Posted on 04/20/2004 10:48:07 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Did OKC bombers join TWA 800 plot?
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
In light of what we know now we need to look back at a whole bunch of things that happened in the 1990s to see if there might be an al-Qaida connection and that would include the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA 800 flight. There may be no connection to terrorism, but boy do we need to take a second look at it.
– Herbert Meyer, Reagan-era special assistant to CIA director, on "Fox and Friends," April 15, 2004
In this generation, no single reporter has done more resourceful legwork than Jayna Davis, the author of "The Third Terrorist." For those who have followed the fate of TWA Flight 800, one of Davis' adventures has particular relevance.
In the summer of 1996, more than a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, the intrepid KFOR-TV reporter received a tip on her unlisted home phone line to check out a certain garage, International Auto Mechanics, located a mile or so north of the Murrah Building site in Oklahoma City.
"The Iraqi soldiers had been seen hanging out at the garage," the caller told Davis, referring here to the suspects that Davis had fingered as helping Timothy McVeigh deliver the fatal bomb. The caller's boyfriend, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who worked at the garage, had started noticing a heavy influx of calls from Iran and London in early 1995.
Then, in February 1995, the new owners shut down the garage unexpectedly and let all the workers go, only to rehire them a few months later, "after the big boom downtown."
The new owners, Davis learned, were a pair of Pakistani nationals, one a full-time student and the other, a New York cab driver. The pair had shown up in November 1994 with $25,000 in cash, bought the garage, and prepaid the lease through August 1995. Before the lease was up, the pair abandoned the business and gave it back to its original Iranian owner, himself a questionable character.
On July 14, 1996, Davis, accompanied by her husband Drew, found her way to the Pakistani student. Unprepared for the interview, he dissembled his way through Davis' questions. He gave no good explanation as to why he would absorb a $25,000 loss and then hand the keys back to the original owner, a man the student claimed had tricked him into buying the shop in the first place. When Davis asked about his partner, the New York City cab driver, the Pakistani student told her that she had better catch him soon as he was heading back to New York.
To her surprise, Davis found the cab driver's name in the phone book. This time, she had Drew, a trained U.S. Army linguist and Gulf War vet with a knack for accents, make a phone call. When the Pakistani cab driver answered, Drew identified himself as "Mohammed" and ascertained that the Pakistani cab driver was indeed leaving for New York City.
In a stunning bit of chutzpah, Drew managed to solicit from the unsuspecting cab driver his New York phone number. When the cab driver started growing suspicious, Drew terminated the call, called the number in New York and asked for the cab driver by name. "He will be here on Tuesday," a man answered with a thick Arab accent. This man, too, grew quickly wary, and Drew hung up.
At 1:17 a.m. on Tuesday morning, July 16, 1996, Jayna Davis got a phone call on her unlisted line. "Jayna, don't try to run away. You're not going to get away with this," the caller growled in his foreign accent. "See you in hell." This was Davis' first and only death threat.
Later on that same day, the Islamic Change Movement issued a threat, this one received at the highest levels in Washington. The group's communique promised an attack of great "magnitude" to embarrass "the foolish American president." The threatened time was "morning dawn."
The next day, July 17, as morning dawned on the Arabian peninsula, and the sun set on Long Island, hundreds of Long Islanders – pilots, fishermen, surfers, vacationers – watched helplessly as flare-like objects ascended off the horizon, zigzagged upward, made last second course corrections and exploded violently in a bright white light. The Serbo-Croatian word for such a blast is "bojinka." Some endless seconds later, TWA Flight 800 erupted in an orange fireball of great magnitude and fell immediately into the sea
That very day, National Liberation Day in Saddam's Iraq, Ramzi Yousef had been standing trial in a New York City federal court. Evidence strongly suggests that Yousef had conspired with Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols in the Philippines in the months prior to the Murrah Building bombing. "We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay," writes Richard Clarke in "Against All Enemies," "and were deadly when he returned."
Although Yousef also oversaw the first World Trade Center bombing, he was being tried in July 1996 for his role in Operation Bojinka, a plot both to blow up American airliners with bombs and to use planes as missiles to attack American targets.
The independent analysts who have looked at the fate of TWA Flight 800 – and this includes scores of airline pilots, safety investigators, munitions experts, physicists, TWA mechanics, FAA investigators, Boeing engineers and retired military through the ranks of admiral – agree almost to a person that missiles were indeed fired, and that those missiles resulted in the destruction of the aircraft.
Given the restraints on evidence gathering, these independent investigators differ on the details. One school holds that terrorists launched the attack, most likely from the sea and with missiles likely more powerful than the much-discussed Stingers. In "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America," James Sanders and I advance the theory that U.S. Navy missiles fired at and struck an explosive-packed terrorist plane in close proximity to TWA 800.
Either of these terrorist scenarios would demand a support team. When Jayna Davis heard of the TWA 800 disaster on July 17, she connected it immediately to her death threat and the cab driver's arrival in New York, both on July 16. Horrified at the implications, she had to wonder whether she had actually called the team's safe house.
This connection needs to be explored. If former CIA honcho Herbert Meyer believes that it is worth a "second look," perhaps the 9-11 Commission should oblige him.
"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.
Other interesting info:
Yes, Clinton and Gore did abandon airport security planning for sake of campaign cash. But worse, they concealed the real cause of the crash, in no small part to justify that abandonment.
In fact, on the same day in September of 1996 that Al Gore sent the airline's lobbyist a letter signaling his intent to roll over, the National Transportation Safety Board reversed its spin and all but ruled out a bomb or missile strike [on TWA 800].
