Posted on 04/06/2005 5:33:20 AM PDT by ricoshea
Hidden explosives tie FBI to OKC destruction?
Posted: April 6, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern
On Thursday afternoon, March 31, within hours of the death of Terry Schiavo, the FBI approached an entirely surprised Georgia Rucker in the forgotten little town of Herington, Kan., an hour or so southwest of Topeka.
The agents asked Rucker for the keys to a cracker box of a house she was trying to sell on South Second Street. They told her they were searching for possible explosives. Naturally, she obliged. Unconcerned by what they might find, Rucker went and had her hair done while she waited for them to finish. "I didn't think it was possible for there to be anything there," she told a reporter from the Daily Union in nearby Junction City.
Rucker was wrong. The FBI soon called in the Topeka bomb squad, evacuated the immediate neighborhood, and cordoned off a three-block area. They worked through the night and into the next day. As Rucker learned, this is the house in which Terry Nichols lived at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Although the FBI on the scene would not confirm that its agents found anything, ABC News and others were told by Oklahoma City's FBI office that explosive devices had indeed been found. The news spin, at least what little surfaced in a period of predictable news frenzy, was that the FBI was embarrassed for not having found this old material 10 years prior.
As has happened all too often in the past, however, seeming FBI incompetence provides a cover for a much more troubling story. The story, as high-level forensic economist Stephen Dresch relates it, revolves around an extraordinary figure, Gregory Scarpa Jr., a convicted mobster now serving hard time at the federal super max in Florence, Colo.
Readers may remember Scarpa from multiple Emmy-winner Peter Lance's book, "Cover-Up." As Lance relates, Scarpa cooperated with the Justice Department in the summer of 1996 by scheming to rout the calls of jailmate Ramzi Yousef through to the FBI. Unfortunately for the United States, Yousef often used two obscure languages that the FBI could not translate quickly enough, if at all.
[A letter I received two weeks ago from a purported NSA insider identified the key language as Baluchi, Yousef's native tongue. Again, reportedly, Yousef's final transmission on the subject translated as follows, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800 (last two words unintelligible)."]
What is undeniable is that the day after TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island, Yousef asked for a mistrial, citing the now prejudicial environment post-explosion. He was denied. By allowing him to communicate overseas, however, the Justice Department may well have unwittingly assisted Yousef in his effort to destroy that ill-fated plane.
No one doubts that his allies were capable of it. Indeed, Yousef had bombed a plane in the Philippines, killing a passenger and almost blowing the plane out of the air. He also served as the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and was convicted for the same. His uncle, Khalid Shiekh Muhammad, with whom he communicated from his New York jail, was the mastermind of 9-11.
Possibly to silence him, the Justice Department cut Scarpa no slack for his help with Yousef and deep-sixed him in Colorado for 40 years, a severe sentence for a non-lethal RICO charge. On March 1, 2005, Scarpa called Dresch, who was consulting with an attorney on a related case. Scarpa informed Dresch that an unnamed inmate had made him aware of a cache of explosives to be used in an act of domestic terrorism, possibly on the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19.
Dresch surmised, correctly as it turned out, that the inmate was Terry Nichols, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber, and he immediately contacted the FBI by both phone and fax, as well as Massachusetts Congressman William Delahunt with whom Dresch had been working on an FBI-related matter. The FBI visited Scarpa at the prison on March 3, two days later. Having been burned once, this time Scarpa insisted on a written cooperation agreement before he talked.
The following day, an FBI polygraph expert flew in from D.C. and administered what Dresch's own expert calls an "absurdly flawed examination." The FBI expert claimed that Scarpa was lying. Scarpa immediately called Dresch's associate and insisted that she and Dresch visit him.
It should be noted that the FBI's current chief counsel, Valerie Caproni, was the Clinton Justice official who oversaw Scarpa's work with Yousef. To thicken the plot, it was also Caproni who illegally ordered the FBI to take the TWA Flight 800 investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board and who arranged the prosecution of James and Elizabeth Sanders for James' reporting on the TWA Flight 800 investigation. The absurdly compromised Caproni has any number of reasons for keeping Scarpa out of the light.
