Posted on 09/28/2001 6:01:55 PM PDT by OKCSubmariner
It is obvious material for conspiracy buffs: Did Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols really act alone, or was some larger terrorist outfit behind the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?
In Oklahoma City, an investigative reporter began asking the question long before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Jayna Davis, in a series that aired on KFOR-TV in 1995, examined the possible existence of John Doe No. 2, a man witnesses saw with McVeigh outside the federal building moments before the bomb went off, killing 168 people. Her reports also raised questions about the purpose of several trips Nichols made to the Philippines, into areas in which terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were known to hide out.
Davis herself no longer freely talks about her work. She has been sued by a subject of her reports and advised by her attorneys not to grant interviews. Earlier this year, however, she appeared on Fox Network’s The O’Reilly Factor and spoke at length about her investigation: “And what we discovered, an intelligence source at one of the highest levels in the federal government later confirmed, was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell living and operating in the heart of Oklahoma City . . . We have (22) sworn witness affidavits that tie seven to eight Arab men to various stages of the bombing plot . . . It really is a foreign conspiracy masterminded and funded by Osama bin Laden, according to my intelligence sources.”
McVeigh went to his grave denying any foreign involvement in the bombing. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, swore they acted alone, and no proof of a wider plot ever surfaced.
The arrests of McVeigh and Nichols came quickly and closed the case for many. Less than two hours after the bombing, a state trooper stopped McVeigh’s 1977 Mercury Marquis 80 miles from Oklahoma City because it was missing a license plate. Two days later, Nichols, who was at his Kansas farm on the day of the bombing, surrendered to police.
Minutes after the bombing, however, police radios carried a description of a brown Chevrolet pickup with “two Middle Eastern men” inside seen speeding away from the federal complex. A short time later and without explanation, police withdrew the all-points bulletin. The mystery over the truck became the starting point for Davis’ investigation.
Davis found people in Oklahoma City who said they remembered seeing McVeigh meet with several men they describe as Middle Eastern in the months before the bombing. She also uncovered confidential warnings that a congressional task force issued about a possible Islamic-fundamentalist terror attack on “America’s heartland” one month before the Oklahoma bombing.
Davis, in her early reports, makes it clear she is not certain of a connection between McVeigh and any terrorist group. And certainly witnesses were primed to view anyone who looked suspicious as “Middle Eastern” in the hours right after the bombing. What Davis wants, she said, is a full federal inquiry into the matter. One big-name lawyer trying to get such an investigation rolling is David Schippers, former chief counsel to the House of Representatives managers who conducted Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. “I’ve been practicing law for 40 years, and I know what bullshit is,” said Schippers. “Jayna gave me a stack of affidavits, signed by credible witnesses, connecting McVeigh to Middle Easterners living in Oklahoma City. She also gave me a ton of supporting documents. I’ve reviewed this material, and I’m convinced there are solid leads here that need to be investigated.”
Schippers said he is trying to get the material to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. “I made some calls, but no one would give me the time of day,” he said. “I tried like hell to get to Ashcroft, but I just couldn’t break through.” He said he has not given up, but would not disclose his plans to get a full airing for Davis’ findings.
The reports, which aired on KFOR in the months after the Oklahoma City bombing, are based on witness statements, court records, government documents and unnamed sources. A federal court order dismissing a lawsuit filed against Davis mentioned several of her findings, which include:
• A brown Chevrolet truck similar to one seen leaving the federal building had been parked a few weeks earlier — twice, in fact — at Samara Properties, according to two employees at the Oklahoma City property-management company owned by Dr. Samir Khalil. In 1991, Khalil pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and spent eight months in federal prison. According to court documents, Khalil denied FBI allegations that linked him to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Six months before the bombing, Khalil had hired a group of Iraqis for painting and construction work. On the day of the bombing, a former co-worker told Davis they reacted to the news with unrestrained joy. “They even praised [Saddam] Hussein, vowing to die in his service,” a source stated in an affidavit.
On April 27, police found a Chevrolet pickup abandoned at an apartment complex in Oklahoma City, stripped of its license plate, inspection tag and other identifying numbers. It had been painted yellow, though it was clear its original color was brown. One resident told Dallas FBI Agent Jim Ellis that the driver was “clean-shaven, with an olive complexion, dark wavy hair, and broad shoulders,” in his late 20s or early 30s, and of Middle Eastern descent. The resident also identified him as a Samara employee from KFOR’s pictures.
• An FBI sketch of John Doe No. 2 resembled a Samara employee who described himself as a political refugee who had served in the Iraqi army. The TV station did not name him and digitized his photos to hide his identity. Later, Hussain Al-Hussaini came forward and said he was the man identified by several witnesses as possibly being John Doe No. 2, and sued the station and Davis for defamation and libel, saying he could be easily recognized from their coverage. (Al-Hussaini withdrew the state case, and a federal judge dismissed a second case; Al-Hussaini has appealed.)
