Document: Oklahoma City Bombing Was Taped

AP via Yahoo! ^ | April 19, 2004 | John Solomon

[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

[Carry_Okie]

We went around on this one for quite some time. You don't remember?

[Jim_Curtis]

From the Denver Post article in the usenet link from my last post quoting Oklahoma State Medical Examiner Fred Jordan on the embalmed leg:

"The leg might have belonged to a woman because it appeared to have been shaved"

From Mohammed Atta's letter to the "martyrs", instructions to prepare for martyrdom:

The Last Night

1) Make an oath to die and renew your intentions. Shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne. Shower.

[epluribus_2]

I'm sure this was dutifully destroyed by officials when they "closed" this case - after they pulled the "w"'s from the keyboards...

[elli1]

Do any of you remember part of the backstreet, hushed up coverage on OKC bombing (by that i mean NOT mainstream) abot all the FBI or other Fed. agents stationed in the Murrah bldg. somehow being absent or out in the street just at the time of the bombing,...

Bombing was at 9:02 a.m. on a Wednesday. Weather was peachey...warm, sunshine, light wind. Doesn't seem esp. unusual to me that agents would be out of the office at that time, esp. midweek. If there were ''missing'' agents, I suspect that they could have been found on one of the many local golfcourses.

[RockyMtnMan]

I was in OKC at the time and the news reported that a tape had been taken by the FBI from the South Western Bell building across the street. It was only mentioned once and never heard about again after that. That is probably the tape they refer to.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the research!

[LS]

Well, you miss the point. Almost no one is free of some remote connection to ANYONE. I have a cousin who was the mortician to John Lennon. Does that make me a Beatle?

[elli1]

What McVeigh had to gain by keeping quiet was the lives of his family...

You betcha'. His sister, Jennifer, was in deep do-do. After being granted immunity from prosecution (Feds threatened to prosecute her for treason), she testified against Timothy.

http://63.147.65.175/bomb/bomb296.htm

[joesnuffy]

End of Desert Storm part 1 we brought thousands of Iraqi soldiers here to America?
What the hell for?
Gee all of a sudden we have an internal terrorist problem...
Mena to the White House and the two party cabal

[job]

I was at what I think is called Penn Square Tower (at then end of Classen, just east of Penn Square Mall, it has changed names several times. I was working in an interior office, and we heard a great big boom. We thought a jet fighter had just flown by our window and caused a sonic boom. We went to the south window, where we saw a huge black cloud of smoke. We thought it might have been a gas main, but b/c of business, I knew most of down town was on the heater chiller system from Trigen.

We had no idea that it was a bomb. Did not even dream it as a possibility. We turned on the radios, and a small office tv, and they kept broadcasting that the FBI was looking for a brown chevy pickup speeding away from the scene, with 3 middle eastern men inside. This was broadcast over and over.

There is an excellent article from a Los Angeles newspaper posted of FR, which did an investigation to the middle eastern connection.

I also find interesting that Gorelick supposedly shut down the investigation to the Middle Eastern connection. The motive is easily understood because Clinton did not want to get entangled in a foreign affairs mess so close to re-election. It would have forced him to take action, spend time money, which he did not want to do.

One last thing that keeps running through my mind, is that there have been reports that Timothy McVeigh, and/or Nichols, were in the same small village as Ramzi Yousef in the Phillipines. If that was not a concerted effort to meet, it is quite a co-incidence: the two largest terror attacks on US soil (prior to 9-11) were planned by two people who just happened to be in a remote village, and neither one knew that the other was there, or why? McVeigh, a guy from New York, who was never stationed in the Phillipines.

[archy]

Bombing was at 9:02 a.m. on a Wednesday. Weather was peachey...warm, sunshine, light wind. Doesn't seem esp. unusual to me that agents would be out of the office at that time, esp. midweek. If there were ''missing'' agents, I suspect that they could have been found on one of the many local golfcourses.

Well, no; you miss the point: They were indeed out of the office, but were right back to the scene of the bombing just a minute or two after the building's collapse; at least ten of those from the BATF who had so conveniently stayed away until just after the explosion. Likewise, the FBI agents who routinely left their kids at the Murrah building's day care facility, though their office was in another building without one, all picked that one day to not bring their kids in.

Why, it's almost as if most of them knew in advance....

[theFIRMbss]

>Is there a link to McVeigh's manifesto?

I'd like to see it.
If such a thing existed,
we'd have a thread here.

Metacrawler finds *
only a comment about
a "letter" cops found

on his sister's drive,
and "literature" they found
in McVeigh's auto.

Neither of those is
my idea of what's called
a "manifesto."

