Doug--again, still have to read David---but Peter Lance (hardly a Clinton apologist) who wrote "1000 Years for Revenge" looked at the claims that McV and N were working with the Arabs in the Philippines and he ultimately discounts it. Please check his endnotes. Lance is one of the BEST investigators of 9/11 that we have, and he did not leave this stone unturned. If I get a chance Fri., when I'm back in the office, I'll try to post his endnote analysis.
The most compelling evidence surrounds a visit to the Philippines by Nichols from November 1994 through January 1995. While he and McVeigh were presumably in the thick of planning the Oklahoma City bombing, Nichols simply dropped everything in his life and went to the Philippines on a trip that he believed would endanger his life.
When he arrived in the Philippines, Nichols showed up unannounced on the campus of Southwestern University, a Cebu City college with a strong Islamic fundamentalist movement where his wife was attending classes. Yousef visited the campus during the same period. Another of Yousef's accomplices made phone calls to a friend on the campus during the same period. And two more al Qaeda operatives may have had business connections to the lumberyard where Nichols and his wife stayed during the visit.
According to his visa records and trial testimony, Nichols was planning to return on January 21, 1995, the same day that Ramzi Yousef planned to bomb almost a dozen U.S.-bound airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean and possibly crash a hijacked airplane into the Pentagon or CIA headquarters.
A note Nichols left behind "for the purpose of my death" expressed concern that he might die before returning from the winter trip, and included specific instructions on how to handle his money if his life insurance refused to pay out "for some reason."
Nichols was carrying stun guns on his person when he flew out of the U.S. When he flew back to the U.S., he was on a Northwest Airlines route out of Manilla that terminated in Los Angeles, matching one of the flights targeted by Yousef.
Okay.
The book the New Jackals by Simon Reeve was written before 9/11 but updated after 9/11.
The book details Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden. Evidence was provided in that book that the FBI believed that Iraq was behind the funding of the first WTC attack and the OKC blast. Nichols received training in the kind of fertilizer ingredients used in the Murrah Building. After the OKC blast, we invited two Israeli bomb specialists to the Oklahoma and they were convinced that eastern terrorists trained McVeigh and Nichols.
I don't know where you got that information, but it's 100% incorrect.
In the course of his investigation, Lance revisits the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and he finds "a growing body of evidence" to suggest that Ramzi Yousef may have designed that truck bomb. He devotes a chapter to this possibility, citing potential connections between Yousef and Nichols (who was married to a Filipina). It also emerges that Murad -- Yousef's co-conspirator -- claimed responsibility for the 1995 Murrah Building bombing on the morning it happened. An FBI document confirms it. (Full disclosure: I've spoken to Peter Lance several times, after first hearing about his work-in-progress from a whistle-blower group that champions FBI reform.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52078-2003Sep9?language=printer
That link didn't work:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52078-2003Sep9?language=printer
Peter Lance finds a growing body of evidence that Ramzi Yousef designed the bomb in the OKC bombing.