HEAD’S UP: Michael Flynn Hearing today
http://www.comeandtakeit.com/okc1.html
What Really Happened in the Oklahoma City Bombing? Many Victims' Families Believe FBI Knew Bombing Was Being Planned
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
As printed in Human Events, October 31, 1997
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[www.FreeRepublic.com]
Topic: White Water
New book claims sweeping cover-up in Oklahoma City blast
Chicago Sun Times
October 20, 1997
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
As Terry Nichols is tried for the Oklahoma City bombing, grave and disturbing questions are being raised in a new book by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He describes a cover-up that protects alleged collaborators of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh in America's worst terrorist act ever.
Evans-Pritchard presents documentation, including an April 21, 1995, memo that he calls ``the smoking gun of the Oklahoma bombing.'' Written two days after the tragedy, it reports an FBI debriefing of Carol Howe, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms volunteer undercover agent at Elohim City--a neo-Nazi paramilitary base in eastern Oklahoma. She told the FBI of conversations with two activists there who were closely associated with McVeigh: Andreas Strassmeier, a former West German army lieutenant illegally in the United States, and Dennis Mahon, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Reporting the interview with Howe, the memo says Strassmeier ``frequently talks about direct action against the U.S. federal government.'' The information about Mahon is even more precise: He ``has talked with Carol about targeting federal installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS building, the Tulsa federal building and the Oklahoma City building.'' The same document reports three pre-bombing visits to Oklahoma City by Strassmeier and Mahon (accompanied by Howe on one occasion).
This information was supplied by Howe before the disaster to her ATF contact, agent Angela Finley (who on Nov. 29, 1994, warned of ``bombings'' after a debriefing of the undercover operative). Whether or not this meant the government was alerted to the horror to come, what is unfathomable is that the Elohim City extremists were ignored after April 19, 1995.
The FBI conducted more than 20,000 Oklahoma City interviews, most inconsequential. But it never talked to Mahon, who unlike his associate McVeigh is an expert on ammonium nitrate explosives. Strassmeier was interrogated by phone a full year later and then only for the purpose of clearing him of accusations. Federal prosecutors successfully blocked Howe from testifying in the McVeigh trial and brought a terrorist case against her (which resulted in acquittal Aug. 1), though she then was still a federal informant.
Why this reticence? Why insistence that there were no more accomplices, though Evans-Pritchard provides abundant evidence that at least four other men were involved?
Evans-Pritchard is certain that Strassmeier and Mahon are under federal protection, though he is unsure what agency they worked for. He says the ATF was ready to arrest Strassmeier in February, 1995, as an illegal alien violating weapons statutes, based on Howe's secret reports, when the U.S. attorney's office intervened.
The jacket blurb of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories claims that Evans-Pritchard ``exposes'' the bombing ``as a government sting that flew out of control.'' In fact, he has not pinned that down, though he quotes Strassmeier musing about a sting to entrap McVeigh.
Glenn Wilburn, grandfather of two children killed in the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and a tireless battler for the truth until his death from cancer this summer, is reported to have believed this was ``a sting operation that went disastrously wrong.''
Wilburn, joined by 170 Oklahoma families with relatives killed in the blast, in April barely beat the two-year statute of limitations in filing a tort claim against the federal government. That lawsuit could yield truths, writes Evans-Pritchard, that ``may ultimately sweep away much of the political landscape of fin de siecle America.''
That apocalyptic appraisal reflects the conclusion reached by Evans-Pritchard, as Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, that America the last five years shows ``how a country loses its democracy.'' His investigative reporting of President Clinton runs from Vince Foster to Paula Jones, but the 108 pages on Oklahoma City beginning the book are only indirectly connected with the president.
Evans-Pritchard is no conspiracy-theory lunatic. Now back in London, he was known in Washington for accuracy, industry and courage. He has offered leads to discovering a pattern of lies and deception after Oklahoma City that, if verified, would approach Vietnam and Watergate in undermining American citizens' confidence in their government.
Robert Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist of the Sun-Times.
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