Iraq conspired with Bin Laden to produce WMDs...according to Richard Clarke

Washington Post

[Jim_Curtis]

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

[Ann Archy]

Can you make that it's OWN thread n Breaking News!!

The Left's New HERO has said that Iraq and Osama were in cahoots!!! Must be true!!

[rwfromkansas]

Here is his statement the other night on 60 Minutes in direct opposition to this article:

"Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever.""

Also interesting is Clarke's allegation that Condi did not supposedly even know what AQ was when Hannity played an interview today during the 2000 campaign in which she did.

There is also an unproven allegation made by a Freeper with no source in which supposedly Clarke was paid satellite airtime by the Kerry campaign. That story is questionable. But, he is definitely teaching a class with a Kerry foreign policy advisor after claiming to be non-partisan.

Very interesting, Mr. Clarke. Very interesting indeed.

I wish I could find out where he lives and call him up to ask him a question about this, but no articles about the guy have any info on him, where he lives, his family etc.

[rwfromkansas]

Well, nevermind. I have located how to reach Clarke now.

He is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting.

Harvard also gives info on Clarke and Beers (Kerry campaign official) serving as adjunct professors, though the Newsmax article seems to indicate they may taught classes together now, where some Freepers are saying Beers and Clarke are teaching a class together now, which I am not positive about.

[rwfromkansas]

Folks....Clarke and Beers are teaching a class right now this spring. I guess the rumors are right.

Here is a link to the Harvard website!! This is a direct link to the Kerry campaign (at least working with someone at the campaign).

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/webnumber/ISP213

[Wallaby]

bttt

Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden's role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings. While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is "sure" that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

[Jim_Curtis]

WND and Washington Times have picked it up.

Clark actually made mention of the bombing event during his testimony and Iraq was brought up and even offered without being asked that the factory was making WMDs, not pharmaceuticals. This means that the Iraq link is still there, unless he would have conveniently plucked the Iraqi scientists out of the mix by now.

He also said:"By invading Iraq, the President of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." An amazing pause followed and the obvious question was begging to be asked...but no one asked it.

I think Clarke is more guilty than any of us can imagine and I think he has brought the "best defense is a strong offense" cliche to a new standard.

One week before 9/11 he writes a letter(?) to Rice about hundreds of dead Americans at the hands of terrorists and then apparently, one day after a plan was finalized to deal with the taliban and al qaeda ( no more "inaction" to build up the legacy of the "warrior against inaction")...9/11 HAD TO happen.

[Wallaby]

I think Clarke is more guilty than any of us can imagine. . .

From Dan Darling's Regnum Crucis:

Interestingly enough, I got the opportunity to read a two relevant chapters from Clarke's book that I recommend to anyone with serious interest in the matter - "Delenda Est" and "Right War, Wrong War." It is quite interesting because while there is serious criticism of the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq, Clarke not only defends the al-Shifa bombing but also completely tap-dances around any Iraqi connection whatsoever, despite the fact that it was the prime rationale for attacking the plant to begin with. Al-Qaeda and the Sudanese government certainly couldn't have produced the kind of VX precursors he mentions in his apologia in the book on his own and one is honestly left with more questions than answers in this regard.

Another point he makes that I found extremely interesting given his credentials is that Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols were indeed at the same place during the same days in the Philippines and the implication is that there may yet be something to the conspiracy theory that the Oklahoma City bombing was actually an al-Qaeda plot carried out by Nichols and McVeigh. I was quite dumbstruck by this because while I had seen this reported on the internet, this is the first time I've seen anyone of any high-level credibility reference it. While I'm not ready to put on the tin foil hat just yet, it would certainly be fascinating to hear Mr. Clarke's thoughts on the alleged resemblance between Jose Padilla and John Doe #2.

I can't comment on the latter incident, though I was surprised to see a former counterterrorism official of Clarke's stature indulging in what many would have described as a looney conspiracy theory were it to come from the mouth of an administration official.

