Yes, please. I should follow the threads more closely than I do, but please continue to flag me. All efforts at getting whatever the truth is here out into the light of day are appreciated.
Posted on 11/14/2002 5:49:00 PM PST by sjersey
DALLAS - (KRT) - A Tulsa, Okla., airport police officer who has helped perpetuate persistent claims of Middle Eastern involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing has been accused of lying to Congress.
Rep. Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, asked Attorney General John Ashcroft late last week to prosecute J.W. Reser for lying in a sworn affidavit and interviews with congressional investigators.
Reser, who works a night shift at the Tulsa International Airport police department, could not be reached for comment.
A Justice Department spokesman said Wednesday that agency officials had not seen Burton's letter but added that it would be reviewed "as with all congressional requests."
Burton, R-Ind., opened an investigation last spring to examine claims long promoted by a former Oklahoma City television reporter, Jayna Davis, about foreign involvement in the April 19, 1995, blast.
Davis has complained that federal officials have ignored research that she says supports the Middle Eastern theory, including 23 sworn statements she presented in February to Burton's committee.
Davis' materials included an affidavit in which Reser claimed to have seen a surveillance video depicting a Middle Eastern man leaving a bomb-laden Ryder truck just before it shredded the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Reser also claimed that he was working as a Navy contract employee to help investigate the bombing when he viewed the tape at an intelligence briefing at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.
But U.S. Navy officials told committee investigators that the Navy never employed Reser, and they could find no record of the briefing or video.
Congressional investigators also determined that Reser had lied about many other aspects of his background, falsely claiming to have U.S. government intelligence experience. They learned that he lied about being a retired Oklahoma City narcotics investigator. He was actually fired from that department after filing a false report claiming to have been shot at, Burton's letter to the Justice Department indicated.
Burton wrote that Reser's false statements were of particular concern because of the seriousness of his claims and their "potential to cause serious pain and anxiety for the families and victims of the Oklahoma City bombing."
The blast killed 168 people and injured hundreds. Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001, for driving the bomb-laden truck to the federal building.
A massive dragnet led to the arrest of only one other person, Terry Nichols. A former Army buddy of McVeigh, Nichols is serving a life sentence following federal convictions for conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of eight U.S. law enforcement officers killed in the blast. He still faces state murder charges.
Federal investigators have long said they had no evidence that anyone else helped plan or carry out the attack. But some survivors and others have embraced theories promoted by Davis and others that Arab terrorists were involved.
Davis first began reporting that theory, fingering a former Iraqi soldier as McVeigh's accomplice, while working for an Oklahoma City television station. She fended off a defamation lawsuit by the former soldier, and eventually began working full time to research and promote her belief that the Oklahoma bombing was the work of Middle Eastern terrorists.
Davis said she helped fund her work with a $57,000 donation from the same Chicago-area real estate magnate who gave large donations to other conspiracy theorists and causes before his death in August. The Chicago man, Alexander Magnus, also funded attempts by a physician active in the anti-abortion movement to autopsy bodies of Branch Davidians killed in a 1993 standoff with federal authorities near Waco, Texas.
Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other extremist and fringe groups, said Magnus also helped fund efforts to prove government involvement in the crash of TWA Flight 800 and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, as well as a successful campaign by former Oklahoma state Rep. Charles Key to convene a state grand jury to probe his conspiracy theories surrounding the 1995 bombing.
Davis acknowledged that she used some of Magnus' donation to pay Reser to work as an investigator late last year. She said she then asked Reser in January to write the three-page affidavit in which he praised her work and detailed his claims about seeing a dramatic videotape proving Middle Eastern involvement.
Davis said Tuesday that she was concerned by the allegation that Reser had lied, but she added that she had no idea until she was told by congressional investigators that they were having difficulty verifying many of his claims.
"I don't think it reflects upon this investigation, my research," she said, adding that she was involved with Reser only briefly and relied little on his work.
But others who embrace her belief that the Iraqi government was somehow involved in the 1995 attack say they fear that it could harm efforts to prove their case.
"It's unfortunate because it's going to diminish the value of the good work she did, and it's going to hurt our side of the question as to whether or not there was more to the Oklahoma City bombing," said Mike Johnston, a lawyer who filed a wrongful death lawsuit in March against the government of Iraq on behalf of a survivors' group.
Johnston said his concerns about Reser led him to warn Davis last fall that the officer was lying about some aspects of his background and couldn't be trusted. But he said Davis responded by telling him in writing that he was fired from her effort to develop a lawsuit against Iraq, a letter that was among materials on Reser sent to the Justice Department.
"She took the position that he had better contacts than me, he had better information, and he was in a better position to talk with people in the government," Johnston said. "It's just unfortunate that she was so gullible."
Jayna has refused to share with the public the falsified 302 documentation and the prior warning documents for over SIX years. She reportedly has had the Herb Johnson letter since September of 1998(The Grand Jury concluded their work in December 1998 and Herb Johnson died of a heart disease in November of 1998)
How much patience do you recommend I have?
Since September 11, 2001, my patience is growing a little thin.
You want to talk about "destroying".
