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 appears so. "Someone" felt it was more important to protect anti-Americans than Americans. Go figure!
The DOJ and it's agencies obtained Falcon 50's, Citation III's, Hawker Jets, and Gulfstreams and have what's basically a DOJ airline. They can fly each other around for ninja conferences with all the paramilitary gear that JBT's could dream of without the hassle of being questioned. They use the general aviation terminal and not the air carrier terminals the commercial airlines use. This way they can drive right up to their jets and load their own toys, explosives, guns, ammo, tear gas, etc.....I once asked a piloting crew why the need for such planes, as they are the the most pricey of executive jets and they explained they had to be able to fly globally and needed the range. I wanted to puke right there. The vans are what's used on the ground, like airport shuttles.
One time I saw a Falcon 50 fly into Charlotte with about 20 FBI windbreaker guys come out. They panned the area and then escourted one prisoner down the steps and loaded him in some Crown Victoria thing with darkened windows. I asked the pilot who it was and they said it was just some banker arrested for fraud making a federal court appearance.
Now think of the money they spent and the fun time they have doing it?
How so?
If the feds were pulling a *false flag* operation and had convinced McVeigh that he was operating as an undercover agent or operative against an Iraqi plot against the United States, then he had no mens rea, no state of mind that he was committing a crime- he'd have believed his activities were those of a federal agent or employee.n Per following:
Both the Federal government and the ADL were "tracking" Timothy McVeigh long before the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. McVeigh and at least a half-dozen other men planned the bombing while encamped at "Elohim City," a heavily-infiltrated "Christian Patriot" community in rural Oklahoma. ATF informant Carol Howe infiltrated Elohim City before the Oklahoma bombing. ATF internal documents prove Howe was an informant who overheard McVeigh and his accomplices plotting to blow up the Alfred E. Murrah building. Howe sent over 70 reports to her superior, ATF Special Agent Angela Finley, warning that a number of people at Elohim City were planning to bomb a federal office building in Oklahoma City.
Howe was not the only government agent privy to the Oklahoma bombing however. The shadowy Aryan Republican Army (ARA) gang of bank robbers were also complicit. Aryan Nations "East Coast Ambassador" and FBI informant Mark Thomas assisted ARA leader Peter Langan, an asset of the US Secret Service. Langan, the son of a US Marine Intelligence officer, was arrested for a robbery in 1992. The U.S. Secret Service intervened, however, arranging for Langan to be released on merely a signature bond.
Langan subsequently formed the ARA, which was, from its inception, a government black op. For example, the ARA never encountered any bank guards or other police during any of their twenty successful bank robberies. Langan and his lieutenant were only arrested in connection with the robberies after independent investigators began to publicize Elohim City's ties to McVeigh. It was at Elohim where the ARA leaders, among whom was "John Doe No. 2" (Michael Brescia), held three meetings to plan bank robberies and other activities. (Langan's lieutenant conveniently "committed suicide" while in custody).
Many government black ops use Halloween Satanists as a cover for their crimes. In Oklahoma City it was "white supremacists" and "neo-Nazi" patsies. The orchestration was finite and detailed, right down to the appointment of District Attorney Robert Macy -- the prosecutor who allegedly stymied all efforts to get to the bottom of the Oklahoma City conspiracy --to head the special Grand Jury proceedings to investigate a conspiracy. This is the same Robert Macy who, when asked by Oklahoma state Rep. Charles Key why Macy didn't proceed with an investigation, allegedly replied, "They won't let me."
Macy's Grand Jury delivered no indictments of ATF agents or of shadowy right wing, neo-Nazi "useful idiots" like Chevie Kehoe. No, the only one indicted was the investigative journalist David Hoffman (no relation to this writer), author of the seminal book, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Feral House, 1998). Rare book collectors take note: the entire remaining stock of David Hoffman's book was pulped and destroyed under legal threat from lawyers for agents of the FBI.
Chevie Kehoe murdered gun dealer William Mueller and his entire family in Arkansas in 1996 because Mueller had inside information on Timothy McVeigh and the OK City bombing conspiracy.
As part of the "Revelation of the Method," recall that Aryan Nations member and L.A. daycare center shooter Buford Furrow "miraculously" eluded the largest police dragnet in the history of the LAPD, to report directly to his FBI handlers in Las Vegas in full view of the television cameras.
By the same process, Chevie Kehoe of Yaak, Montana and his partner, Danny Lee of Yukon, Oklahoma, killed the Mueller family while "dressed in FBI raid outfits" (Spokesman-Review, [Spokane, Wash.] April 8, 1999, p. B-3).
In both these cases a symbolic hint was being intentionally sent to the public concerning who Kehoe and Furrow's real handlers are. At the time of the Mueller murders Kehoe was a resident of the Shadows Motel in Spokane, Washington, where he had been staying on and off since 1994. Kehoe was often visited at the motel by a child rapist and Aryan Nations activist who was also a master gunsmith and machinist.
"Witnesses also believe McCrea and Kehoe met Timothy McVeigh at the Shadows Motel shortly before the April, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing...A former manager of the motel has reported seeing McVeigh visiting Kehoe there a few weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing.
"...But the possible link between the Shadows Motel, Kehoe and McVeigh has been given little, if any, attention by the FBI...With McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing, there is reluctance to reopen the investigation, federal officials say." (Spokesman-Review, April 11, 1999, pp. B-1 and B-6).
Here is a frank admission of the government's refusal to apprehend other guilty parties in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing. The conviction of the scapegoats satisfies the Federal police. Why? Because any further indictments would tend to risk losing control over perpetrators who might reveal embarrassing details and unaccounted for facts that point to orchestration of the bombing by the Federal government itself.