On the subject of al-Shifa, however, Rack and File [sic] has an excerpt from former Clinton administration secretary of defense Bill Cohen's testimony just yesterday to the 9/11 commission (scroll down to the bottom):

Concurrently, the U.S. intelligence community obtained physical evidence from outside the al-Shifa facility in Sudan that supported long-standing concerns regarding its potential role in Sudanese chemical weapon efforts that could be exploited by al Qaeda. The al-Shifa facility had been under surveillance for some time because of a variety of intelligence reports, including HUMINT reports identifying it as a WMD-related facility, indirect links between the facility and Bin Laden and the Iraqi chemical weapons program, and extraordinary security – including surface-to-air missiles – used to protect it during its construction. The direct physical evidence from the scene obtained at that time convinced the U.S. intelligence community that their suspicions were correct about the facility’s chemical weapons role and that there was a risk of chemical agents getting into the hands of al Qaeda, whose interest in obtaining such weapons was clear.

Emphasis mine.

So now Cohen joins Sany Berger and Clarke himself (in his book) in the defense of the al-Shifa attack and cites indirect ties between the plant, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein's WMD program. To me, this isn't exactly a non-trivial point as it predates the Bush administration and presumably any perfidy by the Neocon Cabal(TM) by nearly 2 years. So if all 3 of these men are standing by the decision to hit the plant in order to thwart Iraqi-Sudanese efforts to provide al-Qaeda with VX, that sure as hell looks to me like a definite reason to want to hit Iraq ASAP after 9/11 to prevent another attempted exchange that we didn't know about from succeeding, especially with the pre-2003 US intelligence community's conclusion (and even Hans Blix's, according to his new book) that Iraq did indeed possess such weaponry.

Even more alarming is a claim by Indian intelligence that the factory in question was visited by Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Why did Khan consider it necessary to visit the site of a factory in Sudan, which became the target of US Cruise missile attacks after the explosions outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam by Al Qaeda in August 1998? The Americans had alleged at that time that this factory belonged to Osama bin Laden and was producing chemicals for weaponisation purposes. Denying this, the Sudanese authorities had claimed that it was producing anti-malaria drugs.

I think I can begin to imagine.

[Wallaby]

I'll bump this thread again in hopes that the few who are successfully finding FR today take a look at it, and the information from Regnum Crucis I posted in the preceding comment.

[Jim_Curtis]

I was googling a bit, don't know how reliable this is as I didn't know about the Nichols stuff until you posted.

"On April 19 [1995], 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 C.I.A., that an Iraqi hit squad was scouting targets to attack in Oklahoma City, Houston, and Los Angeles."

I wonder if this info made it to the white house before or after the explosion. Did the intelligence meet the eyes of anyone in particular....did the bomb HAVE TO go off on April 19 1995 because there was "actionable intelligence" at hand?


http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310C.html

[Jim_Curtis]

I guess the story has got enough play outside the liberal media that at least one liberal outlet, Slate, has dipped their toes in.

Liberals are a bit stressed out about this for a few reasons:

The situation has Clinton's legacy battling against the current liberal talking point/assertion for which all of their anti-Bush rhetoric is based.

They want to promote Clarke but to do so they need to embrace the notion that Bin Laden and Saddam were in cahoots to produce WMDs...they don't even want to admit that Saddam was producing WMDs for Iraqi use.

The liberal media would like to ignore this forever but they can't ignore it if they want to keep pushing the "Iraq innocent on WMDs" argument because they can't expect the "what about Al Shifa" question not to be raised during their political round-tables. The liberals lose as soon as the American people hear the dreaded words "Bin Laden and Saddam in cahoots on WMDs".

I think it's safe to say that the political scientists are hard at work trying to nuance this thing before Peter Jennings has to tackle it.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2098102/

[Wallaby]

Key questions for Clarke:

1. In your testimony, you said "By invading Iraq, the President of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." Yet, in 1999, the Washington Post quoted you as defending Clinton's decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum by pointing to the assistance Iraq was giving Bin Laden on the production of VX nerve gas. You are reported as saying the the U.S. government is "sure" that the Iraqi nerve gas experts produced a VX-likek substance at the plant. You were quoted as adding that President Clinton "would have been derelict in his duties not to blow up the facility." How can you fault this president for believing Iraq is an enemy in the War on Terror when you were on record in 1999 as saying Iraq was assisting al Qaeda in the production of chemical weapons?