Why don't you talk to retired OKC Police Officer Don Browning and ask about an attempt to "destroy" his career. Please, before you get any more appalled talk to Don Browning.
Post it as a response to you about the Free Republic.
Here it is, in its entirety -- without comment, and only modified by the addition of HTML paragraph breaks for readability here on FR:
TXnMA (No Longer!!!)
============================
Thank you for your defense of my integrity. I was never inclined to imperil innocent, decent witnesses and their families by recklessly posting their affidavits on the internet. How foolish and irresponsible. I fended off and won a lawsuit against the attempts by my former employer New York Times to protect the sanctity of those statements until such time law enforcement launched a legitimate investigation into the foreign perpetrators they named.
Honway has a lot of time on his hands. Tell him to research my court ruling in which Alhussaini's defamation lawsuit was flatly rejected and his alibi discredited.
As for the letter from Herb Johnson, never....I reiterate never did I indicate that Johnson said there was an on-the-record directive from the FBI to kill the Middle Eastern connection. Honway needs to do his homework and document the source of this information. I challenge him to find one document or article quoting me or any other reporter, for that matter, stating Herb Johnson made such a statement. That is patently false.
As for the prior warning, I have released that document to the Wall Street Journal, LA Weekly, Congressman Burton's staff and Senator Specter's office. I have worked with a number of reputable, responsible journalists who have handled the contents of that warning with integrity. The purpose of my making it public was to punctuate the underlying intelligence that was generated prior to the bombing that pointed to an Islamic inspired plot with the aid of two "lily whites." There is absolutely NO evidence that would indicate law enforcement had enough information to stop the bomb. But they tried. I was the reporter who broke the story in November 1995 about the presence of the bomb truck downtown per the testimony of a local attorney and other elements that indicated everyone was desperately scrambling to prevent a tragedy. Unfortunately, the Arab terrorists were crafty and covered their tracks to the extent the bomb was detonated before intelligence poured into the Congressional Task Force which indicated Oklahomans City was a primary target.
When one has such an enormous responsibility to manage a story which has far reaching ramifications, one cannot post sensitive documents on the world wide web. I am a reputable, honest citizen who has cooperated fully with law enforcement, Congress, and journalists who are trained to disseminate and vet the information responsibly.
All the best, Jayna
Please let me know when she feels it is proper to release the Herb Johnson letter, the prior warning documents,and the falsified 302's documentation.
Maybe I am not parsing my words correctly. I am requesting a copy of the letter written by Herb Johnson, Senator Inhofe's chief of staff, for Dan Nelson in September 1998 memorializing a converstion between Herb Johnson and a personal friend who worked in the command post for the FBI Oklahoma Bombing Task Force. I believe the letter begins, "To Whom It May Concern", and I believe it concerns us all. Post the letter and we can let the lawyers parse the words.
Dear Ms. Davis,
You do understand law enforcement covered up the Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City bombing, don't you?
You do realize that is my point here, you have "cooperated fully with law enforcement."?
However, to avoid wasting my efforts,
If not, I have much better things to do than sit at this keyboard all day...
Important point. I am from the "diseminate all the truth and let the people decide" school. But I was never trained.
Give Don Browning a call, he has some info on the bombing.
Thanks for the help. You have done more to prove my point than I could have in a thousand threads. Time to go to work. Take care and thanks again, Bob.
I'm in the dark; who is Don Browning, and how would I contact him?
Thanks for the help. You have done more to prove my point than I could have in a thousand threads.
You're welcome -- I guess... I thought all I had done was try to be a "voice of reason" and facilitate both sides of this discussion having a chance to air their viewpoints.
I'm all ears. I don't comment unless I have something more to offer, but any new information- or old information that has been overlooked or forgotten- goes flying across the internet to about 50 recipients.
Yes, please. I should follow the threads more closely than I do, but please continue to flag me. All efforts at getting whatever the truth is here out into the light of day are appreciated.
Not trying to rattle your cage, but do you have a link to that? My attention was elsewhere when much of the storm around OKCSubmariner was brewing.
Thanks.
as a wise old man from the ozarks once said: "the crater reminds me of a piece of that rubber vomit that somebody threw down on the street." (NDCORUP RIP)
maybe this link will work?
I have some concerns about one person -- Romona -- involved in his story but, from what I have read concerning Yeakey's death, it was, indeed, strange...
Outside my personal line of investigation, though.
The new webmaster of the OKBIC website (where the pix were stored for viewing on FR) bollixed up the directory where they were stored. As a result, none of the images in any of my prior posts of materials from the OKBIC Report now work.
I'm working with Charles Key and the webmaster to see if the images can be located and reinstated, but, in the meantime, I am (slowly -- at 24K) FTP'ing images into my own webspace for future posts.
You can see crater photos I've recently posted
and here
and here
plus a legend explaining the bullets in the photo in #180 here
Dagnabit, I hate being distracted by all this childish infighting and backstabbing!
TXnMA (No Longer!!!)
So I asked Jayna Davis this direct question in a personal e-mail:
"Bottom line: is honway correct in saying that you have worked with that AntiFReeping group to censor Briley?"
Jayna Davis' (also rather direct) reply:
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