F.B.I. Opens Inquiry Into Seizure of Documents From Associated Press

fyi

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/840958/posts
U.S. Had Data Hinting of Okla. Bombing
AP News ^ | 11 Feb, 2003

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/842182/posts
FBI Destroyed Possible McVeigh Evidence
AP | 2/13/03

"FedEx originally said the parcel might have fallen off its delivery van."

Which is of course believable
if you might have just fallen off the turnip truck.

The official added that investigators might want to determine how the document, which the F.B.I. originally sent to Philippine authorities as part of an investigation, wound up in the hands of The Associated Press.

The official added that investigators might want to determine how the documents, which the F.B.I. originally sent to ~~Philippine authorities~~ the GWHBush White House as part of Staff background investigations, wound up in the hands of ~~The Associated Press~~ Hillary Clinton.

"This document was not the property of The Associated Press," the official said. "That's the rub."

Hmm... I think they should charge the AP Reporter who sent it with a federal ofense, such as using the Mail to send Stolen Property across State (or international) lines etc... ;0)

"The F.B.I. does not have the right to seize material without a warrant, without even notifying anyone, and just making it vanish," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in an interview. "That, in our minds, is completely illegal."

I agree, they do not have the right to make information like this vanish.However, they have a long practice of doing just that. The FBI confiscated tape from privately owned video surveillance cameras which recorded the Ryder truck pulling up in front of the Murrah Building with two occupants, and then recorded the explosion.

Those tapes have vanished.

I wish Grassely was as concerned about those videotapes as he seems to be about this package.

Camera saw figure in bomb truck , Oklahoma City video is unclear, but it may show John Doe No. 2

The Kansas City Star
October 28, 1995
Section: NATIONAL/WORLD
Edition: METROPOLITAN
Page: A4

Camera saw figure in bomb truck

Oklahoma City video is unclear, but it may show John Doe No. 2.

The Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY - Videotape from a surveillance camera captured a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the passenger seat of a bomb-laden Ryder truck minutes before it blew apart the federal building, a federal law enforcement source says.

The footage is not clear enough to identify anyone, but it adds to the body of evidence that a third figure - perhaps the long-sought John Doe No. 2 - took part in the attack with two other persons, the source said.

``There's a shape in there, but they can't see a face,'' the source said of footage, which was taken by a camera on a nearby apartment building. The camera picked up the shadowy passenger about three minutes before the bomb went off April 19 at the Murrah Federal Building.

The government says Timothy McVeigh drove to Oklahoma City in the truck, parked it in front of the federal building and made his getaway in a yellow Mercury Marquis. But prosecutors have given no indication that Terry Nichols, also charged in the case, was in Oklahoma City the day of the bombing.

Although a federal grand jury indicted only McVeigh and Nichols on murder and conspiracy charges, agents scoured the country for a third conspirator, known only as John Doe No. 2, who was portrayed in sketches distributed shortly after the blast.

Authorities later said that an innocent Army private resembled the sketches. But the drawings were never withdrawn. Moreover, the indictment accuses McVeigh and Nichols of acting with ``others unknown,'' and agents were still hunting for other conspirators.

A call Friday to Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Mullins, a spokesman for the prosecution team, was not returned immediately.

Prosecutors repeatedly refused to discuss surveillance tape or other evidence in the case.

McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, said he had not seen the tape and could not comment.

A senior federal official in Washington said recently that agents currently searching did not expect to turn up another key player in the plot.

The law enforcement source, however, said many investigators remained convinced that John Doe No. 2 was still at large.

McVeigh and Nichols go on trial May 17.

For those who have not been following this story very closely, the following helps explain why the FBI seized this package sent to John Solomon, an AP writer that has been investigating the OKC bombing.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/794420/posts?q=1&&page=1

The court record reveals the Oklahoma City bomber, Terry Nichols was in Cebu City in December 1994 at the same time as the convicted mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack Ramzi Yousef. Did Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols cross paths? According to the sworn statement of the late Edwin Angeles, co-founder of the Filipino Muslim terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, that meeting took place in the early 1990's on the island of Mindanao. Angeles said he was present when Terry Nichols, Ramzi Yousef, and two Middle Eastern co-conspirators met to discuss the acquisition of firearms and bomb making.