----------------------------------------------------------

*     "McVEIGH'S MANIFESTO: The key to McVeigh's thinking, Hartzler said, was the literature agents found in his car after the bombing, including anti-government writings. McVeigh also allegedly left on his sister's computer hard drive an angry, profanity-laced message for federal agents."

[tang-soo]

I posted the following comment a little over a year ago on a thread discussing John Stossel being elevated to anchor on 20/20 ...

Good. I like Stossel. Maybe he can get the missing episode of the Ok. City bombing aired.

The jaw-dropping first episode aired in 1997 (I think that was the year). It spoke of problems with the elevator story, lack of witnesses being called to testify that saw McVeigh with at least one other person moments before the explosion, missing log sheet from the Fire Dept (that is reported to have performed a bomb search that morning around downtown, but latter denied) and several other key points.

I remember the reporter saying to Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters that this was part one and part two would air the following week and that if you thought this was intriguing, just wait until then. Walters' face was ashen. Well, the second episode never aired (with no explaination), from what I understand, the producer (I think his name was Martinez and was well-repsected in the business) was fired by ABC and that was that. I ordered a copy of the tape from ABC and the ending was completely different. No mention of a second episode. I'm pretty sure the reporter was Tom Jarrel (spelling?).

I've brought this up before, hoping someone on the inside could contact Martinez and release the unaired information. Would be interesting if one the victims' family or Rep. Keys could sue for release of the tape.

[archy]

You betcha'. His sister, Jennifer, was in deep do-do. After being granted immunity from prosecution (Feds threatened to prosecute her for treason), she testified against Timothy.

Not quite. The threat was to prosecute her for *misprision of a felony*, a violation of Section 4 of Title 18, the US Criminal Code. That was the law that makes it a felony, for instance, for any of the FBI or BATF agents who knew of any suppression of any of the evidence that might have convinced jurors to clear McVeigh by any of their partners not to have reported that concealment to the Federal Judge inthe case... or, for that matter, affecting any of the Secret Service Agents with knowledge of what happened to the White House parking lot surveilance videotapes from July 20, 1993, the day Vince Foster was murdered.

Accordingly, Chapter Four of Title 18 has since been removed from the books.

[Smokin' Joe]

Nope. I was being facetious. But, when you think about it, there is the sort of intellectual inbreeding inside the Beltway that produces the policy equivalent of toothless banjo pickers. It may sound good, but on closer examination leaves much to be desired. Throw in a profit motive and tremendous potential for corruption, and sometimes seemingly innocent connections have much more to them. Often, there is little of consequence. But when the dots connect, it may merit a closer look.

I have a cousin who was the mortician to John Lennon. Does that make me a Beatle?

No, but had you been selling locks of JL's hair on eBay, it might raise a flag.

Those are the types of connections that bear a second look.

[archy]

One last thing that keeps running through my mind, is that there have been reports that Timothy McVeigh, and/or Nichols, were in the same small village as Ramzi Yousef in the Phillipines. If that was not a concerted effort to meet, it is quite a co-incidence: the two largest terror attacks on US soil (prior to 9-11) were planned by two people who just happened to be in a remote village, and neither one knew that the other was there, or why? McVeigh, a guy from New York, who was never stationed in the Phillipines.

Oh it gets better than just Ramzi Yousef.

An associate of Ramsey Yousef, Edwin Angeles, had been arrested in the Phillipines where he was contacted by McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones. Angeles linked Nichols (a.k.a. 'the farmer') to Yousef in a meeting on the island of Mindanao. In his book 'Others Unknown', Jones describes that at a meeting in Davao, Angeles met an American who introduced himself as 'the farmer'. Among those present at the meeting were Ramsey Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah. The meeting was to discuss terrorism and Murad, Khan and Yousef would later be defendants in the plot to blow up twelve U.S. airliners. All were convicted on September 5, 1996 and are in American prisons. On April 19, 1995, Murad told his guard in his New York cell that the Oklahoma city bombing was the work of Islamic Jihad.

Last month former NBC reporter Jayna Davis told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly that compelling evidence links McVeigh to a Middle Eastern terrorist cell ultimately controlled by bin Laden. "What we discovered, an intelligence source at one of the highest levels in the federal government later confirmed, was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell living and operating in the heart of Oklahoma City just a few miles from the Alfred P. Murrah building," Davis said. Her NBC affiliate had located several witnesses who claimed that an Iraqi national with ties to Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard was seen in the company of McVeigh just prior to the bombing, Davis said. The Iraqi was also seen driving away from the bomb scene in a car identified by the FBI as a possible getaway vehicle.

