Unconnected Dots: Loose Ends on Oklahoma City Show Need for New Agency

Mounting evidence suggesting foreign terrorist involvement in the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City suggests why it is important -- and may be imperative -- that the United States create a new intelligence agency.

In the month before the bombing of the Murrah building, U.S. intelligence agencies received considerable "chatter" that Muslim extremists were planning to attack federal buildings in the United States, intelligence officials told the joint House-Senate committee investigating the intelligence failure on Sept. 11, The Associated Press reported on June 20.

On April 19, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, a source in Saudi Arabia's intelligence service told Vincent Cannistraro, then the chief of counterterrorism for the CIA, that an Iraqi hit squad was scouting targets to attack in Oklahoma City, Houston and Los Angeles, said John Michael Johnston, an attorney who represents relatives of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Johnston obtained his information from official documents through discovery in the lawsuit against Iraq, filed by Judicial Watch in March.

Timothy McVeigh was executed, and Terry Nichols sentenced to life in prison, for their roles in the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh insisted, and the government maintains, that these neo-Nazis acted alone. There is considerable evidence to the contrary.

Last October, an item in U.S. News & World Report said that "a few top Defense officials think Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was an Iraqi agent. The theory stems from a never-before-reported allegation that McVeigh had allegedly collected Iraqi telephone numbers." Nichols is a man who held only minimum-wage jobs, and not many of them. Yet between 1990 and 1994, he spent between $80,000 and $100,000 on trips to the Philippines. On his last trip, Nichols was on Basilan island at the same time as Ramzi Youssef, an Iraqi intelligence operative now serving a life sentence for masterminding the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Edwin Angeles, a former leader of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group, said Nichols met with Youssef, a statement confirmed separately by Angeles' wife.

Youssef was arrested after a plot he was hatching to hijack U.S. airliners in the Pacific was uncovered by Philippine police. A confederate, Abdul Hakim Murrad, told authorities that Youssef had also masterminded the Oklahoma City attack, Johnston said.

Jayna Davis, an investigative reporter for the NBC-TV affiliate in Oklahoma City, obtained affidavits from several witnesses claiming to have seen McVeigh in the company of a "Middle Eastern-looking person" who resembled the sketch of John Doe No. 2. Davis did not identify the individual, an employee of a man suspected by the FBI of involvement with the PLO. But Hussein al-Husseini, a former Iraqi soldier, sued her for libel. A federal judge threw out the suit, on the grounds that the facts in Davis' broadcasts were true.

The Oklahoma City bomb was identical to the 1993 World Trade Center bomb. Michael Fortier, the former Army roommate and friend of McVeigh, testified for the prosecution in the Oklahoma City trial. He testified that McVeigh and Nichols, in October 1994, had been unable to blow up a metal milk jug with a small ammonium nitrate device. Their bomb-making expertise underwent a quantum leap after Nichols' last trip to the Philippines.

These are a lot of dots. The FBI says they don't connect. But as the investigation into Sept. 11 has shown, connecting the dots is not an FBI forte.

An alliance between Muslim terrorists and domestic neo-Nazis makes perfect sense. Both hate Jews and the U.S. government. The neo-Nazis need money and expertise. The Muslim terrorists need citizens who can "blend in" to disguise attacks.

In June Newsweek reported that the CIA had followed two terrorists from a January 2000 al-Qaida summit in Malaysia to San Diego, where their trail was dropped -- the law forbids the CIA from operating in the United States. Those two men turned out to be among the terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon on Sept. 11

We need an intelligence service that can connect dots, whether they are gathered at home or abroad. It need not -- ought not -- to have powers of arrest. But it must be freed of the legal constraints, the bureaucratic rivalries, and the lack of imagination which plague the FBI and the CIA.

How the Federal Intelligence Service should be structured, who should staff it, and how it should relate to existing intelligence and police agencies will be the subject of a future column.

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com).

Also, in his last writings, he was spouting all this stuff about sympathy for the people of Iraq. (I think Mitchell has the details, it is pretty startling.)