2. In chapter 8 (" Delenda Est") of your Against All Enemies, you continue to defend the decision to bomb al Shifa. Yet, you curiously omit any mention of your conviction that Iraqi nerve gas experts had been there. Why?

3. In a little-noticed passage of your book, you suggest that there is some plausible evidence connecting al-Qaeda to the Oklahoma City bombing. You write:

Another Conspiracy Theory intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American boy friend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.

Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earliler in, of all places, Oklahoma City. (Against All Enemies, p. 127.)

If your suspicions are correct, if the "mastermind" of September 11 was also behind the Oklahoma City bombing, would your apologies to the families of the 9-11 victims be extended to your efforts in the previous administration?

[Jim_Curtis]

"How can you fault this president for believing Iraq is an enemy in the War on Terror when you were on record in 1999 as saying Iraq was assisting al Qaeda in the production of chemical weapons?"

Good question. Here is a comment by Cohen during his testimony before the 9/11 committee. This is what I mean by The War Between Clinton's Legacy VS The Liberals:

COHEN: Senator Gorton, let me give you a real case involving actionable intelligence, the so-called pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. I want to use that as an example because there we were given information that bin Laden, following the bombings of the embassies in East Africa, was seeking to get his hands on chemical and biological weapons to kill as many people as he could.

We were real concerned about that. I was very concerned about that.

Intelligence started to come in about this particular plant. They had been gathering information on it, and I think I point this out in my written testimony, but, frankly, I apologize for not getting it to you much sooner. I was still working on it as of yesterday, last night.

But to give you an example, this particular facility, according to the intelligence we had at that time, had been constructed under extraordinary security circumstances, even with some surface-to-air missile capability or defense capabilities.

That the plant itself had been constructed under the security measures, that the plant had been funded, in part, by the so-called military industrial corporation, that bin Laden had been living there, that he had in fact money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program, and that the CIA had found traces of EMTA nearby the facility itself.

According to all the intelligence, there was no other known use for EMTA at that time other than as a precursor to VX.

Under those circumstances, I said, that's actionable enough for me -- that that plant could in fact be producing not baby aspirin or some other pharmaceutical for the benefit of the people, but it was enough for me to say we should take it out -- and I recommended that.

[Nita Nupress]

There are two interesting observations in this 1999 New York Times article. 

First, it was a known fact during the Clinton administration that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. 

But more interesting to me, Richard Clarke was interviewed by James Risen and he (along with Samuel Berger) tried to say there was no "internal dissent" during the planning of the aspirin factory bombing.

 

The New York Times
October 27, 1999

QUESTION OF EVIDENCE: A special report.
To Bomb Sudan Plant, or Not: A Year Later, Debates Rankle

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26

In the 14 months since President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, his aides [including Richard Clarke] have steadfastly defended the decision. Mr. Clinton, they say, acted on evidence that left no doubt that the factory was involved with chemical weapons and linked to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile they blame for blowing up two American embassies in East Africa.

But an examination of the decision, based on interviews by The New York Times with key participants, shows that it was far more difficult than the Administration has acknowledged and that the voices of dissent were numerous.

Officials throughout the Government raised doubts up to the eve of the attack about whether the United States had sufficient information linking the factory to either chemical weapons or to Mr. bin Laden, according to participants in the discussions. They said senior diplomatic and intelligence officials argued strenuously over whether any target in Sudan should be attacked.

Aides passed on their doubts to the Secretary of State, officials said. But the national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, who played a pivotal role in approving the strike, said in an interview that he was not aware of any questions about the strength of the evidence before the attack. [As does Richard Clarke.  Keep reading.]

In the aftermath, some senior officials moved to suppress internal dissent, officials said.

