In that George Zimmerman looks like the kind of person who might commit a hate crime — or at least has the name of such a person – the investigation into his shooting of Trayvon Martin nearly two years ago remains “ongoing.” So said Attorney General Eric Holder on September 30.

In that Jeremiah Hill does not look like the kind of person who might commit a hate crime — at least by Justice Department standards — prosecutors have all but cleared him of the same in the stabbing death of Army Spc. Tevin Geike on October 5. A review of the known facts in these two cases would make you think Zimmerman and Hill live in two different countries.

Geike was walking down Pacific Highway in Lakewood, Washington, with two Army buddies, Matthew Barnes and Brian Johnson. They were on their way to a party celebrating Geike’s impending discharge from the military. All three of the men were white.

A car cruised by. The five men inside were black. “They were looking for trouble,” an emotionally wrought Barnes told a Seattle KIRO-TV reporter the day after the stabbing. “They were looking for someone to attack.” Barnes believed that “maybe race had something to do with it” because of what the men yelled at him and his pals. “There is a derogatory term that they use for white people,” said Barnes. “It’s cracker and what not. I heard that phrase repeated numerous times.”

“So this is how we treat combat veterans now?” Barnes yelled at the men. The car circled back. The five men jumped out, and, according to the reporter, “One of the five men was most aggressive and stabbed Geike multiple times.” The five men then hopped back in the car and sped away. Initial reporting out of Washington, like KIRO’s, led with the “hate crime” angle. That did not last.

Allegedly, it was only when his buddies saw Hill covered in blood that they learned what had happened. Two of them helped Hill dispose of the knife, and they too were arrested. The other two are cooperating with the police.

When it became clear that the attackers were fellow servicemen at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Tacoma, prosecutors, with an able assist from the media, began to scrub hate from the narrative. “This was a senseless and sad murder where a soldier killed a fellow soldier for no reason,” said Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist just three days after the stabbing.

Lindquist appears to have ruled out a hate crime because the two cooperating black servicemen “said race was not a motivating factor in the assault.” Did he expect them to say otherwise?

According to Lindquist, someone from the vehicle did make  ”an unspecified racial slur towards the men on foot,” but witnesses “could not recall what was actually said.” If that did not provide absolution enough, “The victim’s friends said that the initial slur was the only race-related language used.” But Barnes, who had no reason to lie, had a very specific memory of what was said and told KIRO-TV that these slurs were “repeated numerous times.”

Again according to Lindquist, four of the men got out of the car. “Once it was established that all parties were active duty soldiers,” they disengaged and returned to the car except for Hill who attacked Geike. In his October 6 interview, however, Barnes appeared to have no idea that the killer was a fellow soldier. Nor did the reporter.

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This observation has nothing to do with the February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, nothing to do with race, nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with the way people, especially women and young people, increasingly get their information.

Jury selection, a tedious affair even in a celebrated trial, served as an ad hoc focus group on American media habits. Defense attorney Don West summed up the thrust of it with a totally unexpected knock-knock joke at the outset of the defense’s opening statement.

“Knock-knock,” said West. “Who’s there?” he continued. “George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? All right, good, you’re on the jury.” What impressed observers on either side of the divide was just how many people-many of them well educated and employed-could have known so little about the most divisive criminal case in the nation and the most disruptive in the history of Seminole County, Florida.

Several potential jurors admitted to having no real source of news other than what they picked up on Facebook or at the water cooler.  Juror B29, a female who made the jury, may have inspired the knock-knock joke. “I don’t like watching the news, period,” she told West. “I don’t read any newspapers, don’t watch the news.” She had “no idea” about the case. Ironically, her indifference to the news may have assured Zimmerman his acquittal.

On the other hand, the cluelessness of several eyewitnesses helped the State of Florida build its case against Zimmerman. Their testimony provided direct proof, if any were needed, of the corrupting influence of months and months of disinformation from the major media.

The foreign-born Jeannee Manalo lived very near the site of the encounter. In her first interview with law enforcement in March 2012, she admitted to not seeing much, just “two shadow [sic] . . . .  One was on top of the other. I don’t know which one.” Nor at the time could she distinguish which of the two was bigger. By the time of the trial, however, Manalo had concluded that the one on top had to be Zimmerman, as “the top was bigger than the bottom.”