In our book, "First Strike," James Sanders and I make this arguably prophetic comment:
John Kerry seemed to have his sights on Al Gore's Achilles' heel. After the events of Sept. 11, the story of how Al Gore helped subvert the investigation into TWA 800 and undermine airport security may yet prove to be a career-killer. Kerry's "slips" may have put Gore out of the race even before he got in.
Two weeks after advanced copies of "First Strike" started circulating around Washington, Gore withdrew from the presidential race. His withdrawal shocked Washington. It did not shock Sanders and me. We expected it. Kerry plays hardball, too.
While I have your attention, Chris, there is one other person you need to put on the spot. Her name is Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general under the figurehead, Janet Reno. You probably know her. Last week, UPI reported that the high-level 9-11 panel on which she sits "was rocked Thursday by the bizarre revelation that two of its senior officials were so closely involved in the events they are investigating that they have had to be interviewed as part of the inquiry." One of the two was Gorelick.
See also:
Why John Kerry talks about TWA 800
On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.
On the next day, for instance, the FAA began to inquire whether any dog-training exercises had ever taken place on the plane that would become TWA 800. On the same day, as CNN reported, the FBI now claimed publicly for the first time that the explosive residue found along the right wing "could have been brought on the plane by a passenger and was not part of a bomb." Likewise, after the meeting, the FBI would do no more eyewitness interviews, at least not for the next two months. The Bureau only did a handful after that – and all of those for the wrong reasons.
It was discovered by an OKC fireman, witnessed by several people, and promptly removed from the scene and disavowed to ever exist by the FBI.
"One" can doubt all she wants, as for the remainder of us, we believe they did.
but the Philippino press had a lot of reports about McNichols meeting arab terrorists in Makati (Manila) to learn how to make a car bomb.
His name is Nichols, not McNichols. And do you have a source on this? I can find no evidence that Nichols was in Manila...only the Philippines. Now Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed...yes, they were reportedly in Manila.
Heck, they even had comedy skits about Arab bombers at the time...even though two Philippine airlines planes were bombed in the early 1990's (one disappeared, one bomb blew up on the runway thanks to a delay in taking off) and their were well known threats to kill the Pope during his visit to Manila, stopped mainly because the traffic was too dense to get clost to him...
No arguments with this para.
And there are lots of Muslims in Oklahoma...maybe because they came here to study, and stayed and brought their families to live in freedom...
Ri-i-i-ght < /sarcasm>....see the quote from Richard Clarke's book in the last line of my post #21:
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.More info for you:
Yousef and Nichols crossed paths in the Phillipines. Mohammed was Yousef's uncle. It is interesting to note that Yousef entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi". Another name that could be thrown into the mix is Abdul Rahman Yasin, a U.S. citizen who moved to Iraq in the 1960's and returned to the U.S. in 1992. After the 1993 WTC bombing, Yasin fled to Iraq and was given monthly salary and housing by Saddam Hussein's regime.
According to this story, it was not actually live (dummy warhead) but was marked "live ordinance to make it look believable to the targets of a planned law enforcement sting"
Also of interest...
First OKCPD Officer in Murrah Building Murdered, Throat Cut, Body Drug with Rope (ruled suicide)
Intersting that Kerry once had this issue as a strong suit to whack Gore with. Not since the news that FAA agent Sullivan went to Kerry's office with warnings about Logan Airport security just months prior to 911.
Jack Cashill is an extremely respectable source. Thanks for the info. Do you know if he ever posts here?
"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."
I haven't read Clarke's book, but if this is an example of his self-proclaimed expertise on terrorism, it's pathetic. The Nichols/Cebu connection, including the numerous phone calls to Cebu, was covered extensively by McViegh's attorney, Stephen Jones, in his book "Others Unknown." Much of Jones' info is the result of an independent investigation he conducted in McViegh's defense, (an investigation seriously and repeatedly obstructed by the government which then included Clarke and Gorelick) . Now Clarke claims insight into the connection through "some" FBI investigation. If Clarke and the FBI -- which is presumably what he means by "we" -- uncovered the link, why was it repeatedly suppressed by the government during McVeigh's and Nichols' trials? And if the link was proved, why is he referring to it as a "conspiracy theory?" Was he or was he not Clinton's supposed point man on terrorism?
The "final coincidence" Clarke mentions, the Islamic conference in OKC, was uncovered totally by accident by Steven Emerson, who stumbled onto it as a CNN reporter covering another unrelated story in OKC in 1992. The conference ignited Emerson's interest in Islamic terrorism in the USA, and launched his investigative reporting career, as explained in the very first chapter of "Jihad in America."
As I see it, Clarke had the best of both worlds: he could pretend to be saving America from Islamic terrorism, secure in the knowledge that no action would ever be taken by the Clinton administration -- which pretty much freed Clarke of any tough decision-making. The result of all these years of hard work is a book that apparently rehashes the first-hand findings of other authors, while blaming the Bush administration for Clarke's eight years of tilting at windmills under Clinton.
I have no idea, but I find his articles intriguing...he's really done his homework, as has Jayna Davis.
JOEY GLADDEN - PRISON GUARD
DR. DON CHUMLEY - MEDICAL DOCTOR
TERRANCE YEAKEY - POLICE OFFICER
I have several Arab friends and I asked them why they always talked to each other in English. It is because Arabic is so old and has gone down so many different paths that people from different countries or regions have trouble understanding each other. Some common words are fine, but they typically will use English.
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