(snip)

Before the Attack
Suspicions Dating To the Gulf War

Washington's suspicions about Sudan's links to chemical weapons date back to the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The C.I.A. received reports that Iraqi chemical weapons experts had visited Khartoum, prompting suspicions that Iraq was shifting some of its production of chemical weapons to Sudan.

At about the same time, Mr. bin Laden moved to Sudan after his exile from Saudi Arabia and began to invest heavily in commercial enterprises, often through joint ventures with the Government, while using Sudan as a base for his loosely knit international terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, American intelligence officials said.

(snip)

Planning the Attack
Urgency Propelled Military Analysis

(snip)

Some officials said the White House seemed determined to hit Mr. bin Laden in more than one place. Richard A. Clarke, a senior National Security Council official who played a pivotal role in planning the operation on behalf of the President, later explained to a colleague that Mr. bin Laden had shown "global reach" by attacking American embassies simultaneously in two countries. The United States, he said, had to respond by attacking his network beyond its haven in Afghanistan.

In an interview, Mr. Clarke said it was the President and his principal foreign policy advisers who "obviously decided to attack in more than one place." [It's obvious that Richard Clarke was trying to minimize his participation in the planning. "It was THEM, not ME!"]
 
(snip)

In Washington, late in the day on Aug. 19, several officials, including members of the Administration's committee of top counterterrorism experts, were summoned to Mr. Clarke's office at the National Security Council and told to remain there for the evening. The group's members had met previously to discuss the idea of a retaliatory strike but had not been involved in selecting targets.

[In the next paragraphs:  Who was lying to the New York Times -- the "official at the meeting/participant" or Richard Clarke?]

The officials were told of the decision to strike for the first time by Mr. Clarke that night, according to an official at the meeting. But as Mr. Clarke gave them reports to read about Al Shifa, he was met with skepticism.

Some in the group told Mr. Clarke that the intelligence was too thin. "People said, 'Dick, what is this?' " according to the participant, but Mr. Clarke brushed aside those concerns and said the decision to strike had already been made.

The officials had been summoned that night not to pass judgment on the target, Mr. Clarke told them, but to help prepare paperwork related to the operation, including talking points for American ambassadors around the world and briefings for Congress and the press after the bombing.

In an interview, Mr. Clarke denied that anyone raised doubts during that meeting or at any other time before or after the attack on Al Shifa. The "people brought in the night before were brought in to do paperwork," not to review the targets, he said.

---

 

[Wallaby]

sn't it odd that those who clamored for the sworn testimony of Dr. Rice have not been at all vocal about the need to have the testimony, even over remote television, of Khalid Shaik Mohammed, the "mastermind" of 9-11 and the case officer of Ramzi Yousef and Mohammed Atta?

[independentmind]

Do you have any old links to Gorelick's involvement with the OKC bombing?

[Wallaby]

Top DOJ Aide Directing Bomb Case;
Merrick Garland's Resume Lists Wedtech, Marion Barry, Clark Clifford, Now McVeigh

BY DANIEL KLAIDMAN, Distributed by the American Lawyer News Service

Texas Lawyer
May 15, 1995
Pg. 7

Federal prosecutors are accustomed to assembling their cases in antiseptic offices, far from the scene of the crime and its victims.

But in Oklahoma City, where on April 19 a truck bomb blew apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the bloodiest act of terrorism on American soil, government lawyers and agents are working at ground zero, piloting the massive investigation out of a dank two-story warehouse whose windows were shattered by the blast.

Despite its war-torn appearance, the Southwestern Bell Building at Oklahoma and Northeast Sixth streets has been transformed into a high-tech command post for the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- the cerebral cortex of one of the most intensive and far-flung federal investigations ever.

At the helm of the operation for the Justice Department is Merrick Garland, 42, an intense prosecutor and top aide to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick who brings an array of skills to the daunting task of quarterbacking the Oklahoma City prosecution team.

"With these kinds of investigations, there is excruciating pressure to convict, but the trick is to produce convincing, legally admissible evidence against the ones who really did it. Merrick is the perfect choice because he understands exactly how the investigative steps will be critical to obtaining and sustaining convictions," said Alan Strasser, who worked alongside Garland in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C.

