Posted on 04/19/2004 1:23:06 PM PDT by RippleFire
WASHINGTON - A Secret Service document written shortly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing described security video footage of the attack and witness testimony that suggested Timothy McVeigh (news - web sites) may have had accomplices at the scene.
"Security video tapes from the area show the truck detonation 3 minutes and 6 seconds after the suspects exited the truck," the Secret Service reported six days after the attack on a log of agents' activities and evidence in the Oklahoma investigation.
The government has insisted McVeigh drove the truck himself and that it never had any video of the bombing or the scene of the Alfred P. Murrah building in the minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion.
Several investigators and prosecutors who worked the case told The Associated Press they had never seen video footage like that described in the Secret Service log.
The document, if accurate, is either significant evidence kept secret for nine years or a misconstrued recounting of investigative leads that were often passed by word of mouth during the hectic early days of the case, they said.
"I did not see it," said Danny Defenbaugh, the retired FBI (news - web sites) agent who ran the Oklahoma City probe. "If it shows what it says, then it would be significant."
Secret Service spokesman Charles Bopp declined to discuss the video footage reference, saying it would be addressed by witnesses later this week at the capital murder trial of McVeigh co-defendant Terry Nichols. "It is anticipated Secret Service employees will testify in court concerning these matters," he said.
Other documents obtained by AP show the Secret Service in late 1995 gave prosecutors several computer disks of enhanced digital photographs of the Murrah building, intelligence files on several subjects in the investigation and a file detailing an internal affairs inquiry concerning an agent who reconstructed key phone evidence against McVeigh.
"These abstract sheets are sensitive documents which we have protected from disclosure in the past," said a Secret Service letter that recounted discussions in late 1995 with federal prosecutors on what evidence would be turned over to defense lawyers.
Lawyers for Nichols say they have never been given the security video, photo disks or internal investigative file referenced in the documents.
The trial judge has threatened to dismiss the death penalty case if evidence was withheld. McVeigh was executed in 2001 on a separate federal conviction. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison on federal charges before being tried by the state this year.
The government has maintained for years that McVeigh parked the Ryder rental truck carrying a massive fertilizer bomb outside the Murrah building and left alone in a getaway car he parked around the corner. The bombing killed more than 160 people.
The only video prosecutors introduced at trial showed the Ryder truck without any visible passengers as it passed a security camera inside a high-rise apartment building a block away from the Murrah building.
But the Secret Service log reported on April 24 and April 25, 1995, that there was security footage showing the Ryder truck pulling up to the Murrah building. The log does not say where such video came from or who possessed it.
A log entry on April 25 states that the security footage allowed agents to determine the time that elapsed between suspects leaving the truck and the explosion.
An entry a day earlier on the same log reported that the security video was consistent with a witness' account that he saw McVeigh's getaway car in the lead before a woman guided the truck to its final parking spot in front of the Murrah building.
"A witness to the explosion named Grossman claimed to have seen a pale yellow Mercury car with a Ryder truck behind it pulling up to the federal building," the log said. The witness "further claimed to have seen a woman on the corner waving to the truck."
A Secret Service agent named McNally "noted that this fact is significant due to the fact that the security video shows the Ryder truck pulling up to the Federal Building and then pausing (7 to 10 seconds) before resuming into the slot in front of the building," the log said. "It is speculated that the woman was signaling the truck when a slot became available."
Defenbaugh said the FBI had talked to several witnesses suggesting two people had left the truck, but prosecutors never introduced the scenario at trial because it couldn't be corroborated. That's why a new security video would be significant, he said.
"It would have taken the investigation in a very specific direction," Defenbaugh said. "Rather than having to go down an eight-lane highway during rush hour, we would have gone down a faster path with just two or four lanes."
Defenbaugh said the FBI kept a log similar to the Secret Service document inside the Oklahoma City investigation command center that might help solve the mystery of the video. Justice officials declined to discuss documents, citing the ongoing Nichols' trial.
In addition to the witness mentioned in the Secret Service document, a woman working in Murrah's Social Security (news - web sites) office who was rescued from the rubble and a driver outside the building both reported to the FBI seeing two men leave the truck, according to government documents.