On April 19, 1995, Abdul Hakim Murad, a Middle Eastern terrorist who was later convicted with Ramzi Yousef in a foiled plot to blow up twelve U.S. airliners in Manila, corroborated the testimony of Abu Sayyaf leader, Edwin Angeles. Murad told a prison guard at a New York City detention center where he was confined that as a member of the Philippine Liberation Army, he was responsible for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. In addition to his verbal confession, Murad put this startling admission in writing.

Official interrogation reports detailing Murad's 1995 statements to U.S. and Filipino authorities reveal the Islamic terrorist disclosed visionary details of the 1994 plot to hijack commercial airlines and convert them into flying missiles. One of the alleged targets, according to Murad, was CIA headquarters.

From the article:

F.B.I. agents in Indianapolis appear to have determined that the document, an eight-year-old laboratory report detailing materials seized from the apartment of a man convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was too sensitive for public consumption, officials said.

Link

Sent via Federal Express from AP reporter Jim Gomez in the Philippines to Washington AP reporter John Solomon, the 8-year-old FBI lab report was intercepted by the Customs Service, which has the legal right to examine packages sent from overseas at the point they arrive in the United States. Customs said the package had been selected for routine inspection.

The package was sent to the FBI in Washington after an FBI agent reviewed the document and said it contained some information that should not be made public.

In January, the AP was tipped that the package had been intercepted.

The lab report, which had been discussed in open court in two legal cases, dealt with materials seized from an apartment in the Philippines rented by convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef.

The two AP reporters were working on terrorism-related stories.

--------------------------------------------------

My comments:

dealt with materials seized from an apartment in the Philippines rented by convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef

Terry Nichols was in the Philippines on the day of the fire in the Yousef/Khalid Mohammed apartment where the materials were seized.

After the arrest of Murad and the seizure of the materials in January 1995, Nichols immediately returned to the U.S. Yousef fled the Philippines at the same time and was later captured.

A sworn statement by Edwin Angeles places Nichols in a meeting with Yousef and Murad where the subject was bomb making. Months after providing a videotaped depostion and a sworn affidavit on the Nichols/Yousef meeting, Edwin Angeles was assasinated.

http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=241267

Exclusive Report
Iraq Was Involved In Oklahoma City
Posted April 22, 2002

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

Media Credit: Joel Rennich/UPI
Testimony from Elmina Abdul links Ramos, above, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to the Abu Sayyaf terrorist network.

The retirement of career FBI Special Agent Danny Defenbaugh, accused by defense attorneys and plaintiffs in the Oklahoma City bombing case of withholding key evidence, wasn't the only dramatic development in the continuing controversies surrounding the April 19, 1995, attack that killed 168 people.

Insight has learned that the widow of Philippine-government intelligence agent Edwin Angeles has provided audiotaped testimony to an investigator working for the American victims' families that directly ties Iraqi intelligence agents to Terry Nichols, the man sentenced in 1998 to life in prison for his role in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building seven years ago.

Elmina Abdul is the 27-year-old widow of Angeles, one of the cofounders of the Abu Sayyaf group, a Muslim separatist terrorist organization in the Philippines whose members trained in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Her astonishing story, revealed in this exclusive story for the first time, could blow the lid off what a growing number of people believe is a U.S. government cover-up of vital evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case. It also exposes an alleged plot ginned up by former Philippine president Fidel Ramos to manipulate Abu Sayyaf as a means of enhancing his personal political power.

With the knowledge that she was dying of liver disease, Elmina agreed to meet with Dorian Zumel Sicat, a Manila Times correspondent serving as an investigative liaison in the Philippines and the Pacific Rim for Oklahoma City lawyer Mike Johnston, who represents the victims' families. "I want to tell the truth of what I know of my late husband," she said in a taped audio statement.

Angeles was "what they call a 'deep-penetration agent'" who was working for "some very powerful men in the DND," the Philippine national defense-intelligence agency, Elmina said. Angeles was arrested in 1995 after he had negotiated a deal to turn himself in to the Philippine authorities. By that point, the Abu Sayyaf he had helped create in 1991 with bin Laden protégé Abdurajjak Abu Bakr Janjalani had carried out a series of terrorist attacks. These included a failed assault on a U.S. Information Agency library in Manila in January 1991 that was part of a worldwide terrorist campaign against U.S. interests orchestrated by Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

"Does the name 'Ramzi Yousef' mean something to you, Mr. Sicat?" Elmina asked. Angeles had extensive meetings with Yousef and two Americans, including one whom he called "Terry" or "The Farmer," she said.

