My Parallel Universe

by Jack Cashill

The time and place of the universe shift surprised me. I was at the Country Club Plaza speaking to a businessmen's breakfast group on the subject of entrepreneurship.

This was a subject I knew well. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the same, and as executive editor of Ingram's, I continue to follow its evolution. If anything, my at least seeming respectability made the impending universe shift a little more disturbing for my audience.

I was waxing eloquent during the Q & A when someone asked me about an article I had just written on former terrorism czar Richard Clarke for WorldNetDaily, an influential web-based news site. As I had reported, Clarke boasts in his book, Against All Enemies, how he had pulled off the single most dazzling sleight of hand in American history, namely the transformation of a terrorist attack against TWA Flight 800 in July 1996 into a mechanical failure.

Of course, "sleight of hand" is my choice of words, not his.

I told the breakfast group that Clarke's TWA Flight 800 legerdemain is just one part of a larger, scarier story, one that I would not believe were I not so intimately involved. For simplicity sake I call it the "MegaFix," the Clinton administration's sacrifice of America's national security for the sake of reelection. The story involves the Oklahoma City bombing, TWA Flight 800, the Centennial Park bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the plane crash that killed former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. I have written books on two of the four elements of the story and have also been working with Oklahoma TV reporter Jayna Davis, author of the best-selling The Third Terrorist, on a third, Oklahoma City.

One good question that was raised, one that I have asked myself on occasion, is this: how could an obscure Midwest magazine editor become the literary custodian of a story of such staggering dimension? The obvious answer, I told the group, is the Internet. Sitting in my Westport office today, I have more real reportorial power than the New York Times staff did collectively ten years ago. I have access not just to "Internet stuff," some of which is actually useful, but to court records, government documents, journal articles, correspondences, TV and radio transcripts, and a whole rash of other information that I can cross check for salient connections in nanoseconds.

As a case in point, a year before anyone else did, I discovered the conflicts of interest that plagued the 9-11 Commission's Jamie Gorelick. "Her appointment to this select ten-person commission has raised no eyebrows," wrote I on April 12, 2003, "It should have." A year and a day later the House Judiciary Chairman finally raised those eyebrows when he asked Gorelick to step down.

Just as importantly, I receive real time information from a network of savvy people. Last year, after I co-authored a book on the subject of TWA Flight 800, First Strike,that network came to include literally hundreds of airline pilots, aviation engineers, mechanics, missile experts, and retired military officers through the rank of admiral.

One correspondent faxed me the relevant six pages from the Clarke book. My jaw dropped when I read it. Clarke boasts of how upon a casual visit to the TWA 800 investigation site, he chanced upon the "exploding fuel tank" theory even before the NTSB and then steered the investigation in that direction. He hints too at how he made the real evidence go away--the hundreds of eyewitness accounts, the explosive residue on the plane, even the FAA radar data that, according to an NTSB investigator, "showed this track that suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane."

Clarke can make these boasts because he is confident that my universe cannot bleed into his. 60 Minutes, Larry King, Good Morning America, Time Magazine, and a thousand other mainstream media outlets simply have no interest in any evidence from this universe that is not literally dripping in DNA--and even then a Matt Drudge has to rub their noses in it.

This brings us to the second phenomenon that made my universe possible, Gingrichophobia. In 1994, the Democrats lost fifty-two seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and control of both. With the newly elected Speaker of the House grinning over his shoulder like a Cheshire cat, a desperate president decided he would do whatever he had to do to keep the presidency, and a frightened media decided they would do whatever they had to do not to notice.

There was a lot to ignore in the next two years. The New York Times led the way by not interviewing any of the 270 FBI eyewitnesses who had seen flaming projectiles zigzagging upwards TWA Flight 800 in the seconds before it exploded. The networks followed the paper of record's lead. The Times organization then bought Jayna Davis's Oklahoma City TV station and shut down her investigation into the identity of John Doe #2. Now, no one was talking to the twenty plus eyewitnesses who had spotted Middle Eastern men in the company of Timothy McVeigh. No one challenged the FBI when its agents hounded the transparently innocent security guard Richard Jewell for months after the Olympic bombing. No one from the major media even bothered to inquire into the apparent bullet hole in Ron Brown's head, the allegedly lost head x-rays, the refused autopsy or the fatal plane crash that the Air Force called "inexplicable."

More to the point, the major media chose to ignore the election cycle that prompted this skullduggery in the first place, one that Senator Fred Thompson would rightly call "the most corrupt political campaign in modern history." To accommodate the media's willful ignorance, the crafty Dick Morris placed $80 million worth of illegally funded, unethically created, utterly dishonest TV ads in every major market except New York City and Washington DC.

Not noticing the ads, the media would not have to inquire about the nature of the funding, which Morris had left to the President. "Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions," said the Thompson Committee, "much of it from foreign sources."

As I document in my new book, Ron Brown's Body, the deals made to secure that money put Brown's life at risk and will jeopardize American security for decades to come. Again,

I had the field to myself. Incredibly, even after the truth about this election surfaced, no one in the other universe bothered to write a book about it.

I explained all of this to my skeptical business audience. I cannot say that I convinced them all, especially those who draw their data exclusively from the mainstream universe. But I can say that once the conversation shifted to my universe, it never shifted back.

My audience at the Post office, a day later, has had a long history with parallel universes and so cut right to the chase. The clerk, an African American, asked if I had written the packaged books I was mailing, and, if so, what was the subject. When I answered "Ron Brown," he looked up and asked soberly, "So, did they kill him?" For the next ten minutes, the normal business of the Post Office stopped as I add-ressed his question.

If the reader is interested in the answer, I would invite him or her to the book's official Kansas City launch, at 7 PM on the evening of May 26, at the Unity Temple on the Plaza.