The FBI Knew In '95, Why Didn't We?

Eleven months after Timothy McVeigh was put to death for the Oklahoma City bombing, a startling revelation has come to light.

Specific information has surfaced that the FBI and other intelligence agencies were told in early 1995, shortly before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, that Islamic terrorists were about to strike government institutions in Washington, D.C.

Less than a week later, a federal task force updated its warning. The target focus had shifted from the East Coast to "government installations" located "at the heart of the U.S.," which would include Oklahoma City.

Shortly after the bombing of the Murrah building, Yossef Bodansky, executive director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, pieced together intelligence data strongly indicating that Islamic veterans of the 1979-89 Afghan war with the Soviet Union, who trained under Osama bin Laden, were responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma federal building.

Sandra Howell-Elliot, assistant district attorney in Oklahoma County, asserted in a Jan. 18, 2000, affidavit, that there are "intra-agency memoranda between the FBI and a host of other agencies that were not provided to either Nichols' or McVeigh's lawyers or the State of Oklahoma." She didn't know it then, but she was on to something. But what?

Most likely prior warnings, the same type of information that bothers the nation today about Sept. 11. A CBS News poll out this week found that two-thirds of those surveyed don't think the Bush administration is "telling the entire truth" about what it knew before Sept. 11.

The Congressional Task Force's warning revealed that Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations sponsored by Iran and Syria had been discussing since late 1994 a campaign of attacks beginning in 1995. That document boils down to ideological differences between radical Muslims, peace-loving Muslims and the rest of the world.

"In a series of gatherings and conferences in mid-February 1995, senior officials of the Hizballah (Hezbollah) and other terrorist organizations, as well as senior officials of Iran and Syria, made specific threats against the U.S. Congress and the White House," the warning states.

"These threats were made during conferences devoted to declaring the forthcoming phase in Islamist 'Jihad' against the West, and particularly the U.S. Congress and the president of the United States as institutions that are great enemies of the Islamist movement and especially Iran. This is a deviation from past discussion of the subject of struggle against the U.S. in that the Islamist leaders went beyond referring to the U.S. as a single entity to pointing to specific branches of government as their true enemies."

So American intelligence agencies had knowledge nearly two months before the Oklahoma bombing that an Islamic terrorist campaign was about to begin against the United States. But they failed to tell that to the McVeigh and Terry Nichols defense teams, who were looking for any shred of evidence connecting Middle Eastern terrorists to the bombing.

On March 3, 1995, the threat to U.S. targets became even clearer. The task force built a stronger case that something big was in the offing by issuing an update of the Feb. 27 warning to intelligence agencies.

"It was based on very special material I received and verified after the first warning had already been issued," Bodansky wrote in 1996. "The key message of this 'update' was that there was greater likelihood that the terrorists would strike in the heartland. The language that should be of interest is that the terrorists were expected to 'strike at the heart of the U.S.' We also put 'government installations' on the list of possible objectives ahead of the communication and transportation objectives (as in the Feb. 27 warning)."

The Oklahoma bomb exploded 47 days after the task force issued its March 3 update. Bodansky later indicated that intelligence showed Oklahoma City had been at the top of the terrorists' list.

"I did get, and later confirmed by numerous sources, certain criteria on how to better identify possible terrorist targets," he wrote in 1996. "By the time I mastered this 'method,' it was too late for Oklahoma City. However, going over and reconstructing relevant data (some of which arrived only after the bombing but had originated prior to it), Oklahoma City was on the list of potential targets."

The American people have a right to see any warnings about terrorism issued in the months preceding Sept. 11 and the Oklahoma bombing. Isn't it time to release those documents now?

It will and should make headlines only if a "smoking gun" can be developed showing connections between Oklahoma City and the Middle East. What this article has is a mere coincidence in time, a warning of attacks by Muslim extremists followed by a large attack. Suggestive, but hardly evidence. Terry Nichols is still alive, and fighting a further trial, I believe, that has death penalty implications. It's possible that the Muslims managed to use native American extremists without their knowing it, but I would hope that further tracing of Nichols and McVeigh's contacts (and their contacts) could establish the relationships if there was one.