• In an affidavit, a waitress said McVeigh and someone resembling Al-Hussaini came into her bar on April 15. The waitress said the man she had identified from a KFOR photo lineup “asked me if I was married. He spoke with an accent . . . a Middle Eastern accent.” She also said the FBI had interviewed her, and showed her photos and sketches of possible suspects. The photos were presumably taken from surveillance cameras near the Murrah Building. The FBI took possession of videos recorded by those cameras on April 19, and has refused to release them.
• In an affidavit, Mike Moroz, a worker at Johnny’s Tire Service, a few blocks from the Murrah Building, said that at about 8:30 a.m. on April 19, the day of the bombing, McVeigh pulled up in his Ryder truck and asked for directions. He insisted there was another man sitting in the truck cab. Moroz told Davis he had picked McVeigh out of a live FBI lineup. He also said Al-Hussaini, as shown in one of KFOR’s surveillance photos, could have been the man he saw.
• A patron at the Social Security office at the Murrah Building, who was wounded in the blast, told Davis she was standing 12 feet away when the Ryder truck pulled up. She said she saw McVeigh and a “foreign-looking man with an olive complexion and thick black curly hair poking out of a ball cap” get out of the truck. She also gave this information to the FBI, even describing the insignia on the cap of the person with McVeigh. She identified him as possibly being Al-Hussaini from KFOR’s photos.
• Employees and guests at a motel near downtown Oklahoma City reported seeing McVeigh with several Middle Eastern men in the months before the bombing. One of those men was identified from KFOR’s surveillance photos of Samara Properties as possibly being Al-Hussaini. The others were identified as fellow employees of Al-Hussaini. McVeigh reportedly stayed at the motel, under the name of Bob Kling, an alias he had used before, according to the FBI.
The witnesses said they had often seen several of the men moving large barrels around in the back of an old white truck that frequently broke down on the lot. The barrels smelled of diesel, they said, an ingredient in the bomb that destroyed the federal building. According to an FBI report, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent confiscated the motel’s registration records and logs.
• In a hidden-camera interview, Terry Nichols’ ex-wife told of his trips to the Philippines. “Tim bought Terry the first ticket for the Philippines” in 1989, she said. Nichols, who eventually married a woman from Cebu City, traveled, often without his new wife, back and forth to the Philippines, considered by some a hotbed for terrorist activity. His last visit came in November 1994. Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 Trade Center bombing and a plot to blow up U.S. airliners, operated out of Mindanao and Manila; Yousef received funding from Osama bin Laden; and, according to a motion filed by McVeigh’s defense team, an American fitting Nichols’ description met with Yousef in 1992 or 1993 in the Philippines.
• Yossef Bodansky, the executive director of the U.S. House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, told Davis that terrorist organizations linked to Iran and Syria had been talking about a U.S. terror campaign since late 1994. The task force issued the first of several confidential warnings to federal agencies on February 27, 1995. It said that “Striking inside the U.S. is presently a high priority of Tehran” and went on to warn of attacks on “airports, airlines, telephone systems etc.” An update, issued on March 3, 1995, said there was a “greater likelihood that the terrorists would strike at the heart of the U.S.” Israeli intelligence sources warned one month before the Oklahoma City bombing that an impending terrorist attack would use “lily whites,” which, Bodansky explained, are “people without any distinct background, record of any kind . . . who will never be suspected members of a terrorist group.”
It is not clear how or whether all of this adds up. Davis has struggled to get the results of her investigation to the public. Twice, she has been sued for libel and defamation, in state and federal courts, by Al-Hussaini, who stepped forward on June 15, 1995, and said that he was living in fear since KFOR and Davis fingered him. He said he was at work when the bombing occurred and denied knowing McVeigh. The federal judge who dismissed his lawsuit said Al-Hussaini’s claim that he was at work at the time of the bombing was false.
Nineteen months after Al-Hussaini sued in state court, he dropped his lawsuit. Davis said the legal pressure led KFOR to halt airing new material from her bombing investigation. In 1996, Palmer Communications sold the station to the New York Times Co., which was not interested in pursuing the story, Davis said. On March 3, 1997, she resigned.
In September 1997, Davis was subpoenaed by the Oklahoma County grand jury, which was looking into the possibility of conspirators in the bombing. Davis gave the jury all of her witness statements. The next day, Al-Hussaini refiled his libel suit in federal court, and two months later, it was dismissed. U.S. District Judge Tim Leonard said that Davis’ reports are either true or statements of opinion. Al-Hussaini appealed, and a hearing was held this month, but no ruling has been made.