Angeles ultimately was cleared of terrorism charges at trial, when documents proving he was working as a government agent were produced. He was released from prison in 1996 — but not before he provided astonishing details during a videotaped interrogation by Philippine police authorities of his activities with Abu Sayyaf, including the secret meetings with Iraqi intelligence agent Yousef, Nichols and the second American identified in the document as John Lepney.

The earliest meetings took place at a Del Monte canning plant in Davao in late 1992 and early 1993 — just prior to the first World Trade Center bombing. Later meetings with Nichols, Yousef and the second American — whose name has never been revealed until now — took place at Angeles' house in late 1994, according to a report on that interrogation which has been obtained by investigators working for attorney Johnston, who has been joined by Judicial Watch in representing families of those murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Angeles also revealed the meetings to Elmina, who became his third wife in 1997, "because he knew that he would soon be killed," she said in her audiotaped statement with Sicat, which was witnessed by a Philippine-government official. "He wanted me to know everything so that if anything happened to him I could tell others." Also present at those meetings was a half-brother of Yousef, who was using the pseudonym Ahmad Hassim, she said.

"They met almost every day for one week. They met in an empty bodega [warehouse]. They talked about bombings. They mentioned bombing government buildings in San Francisco, St. Louis and in Oklahoma. The Americans wanted instructions on how to make and to explode bombs. He [Edwin] told me that Janjalani was very interested in paying them much money to explode the buildings. The money was coming from Yousef and the other Arab."

When asked if Angeles had told her the results of those conversations, Elmina replied: "He told me that the Americans exploded one bomb in Oklahoma in 1995, after he was arrested and after we first met."

Later in the interview, she chided Sicat for not knowing that Yousef was "representing Iraq and Saddam Hussein."

"Did Edwin tell you that?" Sicat asked.

"Not only Edwin, but others that were close to us, before he was killed," Elmina said. "One time, a [Philippine-army] soldier and Edwin were talking secretly. I was there because Edwin demanded [it]. The soldier ordered Edwin never to tell anybody about the Iraqis."

On Jan. 14, 1999, Elmina was waiting for her husband in an open-air market in Isabela, the provincial capital of Basilan province. Suddenly, as he emerged from a nearby mosque, she watched as two of his former associates walked up behind him and, with .45-caliber automatics, pumped six bullets into him. He staggered toward her and died in her arms.

The video interrogation linking Nichols to Yousef, bin Laden and Iraq initially was obtained by Stephen Jones, the defense attorney who represented convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. But at the insistence of federal prosecutors, trial judge Richard P. Matsch refused to admit it into evidence.

The judge also refused to admit into evidence the testimony of Yousef coconspirator Abdul Hakim Murad, who was a federal prisoner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Murad was awaiting trial for his part in Project Bojinka, a plot hatched up by Yousef to blow up 11 U.S. 747 jetliners over the Pacific Ocean in 1995 (see "Iraqi Connection to Oklahoma Bombing," April 15). On the day of the Oklahoma City bombing he told his jailers that Yousef had orchestrated the plot.

"Why should Murad be believed?" Johnston asks rhetorically. "For one thing, Murad made his 'confession' voluntarily and spontaneously. Most important, Murad tied Ramzi Yousef to the Oklahoma City bombing long before Terry Nichols was publicly identified as a suspect." (See "Iraq Connections to U.S. Extremists," Nov. 19, 2001.)

Johnston informed Jones last week he would be serving him with a desk subpoena to obtain this and other materials that were either sealed by the court or not admitted as evidence in the McVeigh trial. Shortly after Johnston got off the phone with him, Jones received threatening calls from federal prosecutors in Denver and Oklahoma City, warning him not to release the materials, Insight is told by a close associate of the lawyer. Jones did not return several calls by press time.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter tells Insight the FBI was unaware of a "foreign terrorist connection" to the Oklahoma City bombing. "There is no evidence of a foreign connection in our files," he says. "The Oklahoma City bombing was investigated thoroughly by the FBI; no evidence was found that would tie it to any foreign terrorist group. If we had found any evidence, it would have been presented."

That statement, like so many others from the government in this murky case, appears to be extraordinarily misleading to the families of victims still not convinced that they or the American public know the full story of what happened seven years ago.

In the Philippines, the real story of the Abu Sayyaf and its ties to Iraq, bin Laden and to former president Ramos — who is planning a comeback into Philippine politics — is a dangerous topic.

