While browsing through Raw Story today, I happened upon a strange and disturbing news item. The title?
Affidavit: McVeigh had high-level help.
Crossposted at On Feingold and Swiss Cheese. More below…
Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols says a high-ranking FBI official “apparently” was directing Timothy McVeigh in the plot to blow up a government building and might have changed the original target of the attack, according to a new affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Utah.
Nichols charges, in the affadavit, that the federal government is engaging in a cover-up in order to escape culpability for its role in the Oklahoma City bombing. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:
The affidavit was filed in a lawsuit brought by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who believes his brother’s death in a federal prison was linked to the Oklahoma City bombing. The suit, which seeks documents from the FBI under the federal Freedom of Information Act, alleges that authorities mistook Kenneth Trentadue for a bombing conspirator and that guards killed him in an interrogation that got out of hand.
But I digress. I know what you’re probably thinking: more tin-foil nuttery, you might say. Disgusting, looney allegations from the disgusting, looney mind of an extreme right wing fanatic. Well color me crazy, but I think it’s worth taking another look at this case. Here’s why:
On December 26th, 2006, CBS News broke an AP story about a Congressional investigation’s report. The report concluded as follows:
…the FBI didn’t fully investigate whether other suspects may have helped Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols with the deadly 1995 attack, allowing questions to linger a decade later…The report also sharply criticizes the FBI for failing to be curious enough to pursue credible information that foreign or U.S. citizens may have had contact with Nichols or McVeigh and could have assisted their plot.
What is doubly outrageous to me, and should be to many Americans (including the families of the 168 victims), is the following statement the subcommittee chairman gave regarding the investigation:
“We did our best with limited resources, and I think we moved the understanding of this issue forward a couple of notches even though important questions remain unanswered,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the subcommittee chairman, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Limited resources. The attack on the Murrah building that day was the single greatest act of domestic terrorism pre-9/11. And this subcommittee was given limited resources. Perhaps this had something to do with having “limited resources”:
Rohrabacher’s subcommittee saved its sharpest words for the Justice Department, saying officials there exhibited a mindset of thwarting congressional oversight and did not assist the investigation fully.
The report rebukes the FBI for not fully pursuing leads suggesting other suspects may have provided support to McVeigh and Nichols before their truck bomb killed 168 people in the main federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
So is it a leap to entertain the possibility that other elements may have been at play in this crime? Not when you begin looking at other loose threads that the FBI left untied, such as:
Witness accounts that another man was seen with McVeigh around the time of the bombing. The FBI originally looked for another suspect it named John Doe 2, even providing a sketch:
…but abruptly dropped that line of inquiry. The subcommittee concludes that decision was a mistake.
Phone record and witness testimony that persons associated with Middle Eastern terrorism in the Philippines may have had contact with Nichols, and that Nichols took a book about explosives to the Philippines.
And this from February 2005, via MSNBC:
The FBI believed Timothy McVeigh tried to recruit additional help in the days before the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and gathered evidence that white supremacist bank robbers may have become involved, according to government documents never introduced at McVeigh’s trial…The retired FBI chief of the Oklahoma City investigation, Dan Defenbaugh, said he was unaware of some evidence obtained by The Associated Press and that the investigation should be reopened to determine whether the robbery gang was linked to McVeigh.
Also noteworthy via The American Free Press:
There are now serious allegations that the FBI, using an informer as a conduit, supplied McVeigh and Nichols with the blasting components the two used to construct explosive devices, one of which may have been employed in the tragic Oklahoma City bombing.
That informant’s name is Roger Moore. He has a hallowed spot in this twisted little conspiracy:
Moore, a Royal, Ark. gun dealer, claimed to have been robbed by McVeigh and Nichols of some 66 guns, cash and gold coins in November 1994. The FBI and federal prosecutors claimed that the proceeds were used to finance the OKC operation.
However, the defense team undermined that theory by producing a signed motel receipt proving McVeigh was in Akron, Ohio, on the date in question. This did not keep either the prosecutors or the news media from repeating the robbery story. It is still widely believed.
Moore, who used the alias “Bob Miller,” according to Nichols, later changed his story and said that it definitely was not McVeigh and Nichols who had robbed him, but he apparently was attempting to plant the opposite impression at the time. Townspeople remembered Moore going from barroom to barbershop the week of the alleged robbery, describing McVeigh and asking if anyone had seen him in the area.
At the time, Moore was a confidential informant for two FBI agents named Ross and Hayes, out of the Hot Springs office. The two were the same agents who discovered the “stolen” guns in a sack behind the house trailer of Michael Fortier in Kingman, Ariz., a few days after the bombing. Fortier was later implicated in the conspiracy and is serving a 20-year sentence
I don’t know if the FBI was truly involved, as Nichols alleges. I don’t know if Middle Eastern terrorists had a hand in this attack. But I suspect there is more at play. After all of these strange threads of behavior and evidence, does it seem crazy to request that this investigation be reopened?