The enormous scope of Garland's responsibilities -- from ensuring the fast-moving investigation isn't tainted by poorly executed searches or mishandled subpoenas to assembling a prosecution team and an airtight legal case against alleged bomber Timothy McVeigh -- is a measure of the confidence placed in Garland by Gorelick and Attorney General Janet Reno.

A workaholic's workaholic, Garland seems propelled by an inexhaustible frenetic energy, which tumbles out in his rapid-fire, Chicago-tinged speech. As one colleague put it, "It seems like Merrick is everywhere at once . . . and he talks very, very fast."

Garland declined to comment for this article, but senior Justice Department officials, including Gorelick, provided details of his role in the case.

On the morning of April 19, a message marked "urgent" flickered across the screen of the computer in Garland's office. The message from a prosecutor in the U.S. attorneys office for the Western District of Oklahoma was concise: There had been an explosion in the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, and the situation was grave.

Garland and Gorelick agreed Reno should put into place the department's Emergency Response Plan, a crisis-management strategy developed after the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco. The two then met with Reno and began mapping out a plan, establishing dear lines of authority between Justices law enforcement agencies and other federal investigative bodies. They agreed the FBI should be given unequivocal command of the investigation. Later that afternoon, President Bill Clinton announced he had put the bureau in charge of the case.

By Friday, two days after the bombing, the FBI had a suspect: McVeigh, 27, a brooding Army veteran with zealous anti-government feelings, who was placed at the scene of the crime by witnesses.

With tips quickly leading agents to two brothers with ties to McVeigh in Kingman, Ariz., and Decker, Mich., and with a manhunt under way for a second suspect known as John Doe 2, it was becoming evident the investigation would involve thousands of agents and prosecutors.

"It was quickly clear that the investigation would involve not just Oklahoma City, but many other jurisdictions," Gorelick said in an interview two weeks ago. "It would require the ability to act quickly, with judgment and authority."

Gorelick hit the phones, calling U.S. attorneys around the country to instruct them that the bombing investigation and prosecution would be run out of Oklahoma City -- and that Garland was the attorney general's man in charge. By Friday afternoon, Garland was on an FBI Saberliner aircraft en route to Oklahoma City to take command.
 
STARRING ROLES

It isn't surprising Gorelick turned to Garland in a time of crisis; the two have known each other since they overlapped as undergraduates at Harvard. Both went on to the Harvard Law School.

When Garland graduated from law school in 1977, he clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That was followed by a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice William Brennan Jr.

In 1979, Garland got his first taste of working at the nexus of law, policy and politics as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti.

Garland left government for a stint in private practice, joining Washingtons Arnold & Porter in 1981 and handling a mix of civil, criminal and antitrust litigation. He established himself as a star junior partner but longed to return to prosecutorial work.

Garland got his chance in 1987, when he took a leave from the firm to serve as an associate independent counsel investigating the Wedtech affair, in which a machinetool company in the South Bronx prospered and ultimately unraveled because of a series of bribes and deceptive business practices that implicated high-ranking officials and members of Congress. Former White House aide Lyn Nofziger was tried for violating federal ethics laws, and Garland assisted in the prosecution. (Nofziger's conviction was overturned on appeal.)

Garland returned to Arnold & Porter the following year but did not stay long. He got an attractive offer from Jay Stephens, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia: Garland became an assistant U.S. attorney but skipped the customary tour of duty in D.C. Superior Court trying local cases.

Garland's second case involved Michael Palmet, the first drug defendant charged with operating a continuing criminal enterprise in the District of Columbia. Palmer was convicted and is serving a life sentence.

"I had been investigating the case for months," said lead prosecutor Judith Retchin, now a D.C. Superior Court judge. "Within two weeks, [Garland] had total command of the facts and could have tried the case himself."

Retchin would later come back to him in the highest-profile case of her career, the drug prosecution of Washington Mayor Marion Barry Jr. Garland would play a little-known, behind-the-scenes role in the Barry investigation.

