[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 108 (Monday, July 22, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H8075-H8076]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      ON THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN KEVORKIAN IN CRASH OF TWA FLIGHT 800

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I had the last special order on Thursday, or 
maybe it was the next to the last. I had just been told that I had a 
constituent from my district that had died on TWA flight 800. I stood 
at this very microphone at the Speaker's desk and said that sometime 
over the weekend I would find out if it was a baby, a young child with 
his mom and dad, or traveling alone, maybe; a teenager; whether it 
might be a stewardess, one of the crew. I said the tragic news might be 
someone that lived in Anaheim or Santa Ana, CA, one of the small parts 
of about 10 other cities that I have, like Orange or Tuscan or 
Westminster, or I said it could be from my own town of Garden Grove.
  Mr. Speaker, about 24 hours after I spoke, I found out that my 
constituent who died in that terrible, horrific accident was a male. He 
was from my hometown of Garden Grove, and he was the pilot, Captain 
Kevorkian. I remember being on a TWA flight and this captain coming 
back during the short break at altitude, coming back to say hello to 
me, tell me that he was a neighbor just a few blocks away, and I teased 
him about his name, because of the infamous Dr. Kevorkian.
  I could not have been more shocked. There are towns like 
Montoursville, PA, that have been just shattered by this, but I will 
now proceed to find out if Captain Kevorkian was a military pilot or if 
he learned to fly as a young man, hanging around what we used to call 
the gas pit flyers. They would beg rides until they got enough money up 
to take some pilot training lessons, and then find somebody that would 
sponsor them. More and more of our pilots, as we downsize our military, 
are coming from such programs.
  But this was a sharp pilot that would have gotten on the radio 
immediately if a small device had caught fire on the aircraft, as 
happened with ValuJet down in Florida, that crashed into the 
Everglades. This was just such a catastrophic accident that the odds 
are narrowing almost to zero that a plane of the size of a 747 and with 
its excellent flight safety record could possibly have had some 
juxtaposition of events to cause this massive explosion.
  Just as I left the news to come out here, they have located what they 
think is the fuselage, four more bodies. They still have not reached 
the halfway point of 115 remains out of 230. I think what we are going 
to have to do to play our constitutional role is have Mr. Clinton come 
up here, close these doors, as we did once on Nicaragua, and once on a 
story that a nation had gotten nuclear weapons, and we are still not 
sure about the story, and that we have to have a closed session, with 
all the guards guarding all the exits, and have the Senators come over 
here and have the Commander-in-Chief take the well, and with 534, now 
with Bill Emerson's tragic passing, with 534 Members, decide a course 
of action, a direct course of action; that if our FBI and our 
international investigators narrow it down to a few mass serial 
assassins, as we did with the two people that Qadhafi is still hiding 
in Libya, that this Congress will talk it down with Mr. Clinton and 
give him the go-ahead that we will support him for the type of direct 
action that Ronald Reagan took against Libya shortly after the LaBelle 
disco bombing on April 5, 1986.
  We have to pull together as a country and we cannot let these people 
flounder the way the families from Pan American 103 have suffered over 
these years

[[Page H8076]]

since that ghastly Christmas week. And we cannot do to these people 
what we did to my friend, David Jacobson, one of the hostages in the 
Iranian Embassy, excuse me, in the Lebanon hostage crisis, or what we 
did to the 52 people that it finally came down to in Iran, held in our 
embassy. We cannot try to cut deals behind the scenes to give them 
American taxpayer money out of our Treasury to make them shut up so 
they will not pursue legal redress in the international courts of this 
dangerous Earth.
  I think it is time for all of us to come together and take direct 
action against this type of ghastly terrorist atrocity.

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