On March 10, Dresch and his associate met with Scarpa for seven hours. He gave them a letter from Nichols that provided a highly detailed description of the cached bomb making material – nitromethane, blasting caps, kine-pak, etc. Nichols had told Scarpa that he hid this second cache 10 years ago to be used as a follow up to the Oklahoma City blast.
Nichols' apparent goal in sharing this information was to bust the man who allegedly supplied the material, a reported FBI informant named Roger Moore. Nichols also wanted to expose the FBI's role in supplying Moore the material, presumably in a sting gone awry. Nichols was certain that Moore's fingerprints would be on the material.
No longer trusting the FBI, Dresch worked through a contact, who had high-level Homeland Security connections. Together, they improvised an arrangement for Scarpa, and on March 11, Dresch laid out the offer. Scarpa relented and provided Dresch with the address of the house and detailed descriptions of the location of the cache within it.
Dresch went to Herington the following day and found the house to be vacant and for sale. His well-connected contact had not followed through, however, on retrieving the material and giving Scarpa credit where due. Only later did the contact claim that his people were surveilling the site waiting for someone to retrieve the material. It would take nearly three more weeks, the day of Schiavo's death, for the FBI to go in.
On Saturday, I called Jeff Lanza, the FBI public affairs officer on the scene, whom I have met on at least a few occasions. I left a message, asking him to confirm whether the Scarpa information led to the activity at Nichols' former home. His office paged him. Two days later he has yet to get back to me.
Lanza, however, made a point of telling the Junction City paper, as paraphrased, "that the FBI did not receive a tip leading them to search ... but rather had received the information during an investigation." But either Lanza or Gary Johnson of the FBI's Oklahoma City office is not on message. "Johnson," writes ABC News, "said the discovery was prompted by a recent tip."
In any case, when I visited the house on Saturday morning, there were neither media, nor police, anywhere to be seen. The Scarpa story is one that many people don't want told – Valerie Caproni, chief among them. And from the looks of things, they may be succeeding.
My kind regards to you, who are FR's premier archivist. I still refer people to the DSL, for without that background, there is no understanding of The Decade of Fraud(s).
Thank you so very much for all your kind words!
Have you read the Nelson Demille book on TWA 800? He had the female as the good FBI agent and the men as the bad guys. You never learned the motivation behind the FBI cover up in the story, but it sounds as though he has some of the information right.
He was banned, probably for Bush-bashing.
No, but thanks for the recommendation. I have a list. Some day. lol
Here's a short summary of what Jack Cashill is saying in this article:
It seems that Larry Nichols, before doing the OKC bombing, stashed away a big cache of explosive devices in the house in which he lived at that time (Herington, Kansas). The explosives were to be used later as a follow-up to the OKC blast. When the FBI searched the house after the OKC bombing they missed it, so it's been sitting there all this time unattended.
Fast forward a decade to March 1, 2005. Larry Nichols, while sitting in the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, apparently wants to get back at the FBI informant (Roger Moore) who gave him the material, as well as "expose the FBI's role in supplying Moore the material, presumably in a sting gone awry." (It's also possible that Nichols is trying to thwart someone's use of the explosives this April 19th, the 10-year anniversary of OKC.) Nichols uses his buddy in prison to contact "high-level forensic economist Stephen Dresch" to report the location of the explosives.
Nichols' prison buddy is none other than Gregory Scarpa Jr., a convicted mobster who is serving a 40-yr. sentence for a non-lethal RICO charge. (Regress back to 1995 for a sec...) It seems that Scarpa got the 40-year sentence even after helping the FBI listen in on some of Ramzi Yousef's phone calls ordering the upcoming TWA 800 crash.
The FBI had not been able to interpret Yousef's phone calls in a timely manner (remember those 10 Arabic translators they borrowed from the military after OKC?), so the TWA 800 crash was pulled off by Yousef's associates as planned. (The day after TWA 800 went down, Yousef asked for a mistrial.) After the FBI was unable to stop the downing of TWA 800, they made sure Gregory Scarpa was deep-sixed for 40 years to shut him up.
(Back to March, 2005)... Stephen Dresch, the explosives expert whom Scarpa had called to pass along Nichols' message from prison, immediately called the FBI. The FBI sent their polygraph expert from D.C. to give Scarpa a polygraph test and, naturally, declared that he was lying.
