From: "Steve Wingate" 
Subject: IUFO: Fwd) OKC bombing conspiracy? - As Nichols is sentenced, key ques
Date: 4 Jun 1998 16:46:19 -0400
To: IUFO 


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"Others Unknown": Oklahoma City Revisited 

June 3, 1998

Terry Nichols will be sentenced Thursday for his part in the Oklahoma City
bombing. But it's worth noting that the case against Nichols was so shaky that
he was almost acquitted. Who might be the other suspects? Polls show that most
Oklahomans believe the federal government is engaged in a coverup, and that it
knows a lot more about the bombing than it's saying. Here is CBN News senior
reporter Dale Hurd's investigation into what the government might be hiding.

Dale Hurd, reporter

At 9:02 on the morning of April 19th, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building was blown up, killing 168 people.

The government still insists that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols acted
alone. But the evidence points to a conspiracy of several people. Is it
possible that the federal government is not interested in catching the other
suspects? That's where this tragedy takes a strange twist.

Three years ago, on April 19th, this street was a roiling mass of rescue
vehicles, debris, panicked parents, dead bodies, and the bodies of the dying.
Today it is a memorial to the worst terrorist act ever committed on U.S. soil.
It may also be a monument to the worst law enforcement blunder in U.S.
history.

Stephen Jones was the state-appointed attorney for Timothy McVeigh, and is the
author of an upcoming book entitled Others Unknown, referring to the original
grand jury indictment of McVeigh, Nichols, and "others unknown." While he's
not trying to deny McVeigh's involvement, Jones says the government is hiding
something.

"I had access to all the government's documents of that investigation," says
Jones. "If you make a list, as I have, of everything the ATF knew on midnight,
April 18th, it's hard to understand why they didn't increase security at the
Murrah building."

Despite its denial, it's clear that the federal government did have prior
knowledge of something. It knew that April 19th was a dangerous date: the
anniversary of Waco and Patriot's Day. Although the government initially lied
about it, an alert was issued, and no agents of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms were in the building.

Carol Howe, Confidential Informant #183 of the ATF had warned that the Murrah
building was one of three under study for a bombing, and she told them that a
group from Elohim city, a white supremacist community in eastern Oklahoma, had
traveled to the Murrah building at least three times to case it. 

Another informant, Cary Gagan, gave even more specific information, saying a
bombing would occur in either Denver or Oklahoma City. On the morning of April
19th, in the hours before the explosion, several witnesses saw bomb disposal
trucks and sniffer dogs already on the streets of Oklahoma City. Then, 38
minutes before the blast, the Department of Justice in Washington received a
telephone call.

Stephen Jones says Justice records have the caller saying that the Murrah
building had just "blown up." Jones believes the caller said that the building
was "going to be blown up," and that the Justice Department changed the story
because it ignored the call. But on the ground in Oklahoma City that morning,
the government was looking for bombs.

"And they made sort of a superficial security check with dogs and were a
little more alert," says Jones. "And then when the business day started and
nothing happened, they thought it was just a false alarm and then withdrew.
And then, of course, the building blew up."

The FBI decided, rather unscientifically, that the Murrah building was
brought down by a single anfo bomb: a hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate and
fuel oil, placed in plastic drums as a giant charge inside a Ryder truck.

But that explanation is not without problems. Only microscopic specs of
ammonium nitrate were ever found, there were no noxious fumes at the bomb
site, and the bomb crater, the most important piece of evidence, was filled in
before McVeigh's defense team could examine it.

An initial FEMA study said it would have taken 12 thousand pounds of anfo to
pulverize that much steel-reinforced concrete, and that that much explosive
would have also created a much larger crater.

Whatever was in the truck, some believe it could not have been strong enough
to bring down the Murrah building alone, and that cutting charges were used as
well. That's why it's interesting that survivors reported feeling an
earthquake for several seconds before the truck bomb went off.

"I thought it was an earthquake, because I resided in California for many
years, and it was almost like slow motion," recalled one survivor. "I felt a
shake, and then it began shaking more and I dove under my desk. Then the glass
came in; I think that helped me."

Jane Graham, longtime government employee and Union Local president, felt the
same thing.

"As soon as I sat down and turned on the computer, I felt a waving motion of
the building," she says. "It felt like a rumble -- it was like the ground was
rolling, and the building was swaying east to west. The young lady who was
giving the class said, 'Everybody, it's an earthquake. Get under your table,
under your desk -- somewhere.' And it must have been somewhere between seven
and ten seconds at the most, I believe. Then I heard the explosion, and the
last thing I remember is looking up, and the roof had been blown off and was
suspended in air."

Seismic readings at 9:02 a.m. show two distinct ground motion spikes at the
time of the bombing: a mild spike, a ten-second delay, then a sharp spike. Do
these readings help prove two blasts? Seismologists aren't sure.

