Jean-Paul Troadec, the former chief of the British European Airways national investigation unit, said the obvious about the destruction of EgyptAir flight MS804.

“A technical problem, a fire, or a failed motor do not cause an instant accident, and the team has time to react,” Troadec told Europe 1 radio station on Wednesday.  “The team said nothing, they did not react, so it was very probably a brutal event, and we can certainly think about an attack.”

TWA Flight 800 exploded twenty years ago this July off the south coast of Long Island just as brutally and dramatically as did MS804.  As I document in my forthcoming book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-up, The Conspiracy, the last words out of TWA 800’s cockpit were “power set,” a casual acknowledgement of an air traffic control order to continue ascending, and then nothing.

The difference between the two investigations is that the Egyptian authorities appear to have more freedom to pursue the truth than did ours.  Despite the 258 FBI eyewitnesses to a missile strike on TWA 800 and the air traffic control data confirming the same, the FBI and CIA assured us that for the first (and last) time in the history of Jet A fuel, a commercial airline self-destructed in midflight.  The media, of course, signed on.

With the TWA 800 investigation, the nation took a giant leap toward banana republic status.  The motive behind the cover-up, the most successful in American peacetime history, was no more complex than the motive behind the Benghazi cover-up: the need to re-elect a president.