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Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 11)
I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10During the weeks preceding the Oklahoma City bombing, the US Government received various reports from sources in Iran, Syria and the Philippines warning that bombs would be detonated at US Government buildings, in particular at buildings with courthouses. A warning was therefore sent to all federal courthouses on March 15. This warning indicated that bombings were being organized by the Iranian regime and would begin soon after the Iranian New Yearâs Day, which was March 21. (Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, chapter 10; most of this article is from that source.) John Gannon, a CIA deputy director during that period, confirms an extraordinary amount of intelligence reporting and relevant communications "chatter" along those lines during those weeks. Within hours of the bombing, the US Government received seven phone calls from callers claiming to represent Middle Eastern terrorist groups that had organized the bombing. Because of the warnings and claims, FBI Headquarters immediately informed its domestic and foreign field offices that "the likely group" guilty of the bombing was Islamic Jihad, a group supported by Iran. Eyewitnesses at the site reported suspicious activities featuring Middle Eastern men: * Shortly before the explosion, a woman had been in an elevator descending to the ground floor. Also in the elevator was a young Arab man, wearing a backpack, who hurriedly pushed the elevator buttons as if trying to get off. She followed him out of and away from the building a few moments before the explosion. The woman was still close enough to the building that she was knocked off her feet by the explosion. * Several minutes before the explosion, a pedestrian near the building saw a yellow Mercury parked near the federal building. The car sped off, bounced over a concrete barrier in the roadway, swerved to avoid a dumpster, and almost hit the pedestrian. * Shortly before the explosion, a man saw two men run from the federal buildingâs vicinity toward a brown Chevy pickup truck. He described the two men as wearing beards and as "possibly of Middle-Eastern descent." * Shortly before the explosion, a woman was walking several blocks away from the federal building and noticed three vehicles that seemed to be moving as a group. All the occupants seemed to be Middle Eastern men. One man in one of the cars was staring so intently at something that she herself turned to look in that direction and saw the federal building, which was still standing normally. One of the vehicles was a yellow Mercury, and another was a brown pickup. * Right after the explosion, a woman ran out of another building, located about five blocks from the federal building, to look at the federal building and was almost hit by a brown pickup that had raced around a nearby corner. There were three male occupants, at least two of whom looked like Middle Eastern men. At least one of the occupants had an obviously very angry expression on his face. Later, when she was shown photos of suspects, she selected a photo of an Iraqi with ties to terrorist groups. * A few hours after the explosion, a group of three people reported seeing a brown pickup with three Middle Eastern occupants speeding out of town. That report was compelling enough to prompt the police to issue an all-points bulletin, authorized by the FBI, to search for the pickup. As soon as Timothy McVeigh was identified as the culprit who rented the Ryder truck that carried the explosives, US Government investigators discounted all such eyewitnesses. "We went from a Middle Eastern case investigation to an all-domestic on the turn of a dime," says Buck Revell, then the FBIâs Assistant Director for Criminal Investigations and the FBIâs representative on the Restricted Interagency Group for Terrorism. Dewey Clarridge, Chief of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, says that the identification of McVeigh and Nichols as the culprits "knocked the wind out of many of my former colleagues. There was little incentive for the Agency to fund a large operation against Arab militants when suddenly the concern was with domestic ones." =============== Immediately after the explosion was reported by the mass media, Abdul Hakim Murad, who had been extradited from the Philippines to the United States exactly one week earlier, declared to a guard that Ramzi Yousefâs so-called "Liberation Army" had carried out the bombing. =============== On April 21, two days after the bombing, a phone call was made from the Nicholsâ home in Herington, Kansas, to a boarding house in Cebu City in the Philippines. Less than two hours later, Nichols surrendered to the police. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-04-19 |
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