"We have 24 sworn witness affidavits that tie seven to eight Arab men to various stages of the bombing plot from the beginning all the way to the day in which the plot was executed," the former NBC reporter told O'Reilly.

"It really is a foreign conspiracy masterminded and funded by Osama bin Laden, according to my intelligence sources," she asserted.

Davis is not alone in that belief. In his 1999 book on the Oklahoma City tragedy, "Others Unknown," McVeigh's lawyer Stephen Jones made similar claims, citing a meeting in the early 1990s between World Trade Center bomber Yousef and McVeigh's partner, Terry Nichols, in the Philippines, which he called a "hotbed of fundamentalist Muslim activity." Jones said his research shows that bin Laden was in the Philippines at the same time as Yousef and Nichols. Both Jones and Davis said federal investigators were uninterested in exploring any possible Middle Eastern connection to the crime.

[archy]

Well, you miss the point. Almost no one is free of some remote connection to ANYONE. I have a cousin who was the mortician to John Lennon. Does that make me a Beatle?

Well, I'd like to hear you give us your version of Please, Please Me and Blackbird before I get you any bookings here in Memphis....

[archy]

End of Desert Storm part 1 we brought thousands of Iraqi soldiers here to America?
What the hell for?

Haven't you heard? There are all these jobs most Americans are unwilling to perform.

Narcotics couriers, assassinations and witness rubouts, political bombings....

[Smokin' Joe]

One of the effects was to achieve a sense of 'no matter what happened at Waco, these extremists have gone overboard in retaliation, so Waco is cancelled out/justified'. It sounds screwy, but part of the media ambiance was that 'see, these people are dangerous' anti-right wing attitude.

I seriously doubt that the Congressional hearings had a fraction of the vigor they might have had if conservatives had not seemed to lose the moral high ground.

Blaming OKC on 'right wing extremists' scored a tremendous propaganda victory for the left; branding anyone to the right of Hillary an extremist effectively muzzled all but the softest dissent. Rush survived by sticking to 'safer' topics, and with the Clintons, there were plenty of those.

Events such as Waco and Ruby Ridge had sufficient impact that between outrage and fear rural folks were organizing into 'militias' for mutual defense against attacking agencies, because they had been vocal in disagreeing with Clinton policies. Unfortunately, this allowed them to be further demonized as extremists in the leftist press.

While conspircy theories abounded, people forgot that the theories existed to explain events which did not fit normal parameters. The events occurred, from the attack on Gordon Kahl (sp?) on a North Dakota roadside (when he could have been arrested in Medina, ND, probably nonviolently) to 80+ fiery deaths at Waco, things didn't make sense.

The lines were intentionally blurred between Tax protesters, neo-Nazis, the KKK, gunowners, JBS members, radical religious sects, and others in order to make all seem more 'extreme' in the media.

Guys who went shooting on weekends before all this, either quit going to the range or became suspicious of newcomers. People who had freely discussed politics would look around before discussing current events, if they didn't change the subject or just turn away. People would not write their congresscritters because they didn't want to end up on some 'list'. The effect was profound.

Had the OK City bombing investigation implicated Muslim terrorists, that effect would have been lost, and the Clintons needed that effect.

[archy]

"Why would Clinton cover up Muslim involvement in the OKC bombing?"

More precisely, why would the Clintons cover up Saudi involvement in the OKC bombing?

The couple who saw persons in and around Vincent Foster's car at Fort Marcy Park were not the only persons ignored during the investigation of ex-Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske.
To date, no one can account for several men seen wearing orange vests in the park, as well as park visitors who entered after police arrived.

According to a source familiar with the probe, several people entered during the night through a rear entrance and encountered park police. The police had not secured that entrance.

The officers also violated standard police procedure by not recording the names of the individuals who came into the park on the night of July 20, 1993.

And then there were the mysterious men wearing orange vests. A park police officer has acknowledged that after police arrived at the park and well after the end of the workday, they discovered several men wearing orange vests who claimed to be park maintenance workers clearing a park trail.

The park police did not record their names or positively identify them.

Fairfax County rescue worker Todd Hall was among the first at the scene. Sources in Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's probe were aware that he told the grand jury that when he first arrived, he thought he saw a man wearing an orange vest running from the scene on a footpath just below the slope where Foster's body was found. The man, Hall said, was running toward the rear entrance.

During grand jury proceedings, park police claimed they were unaware of the second entrance. Prosecutors had evidence, however, that police were regularly stationed at the rear entrance during the Gulf War, since the entrance is directly across the street from the Saudi Arabian ambassador's residence.