The photos she saw repeatedly on the news convinced her Martin was a child. Defense attorney Mark O’Mara produced some of the photos she might have seen: the iconic photo of a youthful Martin in his red Hollister shirt, two photos of a preteen football player, and the photo of Martin in his hoodie. Manalo innocently confirmed these images as the source of her perception. In reality, of course, Martin was at least four inches taller than Zimmerman and, at 158 pounds, all but fully developed.

Jayne Surdyka, a former school teacher, lived alone in a townhome just north of the site of the fatal confrontation. She told the court that she initially heard a confrontation between two males, one with a dominant, aggressive voice and the other with a softer, meeker tone, “It was someone being very aggressive and angry at someone.” From the imagery Surdyka gleaned in the media, she presumed that Zimmerman was the aggressor. “I truly believe the second yell for help was a yelp,” said Surdyka. “It was excruciating. I really felt it was a boy’s voice.” Before the trial, she had never seen a photo of a bloody Zimmerman, a testament in itself to the breadth of media bias and the myopia of even college-educated professionals.

The State called still another female eyewitness to testify, in this case through her interpreter. A blonde Columbian, Selma Mora Lamilla saw little and had little to say. Curiously, the State failed to call her outspoken, English-speaking roommate, Mary Cutcher.  In the six-week-long hysteria between Martin’s shooting and Zimmerman’s arrest, Cutcher, a massage therapist, was easily the most visible of the eyewitnesses. Her message was one that the media wanted to hear: the police were ignoring eyewitnesses like herself and her roommate whose testimony challenged Zimmerman’s innocence.

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For the record, “woods” is short for peckerwoods, a derogatory term for white people. If Edwards, who is black, knocked out five woods as claimed, he would hardly be unique. As Colin Flaherty chillingly documents in his frequently updated book, White Girl Bleed A Lot, the “knock-out game” has become something of a recreational outlet for bored black youths.

This “game” is just one form of black-on-nonblack assaults. Although hard to quantify, they seem to have intensified after the media put a racial spin on the Martin shooting eighteen months ago.  Occasionally, the attackers have made the link explicit, claiming they were “doing it for Trayvon,” revenge being a more honorable motive than boredom.

Two weeks after the Martin story surfaced, President Obama had the chance to defuse tensions.  ”Obviously this is a tragedy,” said Obama solemnly in response to a planted question.  After some empty bromides about everyone pulling together and the like, the president cut to the chase: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon–If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

By this time, the White House had access to all the information the Sanford Police Department did.  The courageous step for Obama would have been to defend the Sanford Police Department and to demand an end to the media lynching of George Zimmerman.  As an African American, he had more latitude to do this than a white politician would have.  Instead, he chose to identify fully with the black “victim.”

If Obama’s son would have looked like Trayvon, he would have also looked like James Edwards and Chancey Luna, both charged with first-degree murder in Lane’s death.  Although south central Oklahoma would seem to be a long way from south central LA, the national media have created a dysfunctional culture accessible to all disaffected youths everywhere, even the occasional white kid like getaway driver Michael Jones.

These young thugs apparently pulled their language, their vices, their aspirations, and their prejudices– “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM”-from what was broadcast their way.  That same media told them what to think about the “Zimmerman court,” and Obama refused to tell them otherwise.

After an evening session on day eleven of the Zimmerman trial, the media had the opportunity to share with Edwards and Luna the real character of Trayvon Martin.  Richard Connor, an attorney as well as a certified computer forensic expert, had explained to the Court the content of what Martin had communicated on his cell phone.

Connor laid it all out for those who cared to listen. In the week before he died, Martin had had at least four conversations about purchasing a .22 caliber revolver.  In the cache recovered by Connor was a photo of a hand gripping a pistol. Whoever took the photo used Martin’s cell phone.  It appears to have been a self-portrait.

Although Martin’s enthusiasm for guns spoke to the unfortunate turn his life had taken, the defense team had more interest in the data related to MMA-style fighting.  In a semi-comical turn, defense attorney Don West had Connor read word-for-word from Martin’s November 2011 conversation with a girl named “Lavondria.”  After Martin told Lavondria he was “tired and sore” from a fight, she asked him why he continued fighting. “Bae” is shorthand for “babe.”  Here is what Connor related:

MARTIN: Cause man dat nigga snitched on me

LAVONDRIA:  Bae y you always fightinqq man, you got suspended?

