Posted on 06/20/2002 6:17:55 PM PDT by kattracks
"Authorities were warned several times in the two months before Timothy McVeigh struck Oklahoma City in 1995 that Islamic-backed terrorists were planning to bomb a government building," the Associated Press reported today.
The information was never linked to McVeigh but led Bill Clinton's administration to urge increased security patrols and screening at federal buildings nationwide, says AP, quoting documents it obtained.
"The government, however, didn't fortify buildings with concrete barriers like those hurriedly installed after McVeigh detonated his explosive-laden truck at the curb of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995, officials said."
Muslim terrorists are determined to "strike inside the U.S. against objects symbolizing the American government in the near future," said one warning obtained by AP.
McVeigh's former trial attorney Stephen Jones today accused the government of withholding the information from the defense team. "The cover-up continues," Jones said.
"We specifically asked on the record for all evidence, documents and tangible objects to show whether the government had received a warning of acts of terror against federal buildings. We didn't receive this," he said.
According to AP, "Some survivors and relatives of victims said they don't think the intelligence would have led to McVeigh because it pointed to Islamic extremists."
"A lot of times different departments knew different things and you didn't know the whole story," said Calvin Moser, a Housing and Urban Development employee who survived the attack. "That's the problem with a government as large as ours."
AP says it interviewed dozens of "current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials" who said that, after "exhaustive" investigation, the FBI and CIA found no evidence that Muslim or Middle Eastern terrorists aided McVeigh.
In early 1995 there were so many warnings of Islamic terrorism, former CIA official John Gannon said, that he at first assumed Muslims had carried out the attack in Oklahoma City.
"When I first heard about the Oklahoma bombing, the first reaction I had was I wonder if this were a foreign group that had done this or the Islamic extremists that had come up on our screen," said Gannon, a deputy CIA director under Clinton.
Specific Enough
The intelligence was specific enough that "if that was today, you'd have Tom Ridge going out and saying we have this threat," said former Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., who in 1995 was a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
McCollum formed a congressional task force in the late 1980s that began warning of the growing threat of terrorism.
"For a good number of years, there was a failure to acknowledge the severity of the threat," he said. "There really had been this disbelief or unwillingness to scare people."
Joe Lockhart, former Clinton White House press secretary, insisted that "protecting America against terrorists was a high priority" in the 1990s.
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