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JOHN SOLOMON, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Record (Bergen County, NJ) NEWS; Pg. A23 February 13, 2003 Thursday All Editions WASHINGTON -
"They short-circuited the search for the truth," said McVeigh's original attorney, Steven Jones. "I don't doubt Tim's role in the conspiracy. But I think he clearly aggrandized his role, enlarged it, to cover for others who were involved." McVeigh was executed in June 2001. Evidence includes hotel receipts, a speeding ticket, prisoner interviews, informant reports, and phone records that suggest McVeigh had contact with a white supremacist compound in Oklahoma known as Elohim City and that members there were familiar with his plan. "It is suspected that members of Elohim City are involved either directly or indirectly through conspiracy," federal agents wrote in one memo just days after McVeigh detonated a truck bomb April 19, 1995, outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City and killed more than 160 people.
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The documents also include a teletype from FBI headquarters in August 1996 that reported McVeigh called Elohim City two weeks before his bombing, a call to a home where members of a violent Aryan Nation bank robbery gang were present. McVeigh made the call April 5, 1995, moments after calling the Ryder truck company where he rented the truck that carried his deadly bomb. The government had known from an informant weeks before McVeigh's call that members of Elohim City were threatening an attack, the documents show. The FBI teletype revealed that the gang members who were present when McVeigh called were familiar with explosives and had made a videotape three months before McVeigh struck, vowing a war against the federal government and promising a "courthouse massacre." The Murrah Building was directly across the street from the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. The teletype also noted that two of the robbers left Elohim City on April 16 for a location in Kansas, a few hours from where McVeigh was doing the final assembly of his bomb. "I did not see that teletype," said retired agent Dan Defenbaugh, who supervised the Oklahoma City investigation. Defenbaugh said that while he didn't consider the teletype a "smoking gun" that would have changed the outcome of the probe, his investigative team "shouldn't have been cut out." Defenbaugh said he also was surprised to learn, from Associated Press interviews and documents, that prosecutors in 1996 made and then withdrew a plea bargain offer to one of the imprisoned bank robbers, Kevin Peter Langan, who claimed he had information about the Oklahoma City bombing. "The Justice Department came to us through the assistant U.S. attorney and said, 'We believe your client knows about Oklahoma City and we want to talk to him. We want to work out a deal,' " said Langan's lawyer, Kevin Durkin. Langan made several demands the government wasn't willing to meet, and prosecutors dropped the request, Durkin said. Durkin said his client has information about the Oklahoma City bombing, and had planned to tell prosecutors that he could disprove the April 19 alibis for two of the bank robbers mentioned in the FBI teletype. Langan recently asked a court to stop the government from destroying evidence he claims may be relevant to the Oklahoma City case. FBI officials acknowledged some of the documents were not provided to McVeigh's defense team before his trial and that agents suspected at one point that the bomber was linked to Elohim City and the Aryan Nation bank robbers. |
Sadam Hussein pulled this off without ever leaving a fingerprint and everyone just pounced on the patsy provided and said "CASE CLOSED!"
On top of that, an amoral POTUS pounced on the opportunity to demonize patriots and make himself look a little less like a Commonist with his "third way" new age Socialism!!!
That's my story and I'm stickin to it!!! (grin)