MARTIN: Naw we thumped afta skool in a duckd off spot

LAVONDRIA: Ohh, Well Damee

MARTIN: I lost da 1st round ( but won da 2nd nd 3^rd . . . .

LAVONDRIA: Ohhh So It Wass 3 Rounds? Damn well at least yu wonn lol but yuu needa stop fighting bae Forreal

MARTIN: Nay im not done with fool….. he gone hav 2 see me again

LAVONDRIA: Nooo… Stop, yuu waint gonn bee satisified till yuh suspended again, huh?

MARTIN: Naw but he aint breed nuff 4 me, only his nose

As West had Connor establish, over several objections, Martin had engaged in an MMA-style fight with a distinct advantage going to the fighter who could establish the dominant position.  This became evident in a second conversation with someone named “Michael ‘Suave’ French.”

A day later, Martin would tell French that his opponent “got mo hits cause in da 1^st round he had me on da ground nd I couldn’t do ntn.” This all mattered, of course, because after Martin knocked Zimmerman down with a sucker punch, breaking his nose, he assumed the MMA-style “ground and pound position” and flailed away.  The best eyewitness described what he saw in exactly those terms.

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One reason few people ever heard of Scarpa is that until his arrest in September 1992, he worked as a “Top Echelon Confidential Informant” under the protection of the FBI for the most of the thirty years prior. During that time, Scarpa murdered at least fifty people. Understandably, this is not a story not that the FBI wants told, but author Peter Lance has told it anyhow in his stunningly comprehensive new book, Deal With The Devil.

I have taken a particular interest in this story over the years because of the light it shines, improbably enough, on the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, a subject about which I co-authored the 2003 book First Strike. More on this angle later.

The FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, because he provided intelligence on New York’s five notorious La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families. Some of the intelligence was accurate. All of it was self-serving. As needed, Scarpa provided other services as well. In 1964, the FBI, under enormous pressure to solve the “MissBurn” case, sent Scarpa to the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. His job was to interrogate one of the locals who knew what happened to three civil rights workers who had gone missing. The fellow would not talk to the FBI. Armed with a straight razor, Scarpa proved much more persuasive. FBI agents soon found the bodies, as the man told Scarpa they would, buried under an earthen dam. Although this part of the saga did not make the movie, Mississippi Burning, Lance makes a compelling case for its legitimacy. Nor was this the only time the FBI sent Scarpa to Mississippi.

In return for his services, the FBI kept Scarpa out of prison. At the heart of Lance’s book is the contention that the FBI, in the person of agent Lin DeVecchio, did much more, none of it justifiable. Lance argues that DeVecchio lost his moral balance and, at the very least, provided Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed Scarpa to target his enemies.

What has intrigued me most is the activity of New York City’s FBI office in the summer of 1996, the year TWA 800 was destroyed. In April of that year, the office’s assistant director, Jim Kallstrom, sent a memo to the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, warning that the continued internal FBI investigation of DeVecchio would “have a serious negative impact on the government’s prosecution of various LCN figures.”

In July 1996, the case was still dragging on when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation. For the first five weeks Kallstrom did a credible job before buckling under White House pressure on or about August 22. I have always wondered what combination of carrots and sticks the White House used to misdirect the investigation away from the obvious missile strike to a fully contrived mechanical failure.

Without making the connection directly, Lance suggests a possible carrot. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was “not warranted.” By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all talk of a bomb or missile and pushed through the administration’s “mechanical failure” narrative. Kallstrom would remain DeVecchio’s most prominent champion even during his criminal trial on the same charges.

As an FBI informant, Junior picked up where Scarpa senior left off. Awaiting trial in 1996 in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on racketeering charges, Junior turned down a 17-year plea offer in the hope that he could finesse information out of a few of his fellow prisoners and trade it for a reduced sentence.

Incredibly, those prisoners included Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah Shah, all awaiting trial on what is known as the Bojinka plot, and Eyad Ismail, who was awaiting trial for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center along with Yousef. In January 1995, Yousef’s Manila apartment had caught fire just weeks before he and his co-conspirators were to unleash Bojinka, the plot to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific. He was apprehended a month later.

