Posted on 05/03/2003 12:39:06 PM PDT by moyden2000
Oklahoma and the tantalising Iraqi connection May 4 2003 By Roger Franklin
For the first time since the Alfred Murrah Building came down in Oklahoma City in 1995, the recent anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people passed largely unnoticed in America. There were ceremonies, but the explosion's echo was hard to hear above the sound of Baghdad's toppling statues.
According to investigators, the case was closed with Timothy McVeigh's execution. He was a wacko, the authorised version insists, a right-wing loner. Oklahoma's loose ends have all been tied up; time to move on.
Except in an Oklahoma courtroom, where the families of the dead beg to differ. Last week lawyers representing 24 families of the dead attempted to persuade a dubious judge that McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols, were part of a much larger plot. Pick at the loose ends, they say, and the threads lead all the way to Iraq - even, perhaps, to September 11.
Judge Deborah Robinson gave the legal team more time to bolster its argument that McVeigh was working for Saddam Hussein. Yes, she said, a series of coincidences all point to Baghdad, but she couldn't begin to consider billions of dollars in damages on the strength of circumstantial conjecture. Bring me a smoking gun, she said.
Lawyers put a brave face on the ruling. All that was missing, they said, was documentary proof - Iraqi intelligence records of the sort that seem to be turning up almost every day.
For true believers, there is more than enough evidence already. As they see it, the trail begins seconds before the blast, when nine witnesses reported a brown pickup truck speeding from the scene with a man of Middle Eastern appearance at the wheel. Police looked for it until a patrolman radioed the news that he had just handcuffed a young, white male after a routine traffic stop. It was McVeigh, and his arrest ended inquiries into an Iraqi connection.
Except for Jayna Davis, then an Oklahoma City TV reporter. Eight witnesses told her of that pickup's rubber-burning departure. Despite investigators' warnings that Davis was wasting her time and theirs, she kept digging. Her sleuthing became the basis of the relatives' suit.
The dossier begins with the pickup's owner, whom Jayna identified as Hussain Al-Hussaini, a former Republican Guardsman and Iraqi immigrant. She also established that Hussaini's six-man workforce - all former Iraqi soldiers - didn't report to work on the day that McVeigh hired the truck used in the bombing.
Could they have helped mix the fertiliser and diesel fuel - a task the FBI says would have taken one man several days? At the cheap motel where McVeigh had stayed, the owner added weight to her suspicions: not only had he seen McVeigh entertaining Hussaini and other Middle Eastern visitors, they had all fussed with a yellow truck that dripped diesel fuel all over his parking lot.
Then there was "John Doe Number Two", the mysterious co-conspirator for whom the FBI issued an all-points bulletin, only to abandon the hunt several weeks later. John Doe, the G-men announced several weeks later, was actually Terry Nichols.
Davis was sceptical, not least because Doe's identikit picture bore only a slight resemblance to the man in custody but was a close match for Hussaini.
Although officials derided Davis as a crank, she kept ferreting out tantalising links. Nichols was unemployed, yet he flew several times to the Philippines, where he stayed in the same hotel as Ramzi Youssef, the convicted mastermind behind the first attempt to destroy New York's World Trade Centre in 1993 and the nephew of Khalid Mohammed, the al- Qaeda man who oversaw the September 11 attacks.
The relatives' lawyers argue that there is one more reason why the legal system should indulge their theorising. If it were to be explored, they say, the result might unite the Oklahoma bombing, September 11 and the Bush Administration's as-yet-unproven assertions that Saddam worked hand in glove with Osama bin Laden.
Their final link: Shortly before Mohammed Atta flew his hijacked plane into the Twin Towers, he and a fellow terrorist visited Oklahoma. Investigators aren't sure why, but they do know that he stayed in McVeigh's old motel. Could it be that someone in Iraq advised him that the motel had been a safe refuge in the past?
That's the theory, anyway. Now all the plaintiffs have to do is hope that, somewhere in Baghdad, the evidence they need emerges from the rubble.
The way he is all over this thread, it looks like _Jim is someone's stooge. "Pay no attention the the man behind the curtain!"
To actively search for the truth involves a lot of time and effort. It's also a lot safer believing everything you read in the Associated Press, in the sense that the world becomes way too overwhelming (for some) if very little is as it appears on the surface. It can cause some people to slip into cynicism and despair.
_Jim and a few others of his ilk seem to have a vast database of the orthodox arguments to draw on when involved on FR discussions. It has been proposed many times that _Jim and the others are paid to keep the lid on in investigation into Waco, TWA-800, OKCity, etc. They appear on almost every thread on those topics and proceed to use ad hominem attacks on alternative sources, cut-and-paste articles from the database to overwhelm everyone exploring other possibilities, and generally disrupt the discussion.
Poppycock.
No, *you* must work to disprove the veritable MOUNTAIN of physical, unquestionable evidence that tied (and condemned) Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols to (for) the bombing in OKC ...
Or, alternatively, provide your *own* mountain of physical evidence that links the-group-of-your-choice into Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, BEARING IN MIND that *all* the evidence you 'produce' must also correlate with that evidence already existing that condemned Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
TO DATE, no one has been able to do that.
YOU would be the first WERE you to accomplish that task.
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