream newspaper reported that a Muslim terrorist who planned to murder attendees of a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas last year bought a 9-millimeter pistol at a Phoenix gun shop that participated in the ATF’s Fast and Furious program despite drug and assault charges that should have raised red flags. Judicial Watch has thoroughly investigated Fast and Furious and has sued the Obama administration for information about the once-secret operation.