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“Which Owner would be more inclined to yell for help?” read the banner on the top of the slide.  The slide was divided in two.  On the left was a photo of George Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, and on the right was a can of Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.  Beneath the photo of the gun was the question, “Who followed?”  Under the can was the question, “Who ran?”

So absurd was de la Rionda’s presentation, and the whole case for that matter, that the can was turned sideways so the label could not be read.  Throughout the trial, prosecutors have called the drink “iced tea” lest the word “watermelon” be said in court.  ”F***ing” was okay.  De la Rionda said it more times than the average rapper, but “watermelon,” apparently because of its racial connotations, was not.

Hiding the word “watermelon” was the least of de la Rionda’s dishonesties.  This one slide had several built in.  As to who ran, Martin had four minutes to run the 100 or so yards to the house he was visiting.  When he attacked Zimmerman, he was still 70 or so yards from that townhouse.  Do the math.

Then, too, from the day the State took over the case, prosecutors knew that Zimmerman was the one screaming for help.  All evidence supported that save for the dubious identification by Martin’s mother.  If the State’s jobs were to sow the seeds of reasonable doubt, one could forgive them this deception, but that’s not the State’s job.  That’s the defense’s.

The State’s job is to make the case for the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  Fifty years ago, in Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court established that a prosecutor’s responsibility was “to seek justice fairly, not merely win convictions by any means.”  In the case at hand, this meant that the State of Florida had the responsibility to share promptly all exculpatory evidence with the defense.  It did not.

One substantial block of evidence that it kept to itself until a whistleblower alerted the defense was the content of Martin’s cell phone.  On Tuesday night of this week, phone expert Richard Connor made a detailed presentation.  Although the jury was not present, the respective attorneys were, as were the media.

For dubious and probably reversible reasons, Judge Debra Nelson disallowed Connor’s testimony, but prosecutors have known for many months about the downward spiral of Martin’s life.  In the course of his close, de la Rionda called Martin an “innocent young boy” and made several other allusions to that effect.  He was intentionally deceiving the jury.  Martin was neither little nor innocent.

Consider the following exchange from November 2011, three months before the shooting.  After Martin told a female friend he was “tired and sore” from a fight, she asked him why he fought.  ”Bae” is shorthand for “babe.”

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The affidavit was loaded.  Martin was walking back to the townhouse “where he was living” when Zimmerman “profiled” him.  Zimmerman “assumed Martin was a criminal.”  He called the police.  The affidavit cited Martin’s phone “friend” to attest, “Martin was scared because he was being followed by an unknown male and didn’t know why.”  Again, according to the affidavit (and this was critical): “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.”  Martin’s mother then “identified the voice crying for help as Trayvon Martin’s.”  Zimmerman admitted shooting Martin, and that apparently was good enough for the prosecutors.

For the next year, the major media accepted the affidavit as gospel. In so doing, they prepared their audiences to believe that George Zimmerman would be convicted for the killing of Martin.  He won’t be.  Every interesting revelation in the trial so far has supported his innocence.

Here are ten such revelations:

10. Witness #8, the “phone friend,” the real-life Rachel Jeantel, the plus-size American-born daughter of Haitian and Dominican parents, provided a few aha! moments of her own.  Right away, the defense established for the jury the many lies that Jeantel and/or her handlers had been telling.  No, Jeantel was not sixteen and a minor, as first insisted.  She was eighteen at the time of the shooting.  And no, she had not been hospitalized on hearing of Martin’s death.  That too was pure fabrication.

9. In the six-week-long hysteria between Martin’s shooting and Zimmerman’s arrest, Mary Cutcher, a thirtyish blonde, was the media’s favorite eyewitness.  To spread the message that the Sanford PD were ignoring witnesses unfavorable to Zimmerman, Cutcher appeared on local TV, on CNN’s Anderson Cooper Show, on Dateline NBC, and at rallies with the Martin family.  The State did not call on Cutcher to testify.  Prosecutors had very good reasons not to.