The Secret Service (news - web sites) log contained other information about the case — including that McVeigh made 30 calls to an Illinois gun dealer in the months before the attacks to seek dynamite and that the gun dealer subsequently failed a lie detector test. The Secret Service lost six employees in McVeigh's bombing, the single largest loss in agency history.
Nichols' attorneys last week asked the judge to dismiss the case on grounds the government withheld evidence, including the security video footage.
New documents obtained by AP show the Secret Service provided prosecutors other evidence that may not have been provided to defense lawyers, including a file showing the Secret Service agent who reconstructed crucial phone evidence against McVeigh was subjected to an internal affairs investigation and eventually cleared for her conduct in the case.
FBI officials say that file details allegations the agent wrongly collected grand jury-subpoenaed phone information about McVeigh's calls without FBI knowledge, and kept it for weeks while she produced analysis that helped the investigation.
The internal investigation caused complications for prosecutors. They decided it tainted the agent as a witness and they chose instead to hire an outside expert to re-do the phone analysis for trial, officials said.
Bopp said the Secret Service did nothing wrong.
"The Secret Service worked cooperatively with the FBI and other federal state and local law enforcement throughout the investigation," Bopp said. "The expertise of the Secret Service on electronic crimes and telecommunications provided unique and timely information to the ongoing investigation."
On the Net:
The FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
The documents obtained by The Associated Press can be viewed at http://wid.ap.org/documents/okc/okcdoc2.pdf
It gets better,m or worse, depending on how you look at it. But since you mention Mohammed Atta, guess where he turns up again:
March 30, 1997
Electronic Telegraph Issue 674
Dennis Mahon must lead a charmed life. The FBI has pursued endless leads into the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, collecting more than 26,000 witness statements. But it has never been to visit him at his bungalow in Tulsa. The omission is curious. Mahon, 47, is an associate of the government's chief suspect, Tim McVeigh. Indeed, McVeigh's defence team says Mahon sent a tape to their client in prison urging him to accept his "sacrifice" and reminding him in a subtle way that members of his family were vulnerable. Before the bombing on April 19, 1995, he was the subject of a terrorism investigation which generated allegations that he was plotting to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma. In case the authorities had overlooked this, an undercover informant reminded the FBI two days after the bombing that she had told them that Mahon had made three trips to Oklahoma City. On one visit in 1994, the informant said he "cased" the building that was attacked. A former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and now a leader of the more militant White Aryan Resistance, Mahon has never made a secret of his extremism. He has called for the overthrow of the United States government by "any means" and regards it as an honour to have been barred from Britain and Canada. "I always deliver my bombs in person, in disguise," he said mischievously. "I can look like a hispanic or even a Negro. I'm the master of disguise." He has kept his sense of humour, despite being the chief target of McVeigh's defence team in the trial that starts tomorrow. McVeigh's lawyers have introduced documents in court asserting a "high probability" that Mahon and his friend Andreas Strassmeir, a former German army officer, were behind the Oklahoma bombing. "This is where I make my bombs," he said, giving me a tour of a workshop attached to his house. "Just kidding. Everybody seems to think I did the bombing. Even the Iraqis think I did it," he explained, saying he had been on the Iraqi payroll as a propagandist for more than three years. "They paid me $100 a month."
May 7, 2002
Fox News O'Reilly Factor
- Interview with Larry Johnson, Terrorism Expert
The O'Reilly factor interviewed Larry Johnson, formerly of the CIA, who revealed that the identity of John Doe #2 in the Oklahoma City bombing to be Hussain Al-Hussaini, a former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard Guard. He worked for Samir Khalil who was linked to the "charitable" organization "The Holy Land Foundation" which was declared by the Bush administration to be sending funds to terrorists. John Doe # 2 was seen with Timothy McVeigh three days before the OKC bombing, the morning of the bombing, getting out of the Ryder truck after it pulled up in front of the Murrah building, and he was seen driving away from the building. In 1996/1997 when he left Oklahoma City Al-Hussaini went to work at Logan airport in Boston from which several of the September 11, 2001 hijackers left. McVeigh's accomplice, Terry Nichols, an unemployed guy, made several trips to the Phillipines with unexplained sources of cash (See the book 'Others Unknown' by Stephen Jones, McVeigh's original attorney) where he was associated with Osama bin Laden's Al Quaeda organization, Abu Sayyaf. Additionally, the owner of the motel in which McVeigh stayed prior to the bombing of the Murrah building reported to the FBI that three of the September 11, 2001 hijackers attempted to book rooms at the motel in late July or early August 2001 telling him they were taking flight training. These were Mohammed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Zacarias Moussaoui, who is presently in Federal Custody as the possible 20th hijacker.
