A series of sobering facts that were leaked to the media within the first forty-eight hours underscored the government's early inclination to seek out suspects of Arab origin embedded in the homeland. The stack of telling clues included sensitive military communications in which the FBI urgently requested on April 19 that the Pentagon provide ten Army linguists proficient in Arabic to assist in monitoring radical Islamic sects in several major metropolitan areas. Within days, the mission quickly evolved from analyzing recordings of FBI wiretaps of suspected Middle Eastern extremist groups to listening and translating live conversations.
The Department of the Army Headquarters Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia, issued a memorandum on April 22, 1995, asserting that federal law strictly prohibited military involvement of this enormity and scope in a domestic criminal investigation, except under the rare circumstance where the president' life was imperiled. Such a danger was not only deemed to be real, but imminent. In a unique correspondence, the FBI director contacted the secretary of defense to request the Army Arabic linguists continue to monitor live wiretaps in an effort to "protect the president from possible attack during his attendance of the memorial service in Oklahoma City on Sunday, April 23."
By this time, the chief culprits had been profiled as right-wing fanatics, ostracized by their own kind. Not even the citizen militia movement, which spawned from paranoia over government encroachment upon civil liberties, embraced McVeigh and Nichols's brand of extremeism. Therefore, if a duo of rogue domestic terrorists was solely to blame, why was the Department of Justice so intent on obtaining such an unusual waiver of federal law? Without it, the Army linguists would be ordered to cease translating intercepted "chatter" between Middle East terrorists ondomestic soil, leaving Bill Clinton vulnerable to a potential foreign assassination attempt during his forthcoming trip to Oklahoma City. What did two disgrunted malcontents and radical Islamists have in common? Plenty. And the FBI, CIA, DIA, and all other organs of the U.S. law enforcement community were collectively acting on far more than an educated hunch.
I'm glad you transcribed those two pages; there was so much meat in that book that it's hard to take in with just one reading.