8. During his first interview with the Sanford PD, Zimmerman observed that officer Doris Singleton was wearing a cross.  He asked if she was Catholic.  She asked why that might matter, and he responded, “In the Catholic religion, it’s always wrong to kill someone.”  She responded, “If what you’re telling me is true, I don’t think that what God meant was that you couldn’t save your own life.”  If the prosecution had hoped that Singleton would paint Zimmerman as a person of “depraved” mind who killed Martin out of ill will, spite, and/or hatred, she did not at all oblige them.  In fact, she endorsed his behavior.

7.  The defense caught Jeantel changing her testimony one more time.  In her first phone interview, Jeantel recounted that when Martin asked Zimmerman, “Why are you following me?,” Zimmerman responded non-threateningly, “What are you talking about?”  At the trial, Jeantel tailored her response to fit the State’s case, alleging that Zimmerman answered that same question with the confrontational response, “What are you doing around here?”

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On this past Saturday morning, I did a live remote from Kansas City for CNN’s “New Day” program on the subject of TWA Flight 800, hosted by Alison Kosik. What follows is the transcript as it appears on CNN.com. What does not appear I will explain later.

Inherent in this transcript is the Achilles heel of what is arguably the most successful bit of government propaganda in American peacetime history. Unwittingly, what the CNN editors left in is more damning than what they took out.

KOSIK: TWA Flight 800 crashed in 1996 killing 230 people. An exhaustive investigation called it an accident. We’re going to tell you why some of the crash investigators are now saying that conclusion may have been wrong.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KOSIK: It’s been 17 years since TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing all 230 people on board. What followed was an exhaustive four-year search for answers and a 50,000-page report that it found a spark from faulty wiring, that that is what caused a fuel tank to explode on board. But a new documentary is challenging that theory arguing it was instead an external blast. Earlier I spoke with Jim Polk, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and CNN investigative reporter and Jack Cashill, he’s the author of “First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the attack on America. ??(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JIM POLK, CNN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Well, to begin with, the dispute over whether a missile brought down the plane and not an internal explosion begins with the witnesses on the ground. A number of them said they saw a streak in the sky that they thought was a missile. But there were two airline pilots in the area who had a front row seat on this tragedy that happened right in front of them. Let’s look and listen to what they said.

DAVID MCLEAN, PILOT: It blew up in the air and then we saw two fireballs go down to the water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was the voice of David McLean, piloting a 737 over Long Island. A bright light caught his eye.

MCLEAN: All of a sudden, boom. Almost instantly, a fraction of a second later, two streams of flames came out the bottom of it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Another pilot, Captain Paul Wheeler, was in the cockpit of a Virgin Atlantic 747.

CAPT. PAUL WHEELER, PILOT: I could see the cigar tube of the fuselage and the windows and bits falling off, fire everywhere, and it falling into the sea.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Both had flown in the military, both know what a missile looks like. Neither saw a missile that night.

WHEELER: I was aware from both the height off the ground and the fact there were no vapor trails in the sky that it was unlikely to have been a missile that brought the aircraft down.

MCLEAN: I thought there was a bomb on board. That was my initial – I did not see any missile at all.

POLK: Now, Alison, there was a helicopter pilot who says he did see a missile before the explosion, but he was at lower attitude than those two airline pilots.

KOSIK: Ok. So let me ask Jack. Jack, what do you think happened if it wasn’t an internal explosion like those two pilots saw?

JACK CASHILL, AUTHOR: Well, unlike what Jim says, there were 270 eyewitnesses to a missile strike, 96 of them, this is FBI eyewitnesses, saw it from the horizon ascend all the way up to the plane. They all described it the same way, that it was a red tip, a plume trail after it, gray, and then it gets near the plane and it arcs over, zigzags, hits the plane, blows up. One of those numbers, number 73, described in detail the breakup sequence of the airplane and she’s an aviation professional, before the FBI even knew what it was.

Here is the challenge I have for Jim. The FBI recruited the CIA to recreate this animation to show what the witnesses purportedly saw – basically discredit the eyewitnesses. What they said is after the nose of the plane fell off, that it turned into a missile and it ascended upright for about 3,500 feet confusing the eyewitnesses on the ground, several of whom were military people, pilots, commercial fishermen, et cetera – sophisticated people – into thinking they saw a missile.