Explosives expert Dresch, no longer trusting the FBI, then called a "high-level Homeland Security contact." Together, they worked out an arrangement on Marth 11th in which Scarpa was to get credit for supplying the information. Scarpa then gave the Homeland Security guy the exact location of the explosives, the little house in Herington in which Nichols had once lived. The Homeland Security guy presumably gives the FBI this specific, detailed information about the location of the explosives on March 11, 2005.
Presumably, the FBI starts watching the Herington house for someone to pick up the explosives to use in a 10th anniversary bombing. They wait. And they wait. And they wait.
They wait for 3 weeks for someone to come pick up the explosives, then for no apparent reason, they suddenly decide to end their stakeout with 19 more days to go before the April 19th anniversary. They decide to go in and get the explosives on Thursday, March 31st within hours after Terri Schiavo died, while the entire world is watching the news of her death. By continuing a mere 2 more weeks with their stakeout, they possibly could have caught someone who knew about the explosives and wanted to use them.
Jeff Lanza, the FBI's public affairs officer on the scene at Nichols' old house, has already told a newspaper that "the FBI did not receive a tip leading them to search ... but rather had received the information during an investigation." They're not all on the same page yet, however, because Gary Johnson of the FBI's Oklahoma City office told ABC News that "the discovery was prompted by a recent tip."
Apparently, Scarpa's tip to the FBI about the Herington house is being hidden to cover up for the FBI's current chief counsel Valerie Caproni (and her cohorts) in D.C. Caproni was the Clinton Justice official who oversaw FBI-informant Scarpa's work with Yousef back in 1995. It was also Caproni who illegally ordered the FBI to take the TWA Flight 800 investigation away from the NTSB. And it was Caproni who arranged the prosecution of James and Elizabeth Sanders for James' reporting on the TWA Flight 800 investigation.
This stinks to high heaven. And they'll get away with it, too. No one cares anymore.
Thank you for the ping.
Clinton flunkies like Valerie Caproni, Jamie Gorelick, Sandy Burger, et al, have been and still are a cancer hellbent on the downfall of America. They should be surgically removed and shipped to Leavenworth.
I often wonder WHY the cover-up continues on Bush's watch.
Thanks for that
Good God! Thanks for the summary and synopsis.
Thanks for unravelling the story, it was a bit confusing. De Mille's book wasn't one of his best. I think the reason is because the book was written for the purpose of exposing the politicization of the TWA 800 investigation and wake up people to the fact that radical Islamicists started their attacks on the US long before 9/11.
Very interesting post Nita, thanks for the ping.
You might be interested in reading this interview from Front Page Magezine with Peter Lance (be sure to read the FBI documents concerning Gregory Scarpa under the FBI#302s link at the top of the page).
Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.
Did you read all those 302s? This is just incredible stuff. And some of them have the scribbled notes in the margins, most of which I can't read. One of those handwritten, scribbled notes in particular points to the following paragraph in the 302 (underlined in the original 302 for emphasis):
When questioned regarding the incident to take place within the next two to three weeks and the incident associated with the Olympics, SCARPA stated he believes these are two separate events and both will involve U.S. airliners. He believes that the first event may take place within the next week or two as approximately one week has already elapsed. SCARPA did not know through what channels YOUSEF will receive the information. An individual, possibly BOJENKA, is coming from England to Atlanta to check security measures at the Olympics. This person may already be in the United States.
Then, out in the right-hand margin, this is the handwritten note that has an arrow pointing to the above paragraph:
Happened July 1_, 1996
______ ___did the
________ in
_______
Thereforeit was NO
COINCIDENCE
Yousef called
the shit(?)
exp_ _ g
___ ___
______
I just can't make out what the scribbed note says! But I bet someone with some PhotoShop skills could. Anyone know who is a whiz at graphics around here who might be interested in trying to decipher this?
That 302 is dated for "5/7/96." The handwritten note in the margin says, "Happened July 1_, 1996."
The handwritten note was obviously written sometime after TWA800 was shot down. I may be blonde, but even I can figure that one out. :-)
Ummm... and for anyone who has forgotten the actual date... Flight 800 went down on July 17, 1996.
And no, I haven't had any sleep yet, so go easy on the spelling glitches. :-)
No one important cared then, either.
I wonder whose side the US Government is on sometimes...
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