Blaming it on "right winged domestic extremists/terrorists" really, really worked.
The people who were talking about cattle deals, the slaughter at Waco, Vince Foster and other Arkansides, Whitewater, etc. were effectively muzzled as "extremists" after OK City, the "tinfoil hat crowd" --at least as the sheeple viewed it.
NOBODY WANTED TO EVEN DISCUSS IT--THEY LOOKED OVER THEIR SHOULDERS AND CHANGED THE SUBJECT, OR LAUGHED NERVOUSLY AND SLIPPED AWAY.
Even a relative who worked for a federal agency looked at me as if I had lost it when I suggested that there must be more to this than we hear in the news.
THank God this is finally coming out.
This, I have to see.
That is the $64k question. I don't think it was Ashcroft who hurried things up though. I sure happened fast considering it was someone who could have yielded so much information.
If the Bush administration had launched an attack on Clinton policies, it would have been easily dismissed as partisan politics, decried as unfair by the mainstream press, and immediately ignored.
By letting the Dems light the torches and collect their rudimentary farm implements, this has given them the feeling (those are important, feelings) that they were going to hang Bush out to dry before the election. They even stacked the panel.
By giving the Dems (and the media) all that rope, and letting things gain momentum, the media can't just pull the plug. By dropping the bombshell of the Gorelick memo, and the rest yet to come while things are rolling, more people are paying attention who might not have been otherwise.
There is the added benefit that the Dems wanted this, stacked the panel, and now it has backfired. This is a Texas prizefighter defending himself in a bar brawl. They took the first swing. IMHO a lot of worms will be out of the woodwork before this is over.
And why did Ashcroft rush to execute McVeigh? I don't understand that part at all.
That is the $64k question. I don't think it was Ashcroft who hurried things up though. I sure happened fast considering it was someone who could have yielded so much information.
This would make a 'whole' new thread by itself.....?
Cuba?
I think more along the lines of...its already done, why scare people or make them think we were lax or inattentive, or that we are really, really vulnerable, when we can stick this on these white trash peons and make a good case of it?
if a football player gets tackled especially brutally, he will get up right away and grin...never wants the enemy to think he is hurt...
same with OKlahoma and I believe also the TWA800.....
we didn't want the terrorist to think we had been hurt too bad.....
and we didn't want the American people to get "upset"...afterall.....the elections and all....got to put a happy face on.....
Given that they have been right about this much (and much more), as improbable as it may have seemed, maybe the rest of their (JBS) 'kookiness' merits a serious second look.
IT was the Eloihim City connection that let the Feds blame 'right wing' extremists, although Strassmeier was left out (for obvious reasons). Kinda like blaming a restaurant because you had a meeting there, although that bunch are extreme, even by my Constitutionalist standards.
Carol Howe was the (denied by the) BATF informant who produced the data.
As it's worked out, both of McVeigh's sisters, Jennifer and Patty, are still alive. I suspect that was at least a part of the deal. And if anything ever happens to them, a suicide, hit-and-run accident, a plane crash or a death during the commission of a robbery, just as examples of things that have happened that have happened to other OKC witnesses, then don't be too surprised at a release of additional information on Mc Veigh and who he thought he was working for- Andy Strassmeier was reportedly escorted out of the US across the Mexican border by federal agents two days after the bombing, and had been followed and reported entering a BATF office through an *Employees Only* entrance that required ID passcard access.
But the anniversary of McVeigh's execution is also coming up on 11 June. Perhaps we'll see a bit more by then.
That being said, if they come up with an actual video tape of people exiting that truck, I will be absolutely blown away.
Sound crazy? So did the rest of this a couple of months ago to most folks.
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