Elohim City was presided over by Robert Millar, himself an informant who reported to FBI Senior Agent Peter Rickel, according to June, 1997 court testimony. Millar's son-in-law, Jim Ellison, was also a Federal informant. The "chief of security" at Elohim City was Andreas Strassmeier, a German intelligence officer who was in direct contact with McVeigh in the weeks preceding the bombing and who Carol Howe implicated as a co-conspirator.
Federal Judge Richard Matsch prohibited Howe from testifying at McVeigh's trial, saying her testimony might "confuse" the jurors. After Howe went to the media with her evidence, the government indicted her on a trumped up charge of explosives possession. She was put on trial in August, 1997. Her attorney showed that Howe possessed the explosives at the direction of the ATF and Howe was acquitted of all charges by a jury.
Let me guess, an untimely death. I was a freshman in college in '95, before my political 'awakening' if you will. I'm going to have to read more about this.
That's what I remember too. I also remember that the trooper may have been speeding -- possibly up to 90 mph, responding to something. Also have the impression the trooper had someone else in his cruiser, though it was never mentioned. Other than the fact that he used the word, 'we' in one of his statements.
I take it you are referring to the 10' radius of effective brisance would not have reached the columns with enough force to crumble concrete? Maybe Rivero WAS on to something when he wondered why tarping was used to cover some portions of the columns. Hiding brisance damage caused by cutting charges well outside the limits of what the truck bomb could have done?
My guess is that someone removed those tags and knew that he'd not hang around OK City with a screwdriver stealing a fresh set.
And the local media complied.
I take it you are referring to the 10' radius of effective brisance would not have reached the columns with enough force to crumble concrete? Maybe Rivero WAS on to something when he wondered why tarping was used to cover some portions of the columns. Hiding brisance damage caused by cutting charges well outside the limits of what the truck bomb could have done?
The most telling photograph, the one that cinched it for me anyway, was one depicting a severed reinforced concrete beam, rebar cleanly sheared, within 6 feet of unmolested drywall and finish wood trim. If an explosion outside the building had the force to shear reinforced concrete, the drywall would have vaporized.
Plain and simple, shaped charges directly on the affected beams is the ONLY plausible explanation. The fact that this is steadfastly denied in the face of physics implies a much different scenario actually went down that day than they are ever going to admit.
Let me guess, an untimely death. I was a freshman in college in '95, before my political 'awakening' if you will. I'm going to have to read more about this.
Well, sort of.
In the weeks preceding the bombing, G.S.A. employee, Michael Loudenslager, 48, became increasingly aware that large amounts of ordnance and explosives were in the building and strongly urged (along with the operator of the day-care center) a number of parents to take their children out of the Murrah Building.
This situation arose after other employees became concerned with an increased amount of ordnance (TOW missiles) being brought into the building by the B.A.T.F. and D.E.A. As a result of this concern, a grievance was filed with G.S.A. by the building's security director. The result was, the man who'd complained lost his job there. Then, after the operator of the day-care center (the security director's wife) notified the fire marshals after some remodeling had been done (as her license required her to do), the fire marshals were denied access to do their inspection by federal agents and told to leave! And the day-care operator lost her contract.
As a result of this (fearing the worst with all the talk around town of a possible bombing), Mike Loudenslager and the day-care center operator then told many of the parents to get their children out. And, because of their warnings, far fewer children were in the day-care center on that horrible Wednesday morning than there otherwise would have been. A number of families, in and around Oklahoma City, have these two people to thank for their children's lives today.
Shortly after the bombing, Michael Loudenslager was actively helping in the rescue and recovery effort. A large number of those at the bomb-site either saw or talked with him. During the course of the early rescue efforts, however, Mike Loudenslager was seen and heard in a very "heated" confrontation with someone (there). Much of his anger stemmed from the fact he felt the B.A.T.F. was in large part responsible not only for the bombing, but for the death and injury to those inside, including all the children.
To the absolute astonishment of a large number of police officers and rescue workers, it was later reported that G.S.A. employee Mike Loudenslager's body had been found inside the Murrah Building the following Sunday, still at his desk, a victim of the 9:02 A.M. bombing! This, mind you, after he'd already been seen alive and well by numerous rescue workers at the bomb-site after the bombing! He is also officially listed as one of the 168 bombing fatalities.
The question now becomes: Was he murdered and placed at his desk by federal agents? Or was he just simply murdered by them and said to have been found at his desk? Access to the inside of the building, from shortly after the bombing onward was extremely limited to nearly all but federal employees by the F.B.I. His death is unquestionably the most important sidelight of the Oklahoma City bombing. Mike Loudenslager's murder, most assuredly was one of the major factors leading to the demise of both Dr. H. Don Chumley and later Terry Yeakey!
Could have been just a typical private "A" Team which are used all over the country, but not necessarily gummint-connected. Industrial security, industrial counter-intel, private enterprise picking up on closed unsolved cases at someone's behest, private agencies on contract with insurance companies, etc.
Many agencies use white panel vans fitted with roof periscopes, computers, radios, and all manner of electronic surveillance gear including satellite tracking equipment, video and still cameras, and sometimes weapons when working asset recovery on industrial theft and other criminal cases.
Why white vans? Ten to fifteen degrees cooler inside, which means a lot if you have to sit in one for hours on end on a hot summer day without the air-conditioner running and the windows rolled up.
But noboby I know in the biz would ever wear black on a hot summer day.
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