Meanwhile, he moved quickly to complex white-collar and fraud cases of his own, putting a senior official at the Agency for International Development behind bars for embezzling thousands of dollars and taking part in the bank fraud case against Democratic Party elder Clark Clifford and his protege, Robert Altman. (DOJ deferred to New York state prosecutors in the case. Altman was acquitted, and charges against Clifford were dismissed.)
 
NAVIGATING JUSTICE

Garland again returned to Arnold & Porter in 1991, but Bill Clinton's election lured him into government once more. He was one of about a dozen Washington lawyers who prepped Clinton's first nominee for attorney general, Zoe Baird, for her Senate hearing. His old friend and class mate Gorelick led the team.

After Baird's nomination flamed out amid allegations she had hired an illegal alien and failed to pay Social Security taxes, Garland was part of the team -- also headed by Gorelick -- that shepherded Reno through the confirmation process. Garland impressed Reno and secured a senior position in the Justice Department's Criminal Division.

Last year, after Gorelick replaced Harvard law Professor Philip Heymann as deputy attorney general, she tapped Garland to be principal associate deputy attorney general, her top aide. He has quickly become a force within DOJ, playing a major role in most important policy matters.

Those who have worked with Garland at Justice praise his ability to navigate the department's pressure cooker of bureaucratic and ideological rivalties with aplomb.

Those qualities seem to be serving Garland well in Oklahoma City, where by all accounts the management of the investigation, involving more than a dozen federal, state and local police agencies, is going smoothly.

Within hours of landing, Garland was hit by a barrage of legal concerns. Motions had been filed for a change of venue by McVeigh's federal defender. Subpoenas were being sought. Search warrants needed to be approved. Garland even had to worry about the implications of McVeigh's inability to obtain permanent counsel.

In subsequent days, Garland met with Oklahoma County District Attorney Robert Macy, gently notifying him of DOJ's desire not to have a local investigation going on simultaneously. And Garland began interviewing witnesses and presenting them before a federal grand jury convened at Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.

Besides keeping Gorelick and Reno updated on the investigation several times a day, Garland was giving input on the administration's legislative response and assembling a unified prosecution team -- no easy feat given the tension between Justice and the 94 U.S. attorneys' offices.

Garland skirted that problem by forging a team that includes prosecutors from both camps. Leading the unit of Oklahoma-based attorneys is Arlene Joplin, a senior prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office. Joplin is aided by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Vicki Behenna and Kerry Kelly. On the team from the department's headquarters are Bruce Delaplaine and John Lancaster, both in the Criminal Divisions Terrorism and Violent Crime Section.

To provide support to the prosecution team and to help manage the lawyers in the local U.S. attorney's office, Reno dispatched Donna Bucella, deputy director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, to Oklahoma City. And Garland called in Gilmore Childers, a senior trial counsel in the U.S. attorneys office for the Southern District of New York who worked on the World Trade Center bombing case.

Garland has done the bulk of the courtroom work, but he is not expected to try the case; a final decision on who will represent the government in court has not been made. Some dose to the case speculate Joplin will share the trial work with an experienced anti-terrorism prosecutor from Justice.

[Wallaby]

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick expressed confidence that everyone involved will be caught.

At the same time, she became the first official to suggest - without demanding anonymity - that John Doe No. 2, the heavyset man depicted in three FBI sketches and sought in a nationwide manhunt, may not have been an active participant in the bombing that killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

"FBI AND ATF WERE WARNED ABOUT MCVEIGH IN 1993," MARK FLATTEN COX NEWS SERVICE, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, June 2, 1995, Friday , FINAL, NEWS, Pg. A18

[independentmind]

Thanks, Wallaby.

I remember seeing Gorelick's name frequently on the old OKC threads, but a search I did earlier came up with practically nothing.

[independentmind]

Here's another interesting piece of information about Gorelick. She was defense counsel, for some period of time, for Clifford & Altman during their BCCI travails.

[jmstein7]

New FReeper Anti-Kerry Ad: John Kerry Was Warned About 9/11 and Did Nothing