Posted on 10/09/2005 4:20:59 PM PDT by Calpernia
Terry Nichols, Philippines, bombs, etc.
See Mark Tapscott here: “Before Able Danger and Mohamed Atta, There Was Murrah Building Bombing and Hussain Al-Hussaini; Journalist Uncovers OKC Links to 9/11, which links to this L.A. Weekly article: “The Rohrabacher Test: Congressman questions Terry Nichols about Oklahoma City bombing”.
The Mark Tapscott link also has a comprehensive statement from Jayna Davis, who has pursued this story for ten long years and has now written a book entitled “The Third Terrorist”.
One interesting quote — among many — in the L.A. Weekly piece is from Richard Clarke:
Clarke wrote that the theory of Nichols getting training in the Philippines intrigued him because he could never disprove it. “We do know that Nichols’ bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly after he returned.”
So given all that background, here it is … and a formatting note, rather than blockquote the quoted sections from these links, I used indigo and a smaller font.
Suddenly, the veil starts to lift a bit.
Now Terry Nichols claims to have been involved in the planning and execution of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 after all. 168 people were killed in the attack.
C.G. Hill gives a short roundup on the Nichols revelations.
Of course, there is a large backchannel story here that gets no coverage in the media whatsoever.
(1) Al Qaeda Recruited U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov’t:
An al Qaeda operative sought to recruit U.S. veterans as paramilitary trainers and combat volunteers in 1992 and 1993, at the explicit direction of a cleric who converted thousands of Gulf War soldiers to Islam on behalf of the Saudi government.
Clement Rodney Hampton-El was convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks in a 1993 terror plot linked to the World Trade Center bombing in February of that year.
An al Qaeda-trained bomb expert with ties to Ramzi Yousef and radical cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, Hampton-El testified that he was summoned to a meeting at the Saudi embassy in December 1992.
During the meeting, Hampton-El was informed that wealthy Saudis were sponsoring jihad operations in Bosnia, according to his testimony in the 1995 trial (US v. Rahman, S5 93 Cr. 18, August 2, 1995). Hampton-El said he was allotted a budget of $150,000 to train volunteer mujahideen fighters and support their families in the U.S.
[…]
Bilal Philips began working for the Saudi government in March 1991, leading an educational program for American soldiers stationed in the Gulf. Ostensibly to teach the Americans about Islamic and Saudi culture, the program was in actuality an aggressive campaign to convert U.S. soldiers to Islam, by Philips’ own admission.
Immediately after Iraq surrendered in the Persian Gulf War, Philips organized a “tent revival” in the middle of the U.S. barracks in Riyadh, targeting U.S. soldiers assigned to defend the kingdom, according to Senate testimony by foreign propaganda expert J. Michael Waller of the Annenberg Institute and published interviews with Philips.
For about five and a half months beginning in March 1991, the program converted between 1,000 and 3,000 U.S. soldiers to Islam. According to Waller, Philips was “made a proselytization official by the Saudi Air Force. Philips said his work on the program continued through 1994.
The entire operation was sanctioned and sponsored by the Saudi government, according to a November 2003 article in the Washington Post.
“We registered the names and addresses of over 3,000 male and female US soldiers,” Philips said in a 2003 interview with a Saudi-owned Arabic language magazine published out of London. According to Philips, a team of workers trained in psychology identified soldiers who were receptive to Islam and singled them out for more personalized preaching in smaller groups. In some cases, soldiers also visited with Saudi families.
After the initial conversion program ended, Philips followed up in the United States, with phone calls and visits designed to recruit recently released veterans as potential members of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. He enlisted assistance from others based in the U.S., including Hampton-El and members of Islamic centers “all over the United States.”
[…]
Hampton-El also testified that he met a “Prince Abdullah Faisal” at the embassy, who told him he had heard of Hampton-El “from Afghanistan.”
Under Saudi naming conventions, it is extremely unclear to whom this refers; the name would be consistent with more than one member of the Saudi royal family.
One possible identification consistent with the name would be Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, a Saudi prince who was named as a major terrorist sponsor by a captured al Qaeda mastermind in 2002, according to Gerald Posner, writing in “Why America Slept.”
Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki was killed in a car accident less than four months after being named an al Qaeda accomplice, according to Posner. Two other Saudis named by the al Qaeda lieutenant also died under unusual circumstances within days of the accident, Posner writes.
A little housecleaning is always good. Smells all clean and fresh afterwards.
(2) Then both Nichols and McVeigh suddenly moved:
Just one month after an al Qaeda recruiter was ordered to contact former U.S. servicemen, both Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols relocated to areas where Osama bin Laden’s terror network was actively recruiting.
In December 1992, al Qaeda operative Clement Rodney Hampton-El was given a list of former U.S. servicemen to recruit as volunteers by a Saudi-linked cleric based in the Philippines, according to testimony in his 1995 trial.
Shortly after Hampton-El was given the list, McVeigh quit his job and moved to Florida, where al Qaeda was creating a new financing network. In January 1993, Nichols traveled to the Philippines, where al Qaeda had extensive training and financial operations already in place, and stayed there for 30 to 60 days.
Hampton-El was a weapons dealer connected to a New York City al Qaeda cell responsible for planning a series of ammonium nitrate truck bomb attacks. Ammonium nitrate was also the main component of the Oklahoma City bomb used by McVeigh and Nichols.
(3) Next, this:
This is where the story gets really interesting. All of what follows is proven fact. We’ll get to the suppositions in a minute.
In September 1994, just as Nichols and McVeigh began working on their bomb, al Qaeda expert bomb-builder Ramzi Yousef and his homicidal mastermind uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had arrived in Manila with orders from Osama bin Laden to plan and launch attacks on the United States.
Among the plans they hatched during this period was an ambition operation known as “Bojinka,” which is apparently Serbo-Croation for “big bang.” The plot called for five terrorists to plant bombs on 11 U.S.-bound airliners originating in the region, which would detonate nearly simultaneously over the Pacific. A second phase of the plan was a predecessor to the September 11 attacks — one or more plans would be hijacked or stolen, then crashed into prominent U.S. landmarks such as CIA headquarters, the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.
The operatives who were to carry out the plan were never all definitively identified. Bojinka was set to launch on January 21, 1995, the exact date that Terry Nichols’ 60-day visa was set to expire.
In December, Yousef tested one of the Bojinka bombs on a flight from Manila to Tokyo. He got on the flight, planted the bomb and disembarked during a layover in Cebu City, the Philippines. The bomb went off on the second leg of the flight, killing one person, although the plane managed to make an emergency landing.
At the exact same time, Terry Nichols was hanging out in Cebu City, where his wife was attending college. Yousef had made several trips to Cebu in late 1994, visiting friends who were attending the same college as Nichols’ wife.
Yousef’s location for a week or so after the bombing is unknown. In subsequent attacks on Western interests around the world, Khalid Shaikh would use ammonium nitrate bombs (chemically identical to McVeigh’s bomb) over and over again, right up until his capture in 2003.
(4) And last, this:
DENVER, Nov. 19 — Oklahoma City bombing defendant Terry L. Nichols, crying during some of his ex-wife’s testimony, today heard her recount how she discovered a letter in which he urged Timothy J. McVeigh to “go for it” five months before the bombing.
Wiping his eyes as his attorney put a hand on his shoulder, Nichols for the first time in his trial dropped his calm demeanor as ex-wife Lana Padilla described going through a collection of letters left for her and McVeigh in the event Nichols did not return from a trip to the Philippines in November 1994.
The letter that caused Nichols to break down in tears instructed Padilla to divide his property between his new wife Marife and a son he and Padilla had had during their eight-year marriage.
But defense hopes of presenting Nichols in a favorable, human light may have been tempered by the second, potentially incriminating, letter, which was to be forwarded to McVeigh. Padilla first disclosed the contents of this note in a book she wrote in 1995, “By Blood Betrayed,” and later in an interview with the “American Journal” television show.
“Your [sic] on your own; go for it,” Nichols wrote to McVeigh. “As far as heat, none that I know. This letter would be for the purpose of my death.”
Some good tidbits here.
BFLR
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You were pinged to the Clinton silverwear thread. Someone has you trapped in a cheese dish :))
Thank you, it fits with what I have read about the Oklahoma City bombing, the al Qaeda showed up early in the reports.
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