In his videotaped interrogation, Angeles says Yousef first approached him in July 1989 as the "personal envoy" of bin Laden to set up a new base for regional Islamic expansion on the Muslim island of Mindanao. At the time, bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, was operating commercial front companies in the Philippines for bin Laden. This apparently led to the creation of the Abu Sayyaf.

A former CIA station chief in Manila confirms to Insight that bin Laden came to the Philippines personally in 1992 and was flown down to Mindanao in a government C-130 aircraft by then-president Ramos. "Bin Laden presented himself as a wealthy Saudi who wanted to invest in Muslim areas and donate money to charity," the former CIA officer says.

While Yousef was collecting money from bin Laden, he was taking orders from Iraq and is believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have carried out the June 20, 1994, bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Mashad, Iran, on orders from Iraq. Yousef reportedly carried out that attack with help from his own father and a younger brother, Abdul Muneem, in conjunction with an Iraqi front group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization, also known as the People's Mujahideen Organization of Iran.

Angeles "knew he was going to be killed by his own people once he was released from jail," Sicat tells Insight in a telephone interview from Davao, a city on Mindanao. "The question is, who were his own people? Abu Sayyaf, or the cabal who had Angeles help set them up?"

Angeles' second wife, who had prepared the meals for Nichols and Yousef, was gunned down during a government raid on an Abu Sayyaf safe house in 1996. Elmina died last month just days after giving her taped audio statements to Sicat, who tells Insight that he has received death threats and been shot at in recent weeks by unknown assailants. He recently has been given round-the- clock police protection by the government, which is investigating the attacks.

If the remaining witnesses live long enough, the only question left is whether the Bush administration will order the FBI to reopen its files. Or, as some of the lawyers in the case and their clients fear, the administration will endorse what they believe — and testimony now in hand suggests — was a wider conspiracy that was hidden by the Clinton administration and Janet Reno's Justice Department. It may require full and open congressional hearings if the current administration refuses to help or otherwise blocks the federal courts from re-examining the case to find out why the U.S. government shut down preliminary investigations into possible overseas links to the murder of Americans in downtown Oklahoma City.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:h432L-SW9IcC:www.kwtv.com/news/bombing/mcveigh.htm+Nichols+Philippines+1994&hl=en

Indictment of McVeigh and Nichols

24. On or about November 21, 1994 and prior to departing for the Philippines, NICHOLS prepared a letter to McVEIGH, to be delivered only in the event of NICHOLS' death, in which he advised McVEIGH, among other matters, that storage unit No. 37 in Council Grove, Kansas had been rented in the name "Parker" and instructed McVEIGH to clear out the contents or extend the lease on No. 37 by February 1, 1995. NICHOLS further instructed McVEIGH to "liquidate" storage unit No. 40.

25. On or about December 16, 1994, while en route to Kansas to take possession of firearms stolen in the Arkansas robbery, McVEIGH drove with Michael Fortier to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and identified the building as the target.

26. In early 1995, following NICHOLS' return from the Philippines, firearms stolen in the Arkansas robbery were sold and McVEIGH, NICHOLS and Michael Fortier obtained currency from those sales.

Terry Nichols returned from the Philippines on January 16, 1995. Motel registration cards show he was registered at the Sunset Motel in Kingman, Arizona, from February 12 through February 16, 1995. At the same time, Timothy McVeigh was registered at the Hilltop Motel in Kingman. Records from the Daryl Bridges phone card show five calls were attempted from the Hilltop Motel to the Sunset Motel on February 12, 1995. On February 13, 1995, there were two more calls with a connection.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9605/12/terror.plot/

Terrorism trial begins in New York

May 13, 1996
From Correspondent Brian Jenkins

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Jury selection began in New York Monday in the federal trial of three men accused of plotting to bomb 11 planes headed for the United States on a single day in 1995.

Ramzi Yousef is charged with masterminding the plot. He also will be tried later this year, accused of planning the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Four men are already serving life in prison for that crime.

The alleged plot was discovered in the Philippines in January 1995, when a fire broke out in a Manila apartment 200 yards from the Vatican's embassy, a week before the arrival of Pope John Paul II.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/662899/posts

More on Edwin Angeles and Abu Sayyaf Meeting

Thanks for posting this Honway. Not only was this article buried on pg A18 below-the-fold, it conveniently left out Ramzi Yousef's name too.

I wonder what Mueller's FBI is trying to hide?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/899443/posts

I believe the article in this link deserves further investigation.