Now, when CNN did its animation ten years later – ten years after the crash, they eliminated that zoom climb altogether. So I ask Jim this, if those – why did you eliminate the zoom climb if the CIA – and what was the CIA doing involved in this in the first place – if the CIA used that to expressly discredit the eyewitnesses?

POLK: Very quickly, I would agree with you the CIA animation is controversial. We did not make it climb in our animation because, frankly, the transponder disappeared on the radar at the time of the explosion, so there’s no altitude readout on the rest of the flight and so there’s no supporting evidence for the CIA’s animation. ??(END VIDEO CLIP)

Missing minute

KOSIK: And you can see more about the investigation into this crash on an Anderson Cooper Special Report: “TWA FLIGHT 800″ Sunday night at 11:00 p.m.

Before I comment on what’s missing, let me add a little clarity to what is here. In 1997, at the request of the FBI, the CIA prepared its zoom-climb animation in an attempt to convince the media and the American people that the eyewitnesses did not see a missile or missiles but rather a noseless 747 rocketing into space. This became the official government position.

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I got involved in one of the two great media scandals of our time – the Obama ascendancy being the other – fully by happenstance.

In the year 2000, investigative reporter James Sanders came to Kansas City to talk about his research into the fate of TWA flight 800, the plane that crashed into the waters off Long Island on July 17, 1996, sixteen years ago today.

Sanders chose Kansas City because the town had historically been the headquarters for TWA. As a result, many pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants still lived there. The audience was filled with them. Almost to a person, they believed what he was saying – the plane had been shot out of the sky.

Afterwards, I went out to dinner with James and his wife, Elizabeth, and a dozen other people. I sat next to Elizabeth, a sweet, unassuming former TWA flight attendant and trainer of Philippine descent. She told me in painful detail how at one of the many memorials she attended after the crash – 53 TWA employees were among the 230 killed – she ran into an old friend, Captain Terrell Stacey.

Stacey had flown the 747 that would become TWA Flight 800 from Paris to New York the night before it was destroyed. In fact, he was in charge of all TWA 747 pilot activity within the airline. So it was logical that he would be among the first TWA employees assigned to the crash investigation.

Elizabeth thought of Stacey as “a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy” and respected him for it. After a phone introduction arranged by Elizabeth, James Sanders and Terrell Stacey agreed to meet. “What he told me over those first hours,” Sanders would later tell me, “was one thing: ‘I know there’s a cover-up in progress.’”

As a result of that one introduction, the FBI arrested Elizabeth and oversaw her conviction on federal conspiracy charges. James and Stacey had been arrested, too. The crime? Stacey had sent Sanders a tiny piece of foam rubber to have tested. The Sanderses were still on probation when I met them. When I heard this story from Elizabeth, I thought maybe there was something there worth pursuing.

As a video producer, I talked to the Sanders about creating a documentary, but, as I explained, I had no interest unless they could prove to me beyond a doubt that the plane was shot down. They could, and they did. The result was a documentary called Silenced, which has been inexplicably removed from YouTube. It is still available, however, through my website. To explain how I know the plane was shot down would take a book, which James Sanders and I proceeded to write. The result,First Strike, is available through Amazon, including on the Kindle.

In the way of summary, on the night of July 17, 1996, and into the early morning hours of the 18th, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger huddled fretfully in the family quarters of the White House.

The election they thought was in the bag no longer was.

The air-traffic controllers had already reported in. The radar data told a story of an unknown object striking the plane seconds before it exploded. And now, eyewitness reports were flooding in.

The explosion had taken place right at sunset, just 10 miles off the coast, on a perfect night, with thousands of people looking out over the sea from Long Island’s popular south shore. FBI witness No. 73, an aviation buff, watched a “red streak” with a “light gray smoke trail” move up toward the airliner, and then go “past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing.” She even reported the actual breakup sequence before the authorities figured it out on their own.

High-school principal Joseph Delgado told the FBI that he had seen an object like “a firework” ascend “fairly quick,” then “slow” and “wiggle,” then “speed up” and get “lost.” Then he saw a second object that “glimmered” in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a “firebox.” He drew a precise image of the same.

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On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.

Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review’s selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I’d like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits … have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen … the other half are selected … "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?

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2011 Jack Cashill