For years, the FBI has refused to comment on Davis’ report. This week, the response was no different when the agency was contacted by the L.A. Weekly. Davis has tried twice, with the permission of her sources, to deliver the 22 witness affidavits to the FBI office in Oklahoma City. In 1997, agents said her lawyers needed to first contact federal prosecutors. Her attorney, Tim McCoy, said federal prosecutors rejected the offer, saying they would have to release the documents to McVeigh’s and Nichols’ defense teams if they accepted them. In 1999, Davis and another attorney who represented her, Dan Nelson, met with Agent Dan Vogel and got him to accept the documents. He, in turn, gave them to the FBI task force investigating the bombing. “However, I was told we gave the affidavits back to her because there was some question of ownership — whether she or KFOR had legal rights to the material,” said Vogel, who has since retired. Asked whether he thought it was odd that the FBI would reject potential leads, Vogel would only say, “That was a decision made by people above me.”
Davis can’t figure out why the FBI refuses to examine her material. “They had hundreds of agents on this case,” Davis told Bill O’Reilly. “Why wouldn’t they want to take information from a reporter who had sworn witness statements implicating . . . others in the Oklahoma City bombing?”
Sadam Hussein has been linked to helping Bin Laden and AlQaeda do the WTC attacks on 9/11/2001.
The Iraqi, Hussaini, referred to in this article as allegedly being with McVeigh, has been reported to have once served in the Hussein's elite Iraqi Republican guard during the Gulf War.
And it has been said by David Schippers, the legal cousel for the House Managers during impeachment on WRRK radio (Pittsbugh-9/13/2001), that the FBI should look at the Iraqi again since he was a baggage handler at Boston's Logan airport, where some of the hijacked planes in the WTC attacks originated on 9/11/2001.
So it is plausible that Sadam Hussein helped Bin Laden not only do the WTC attacks, but even possibly the OKC bombing since the article described the OKC bombing as a "Bin Laden operation."
Crime/Corruption Front Page News Keywords: BIN LADEN, SADAM HUSSEIN, WORLD TRADE CENTER,OKC BOMBING,FBI,TERRORISM
Source: WRRK, BBC, CNN, Arizona Republic, Boston Globe, AP,Tulsa World,Washington Times,Philippine Star News
Published: September 22, 2001
Posted on 09/22/2001 20:18:38 PDT by OKCSubmariner
TXnMA
1) Agents of a foreign nation or entity, or
2) Part of a sting operation gone very bad.
Why am I not surprised!
-- The Aryan Republican Army (ARA - a Christian Identity splinter group) carried out at least 16 bank robberies in the midwest before they were captured by federal authorities.
-- During the ARA's reign of terror, Timothy McVeigh told his sister, Jennifer, that he had helped organized a bank robbery and he showed her a wad of $100 bills, which he claimed was paymentfor his role in the job. Richard Guthrie, an ARA bank robber who committed suicide in jail, referred in his unpublished memoirs to an accomplice named "Tim."
-- Movements of a number of ARA members and McVeigh were nearly identical in the years and months leading up to the attack on the Murrah building.
-- Telephone records reveal that McVeigh placed two calls to Elohim City, an armed Identity enclave headed by Robert Millar, a few weeks before the OKC bombing. Millar, of course, denied knowing anything at all about McVeigh.
-- McVeigh got a speeding ticket a few miles from Elohim City.
Tim Sullivan: I think he was 29 at the time... There was very likely a conspiracy somewhat larger than McVeigh and Nichols. Michael Fortier was prosecuted for withholding his knowledge of the crime, and many have long believed he was more involved than he or the government ever admitted. Also, some observers and journalists believe there were three or four others involved in the conspiracy. In his book "Others Unknown" lawyer Stephen Jones, who represented McVeigh at trial, explains his theory of a broad, global conspiracy going back to Saddam Hussein.
KimIsland asks: Well, who was involved or thought to be involved in the conspiracy?
Tim Sullivan: There were a few white supremacists who hung out at a compound in Oklahoma, as Dennis Mahon and Carl Strassmeier, who where suspected by some. Also, the ATF had an informer named Carol Howe, who testified that those two and others apparently knew about the plot. Stephen Jones implicates both Ramzi Yousef and Osama Bin Laden as possible suspects.
Regarding Strassmeier mentioned in the OKC story. His dad is a cabinet minister in Germany. Hmmm. Wasn't it from Germany that some unknown parties did a "put" on United, Boeing and other airline stock?
* * * * * Thursday October 28, 1993 Page A1
"Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast"
By Ralph Blumenthal Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.
The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.
The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers.
The explosion left six people dead, more than a thousand people injured, and damages in excess of half-a-billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court [on charges of involvement] in that attack.
Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer, was used by the Government [of the United States] to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists who are now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack, and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels, and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the World Trade Center blast, he was feuding with th F.B.I.
Supervisor `Messed It Up'
After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up." "He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.
"He requested to make me to testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."
The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington about the Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.
Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington, D.C."
Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the `New York people': "Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * THE ACCURACY OF THIS IS VERIFIED IN a 12/9/99 article by Joe Farah in WND.
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