For whoever hasn't seen it:

When Timothy McVeigh was given the chance to write an essay from prison, he chose to write about the unfairness of U.S. policy toward Iraq. I've included the text of McVeigh's essay below. Look how he starts the whole thing. Why is this what he wrote about? He didn't expound on Waco, or the income tax, or 2nd amendment rights, or any of the sorts of things one would expect a "right-wing militia-type" to write about. He wrote instead about Iraq, biological weapons, etc. Why?

Here is McVeigh's essay, written in March, 1998, and published in Media Bypass magazine, in June, 1998. I'd really like to know why this is the one thing he felt compelled to write about from his prison cell.

ESSAY BY TIMOTHY MCVEIGH The administration has said that Iraq has no right to stockpile chemical or biological weapons ("weapons of mass destruction") - mainly because they have used them in the past. Well, if that's the standard by which these matters are decided, then the U.S. is the nation that set the precedent. The U.S. has stockpiled these same weapons (and more) for over 40 years. The U.S. claims that this was done for deterrent purposes during its "Cold War" with the Soviet Union. Why, then, is it invalid for Iraq to claim the same reason (deterrence) - with respect to Iraq's (real) war with, and the continued threat of, its neighbor Iran? The administration claims that Iraq has used these weapons in the past. We've all seen the pictures that show a Kurdish woman and child frozen in death from the use of chemical weapons. But, have you ever seen these photos juxtaposed next to pictures from Hiroshima or Nagasaki? I suggest that one study the histories of World War I, World War II and other "regional conflicts" that the U.S. has been involved in to familiarize themselves with the use of "weapons of mass destruction." Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones - Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the U.S. killed at least 150,000 non-combatants - mostly women and children - in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges against him and his nation, whey do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible for even greater amounts of "mass destruction" - like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above? The truth is, the U.S. has set the standard when it comes to the stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction. Hypocrisy when it comes to the death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied the upper floors of the building. Yet when discussion shifts to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly becomes "a shield." Think about that. (Actually, there is a difference here. The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb - saying that they cannot be held responsible if children die. There is no such proof, however, that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing.) When considering morality and "mens rea" (criminal intent) in light of these facts, I ask: Who are the true barbarians? Yet another example of this nation's blatant hypocrisy is revealed by the polls which suggest that this nation is greatly in favor of bombing Iraq. In this instance, the people of the nation approve of bombing government employees because they are "guilty by association" - they are Iraqi government employees. In regard to the bombing in Oklahoma City, however, such logic is condemned. What motivates these seemingly contradictory positions? Do people think that government workers in Iraq are any less human than those in Oklahoma City? Do they think that Iraqis don't have families who will grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones? In this context, do people come to believe that the killing of foreigners is somehow different than the killing of Americans? I recently read of an arrest in New York City where possession of a mere pipe bomb was charged as possession of a "weapon of mass destruction." If a two-pound pipe bomb is a "weapon of mass destruction," then what do people think that a 2,000-pound steel-encased bomb is? I find it ironic, to say the least, that one of the aircraft that could be used to drop such a bomb on Iraq is dubbed "The Spirit of Oklahoma." This leads me to a final, and unspoken, moral hypocrisy regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction. When a U.S. plane or cruise missile is used to bring destruction to a foreign people, this nation rewards the bombers with applause and praise. What a convenient way to absolve these killers of any responsibility for the destruction they leave in their wake. Unfortunately, the morality of killing is not so superficial. The truth is, the use of a truck, a plane, or a missile for the delivery of a weapon of mass destruction does not alter the nature of the act itself. These are weapons of mass destruction - and the method of delivery matters little to those on the receiving end of such weapons. Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the U.S. military, you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing in Oklahoma City. The only difference is that this nation is not going to see any foreign casualties appear on the cover of Newsweek magazine. It seems ironic and hypocritical that an act as viciously condemned in Oklahoma City is now a "justified" response to a problem in a foreign land. Then again, the history of United States policy over the last century, when examined fully, tends to exemplify hypocrisy. When considering the used of weapons of mass destruction against Iraq as a means to and end, it would be wise to reflect on the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. His words are as true in the context of Olmstead as they are when they stand alone: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." Sincerely, Timothy J. McVeigh

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