But Graham witnessed something equally important: on two separate occasions in
the days before the bombing, Graham and others saw suspicious men in the
Murrah building. On the Friday before the bombing, Graham saw three men in the
underground parking garage looking at plans of the building, and none of them
fit Timothy McVeigh's description.

"When I first saw them, I thought they were phone people, because they had
some wiring," she remembers. "Of course, the more I watched them, then they
started watching me. They had a paper sack, and they put back into that sack
the wiring. They had a block -- I don't know what it was -- putty-colored.
Upon the man in charge's direction, the second man put it back into the car."

Does she think the putty was plastic explosives?

"I do now," replies Graham.

Kathy Wilburn and her daughter saw the same three men. "You didn't see many
people in the parking garage, but these guys, when we pulled up, I mean their
demeanor changed, they stopped talking -- they didn't say another word, and
one of them kind of looked over his shoulder like this to see what we were
doing. When we got into the building, we commented to each other, 'Well,
they're up to no good.'"

What were they up to? Were charges placed on the structure of the Murrah
building? Photos not only show that there was smoke on the columns, but that
some of the cross beams were cleanly sheared off, something demolition experts
say only a contact charge could do.

Experts also say the way the Murrah building fell may also indicate that
charges on floor beams began a building collapse just before the truck bomb
went off.

But the government has never been interested in Graham's or Wilburn's
testimony. In fact, from almost the very beginning of the case, the federal
government has engaged in what could be called a bizarre pattern of behavior.
It launched the largest manhunt in U.S. history, but after apprehending
McVeigh and Nichols, the investigation abruptly shut down. Although the FBI
spent a lot of time trailing a mysterious "Robert Juaquez," officials no
longer seem interested in finding anyone else.

"I think it basically boiled down to this," says Jones. "They had two men.
They couldn't find the others, so they declared victory and said, 'We've
solved the crime.'"

The second explanation is less benign. The explanation -- and it's a theory
supported by the government's behavior -- is that Washington knows who the
other suspects are, but who one or more of them are poses a big problem.

"The most reasonable explanation is that there was someone in this group of
people that helped carry this out," says Oklahoma state representative Charles
Key. "If they would have traveled this path to discover and prosecute these
other John Does, one of those persons, I believe, was either an informant for
the government -- maybe even a government agent. They don't want that to be
discovered, because that, like other information, will point toward specific
prior knowledge."

Key was responsible for convening a special county grand jury for the purpose
of finding out the whole truth about the bombing and what the government might
be hiding.

"We believe they had specific prior knowledge, and that they were in the
process of actually trying to stop these people from carrying out this
crime," says Key.

"What do you do if you're the government in charge of this?" questions Jones.
"If you admit that yes, we thought something might happen and we did check it
out, then you open yourself up to negligence, which means, of course, hundreds
of millions of dollars recovered by victims of the bombing."

Then maybe it's not so surprising that in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the
government did not call a single witness who could place him in Oklahoma City
on the day of the bombing, because those same witnesses, under
cross-examination, would also testify that they saw a number of other men too.


Carol Howe was not allowed to testify, either. Instead, the government tried
to prosecute her but lost. She's now in hiding and has changed her identity.

And the over one thousand fingerprints recovered by investigators have been
checked against fewer than 20 suspects.

Who could have been the other suspects? One man connected to the bombing by
Carol Howe was Andreas Strassmeir, a German national. Strassmeir was
questioned by the FBI and, incredibly, allowed to leave the country. British
investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says flatly that Strassmeir,
the son of a prominent German politician and a veteran of German
counterintelligence, was an agent sent in to infiltrate anti-government hate
groups. Strassmeir even suggested to Evans-Pritchard in a book that the
bombing was a sting operation that spun out of control because different
branches of the FBI and ATF were not cooperating with each other.

Carol Howe also names white supremacist Dennis Mahon as part of the plot, but
Washington has not sought his prosecution. And there remains strong evidence
of a Middle East connection. Jones insists that the know-how to build and
execute such an operation does not exist among American terrorists.

"This was clearly a conspiracy of more than two people, fairly sophisticated,
well organized and developed, and deadly," says Jones.

Key's group counts eight suspect sightings -- including Arabs -- but all
during the McVeigh trial, the government worked strenuously to keep the
defense from uncovering anything about the other suspects. What does
Washington know? 475 family members of the victims are preparing to file suit
against the federal government, saying it "knew or should have known" about
the bombing.

Jones, for his part, does not think the government will ever allow the whole
truth to be known.

"I'm not a prophet," says Jones. "I do not think the truth will come out. I
think instead, you will see continued efforts to keep the truth from coming
out. Those people who suffered and perished there in Oklahoma City died. And
they received in return the gift of grace. What they did not receive was
justice. They still wait for it." 

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