Our reflexive reaction in the immediate hours and days after OKC was to suspect radical Islam, and, when that seemed not to pan out, much of the Left waved that in the face of the rest of us as evidence of how prejudiced we, as a country, were. How ironic if our first instincts were to turn out to be right.

What I would liked to see is the documents that Ashcroft had to go over after he postponed McViegh's execution for a month,.....

Speaking of Ashcroft:

"The following is a letter read by Claire Braz-Valentine, the author, at this year's In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College. It is worth knowing that the author is a woman of 60+ years, conservatively dressed and obviously quite talented.

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES

On January 28, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer's money for drapes to cover up the exposed breast of The Spirit of Justice, an 18 ft aluminum statue of a woman that stands in the Department of Justice's Hall of Justice.

John, John, John, you've got your priorities all wrong. While men fly airplanes into skyscrapers and dive-bomb the Pentagon, while they stick explosives into their shoes and then book a seat right next to us, while they hide knives in their luggage, steal kids on school buses, take little girls from their beds at night, drive trucks into our state capital buildings, while our president calls dangerous men all over the world evildoers and devils, while we live in the threat of biological warfare, nuclear destruction, annihilation...you are out buying yardage to save Americans from the appalling alarming, abominable aluminum alloy of evil, that terrible ten-foot tin tittie. You might not be able to find Bin Laden, but you sure as hell found the hooter in the hall of justice.

It's not that we aren't grateful. But while we are begging the women of Afghanistan to not cover up their faces, you are begging your staff members to just cover up that nipple, to save the American people from that monstrous metal mammary. How can we ever thank you?

So, in your office every morning, in your secret prayer meeting, while an American woman is sexually assaulted every 6 seconds, while anthrax floats around the post office and settles in the chest of senior citizens, you've got another chest on your mind. While American sons arrive home in body bags and heat-seeking missiles fly around a foreign country looking for any warm body, you think of another body. And you pray for the biggest bra in the world. John, you see that breast on the Spirit of Justice in the spirit of your own inhibited sexuality.

And when we women see our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our granddaughters, our sisters, ourselves, when we women see that statue, the Spirit of Justice, we see the spirit of strength, the spirit of survival. Every day we view innocent bodies dragged out of rubble, and women and children laid out like thin limp dolls and baptized into death as collateral damage, and we see the hollow-eyed Afghani mother whose milk has dried up underneath her burka in famine, in shame, and her children are dead at her breast. While you look at that breast, John, that jug on the Spirit of Justice, and deal with your thoughts of lust and sex and nakedness, we see it as a testimony to motherhood. You see it as a tit.

It's not the money it cost. It's the message you send. We've got the right to live in freedom. We've got the right to cheat Americans out of millions of dollars and then just not want to tell Congress about it. We've got the right to drop bombs, night and day, on a small country that has no army, no navy, no military at all, because we've got the right to bear arms.

But we just better not even think about the right to bare breasts.

So now, John, you can be photographed while you stand there and talk about guns and bombs and poisons without that breast appearing over your right shoulder, without that bodacious bosom bothering you. And we just wanted to tell you in the spirit of justice, in the spirit of truth, John...

...there is still one very big boob left standing there in that picture."

Hey HEG...have you seen this article from the BBC...BBC: DID BUSH TURN A BLIND EYE TO TERRORISM?
I saw some info on Case ID - 199I-WF-213589 and was doing a litle more searching.
Infowars has some more info and a pic of the doc apparently and there is plenty on the net about the bin Laden family being flown out of the U.S.
However, I can't seem to find aything more about the specifics of investigations being called off through that document. You know the BotB pretty well and I was wondering if you knew anything else regarding that particular Case ID.
I've been lazy lately on searching. No excuses, just the way it is. My DILIGAF factor has been extremely low over the last year.
BTW...this site www.corvusstudios.com says it is an E. O. and has a video of the BBC: DID BUSH TURN A BLIND EYE TO TERRORISM? article.
The E.O., if it is an E.O., isn't listed here...Executive Orders Issued by President Bush or here Administration of George W. Bush (2001-Present) as far as I can tell. He has 66 EOs to date so I may have just missed it if it is an EO.

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