Lawyer claims FBI informer linked to McVeigh bombing

[seemslikeadream]

By Pamela Manson
The Salt Lake Tribune

A Salt Lake City lawyer says an FBI informant who was an explosives expert might have trained accomplices of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh at a white supremacist compound.
Attorney Jesse Trentadue says two teletypes sent by the FBI's director show that an informer had infiltrated a paramilitary training compound in Oklahoma known as Elohim City and was there in April 1995 when one of the bombing suspects allegedly called looking for co-conspirators.
The name of the informant and caller are blacked out, but Trentadue suspects they are Andreas Strassmeir, a German national who he says was the weapons and explosives instructor at the compound, and McVeigh, who allegedly was trying to recruit accomplices two weeks before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people. The attorney says he believes Strassmeir was working either for the FBI or for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights group, which relayed the information to the agency.
If his suspicion about the informant's identity is correct, "then not only does it appear that FBI defendants knew about and fail to prevent the attack upon the Murrah Building, but FBI defendants may also have been responsible for training McVeigh and the others who planned and carried out the attack," Trentadue says in a document filed Monday at U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.
The accusation was made in the lawyer's lawsuit that alleges the FBI is violating the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to turn over documents connected to the 1995 death of his brother in an Oklahoma prison.
This latest allegation by Trentadue follows one he made last month that the FBI probably knew in advance about the bombing but did nothing to stop the attack.
more
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2499296

[0007]

1. Even if true the government will not let this reach the front burner.

more.....

Trentadue does not say how he obtained the teletypes, which appear to have been sent to bombing investigators. He is seeking documents on the probe because he believes it holds clues to his brother's death.
Kenneth Trentadue, 44, who had served time for bank robbery, was arrested on a parole violation and had been placed in a federal prison in Oklahoma City when guards found him dead on Aug. 21, 1995, hanging from a noose made of torn bed sheets. His family insists he was killed and contend correctional officers destroyed evidence.
Authorities have denied the allegations and several investigations ruled the death a suicide.
Jesse Trentadue believes that at one time, the FBI was investigating whether a gang that robbed banks to fund attacks on the government was connected to the bombing and suspected his brother of being one of the robbers. The lawyer thinks Kenneth was killed "when things got out of hand" during an interrogation.
McVeigh was executed in 2001. Media reports say Strassmeir returned to Germany soon after the bombing.

[Laughing Mirror]

11. Background on the Trentadue coverup by Lew Rockwell

At 7 AM on August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with scalp split to the skull in three places, throat slashed, and a body completely covered in blood, bruises and burns.

As law requires, the officials asked to see the cell in which the alleged suicide occurred. Federal officials pulled rank and refused on the grounds that a federal investigation was underway.

A federal investigation was not underway.

The state officials told the prison officials that the body’s condition required FBI notice and protection of the cell as an undisturbed crime scene. Associate Warden Max Flowers, however, ordered the cell to be cleaned before any investigation could be done. Flowers claimed that medical staff informed him that Trentadue was HIV-positive and that it was urgent to remove the infectious blood.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts20.html

[jmcgowanjm]

2. OKbomb and Bombrob are the key words

When bank robber Mark Thomas was indicted in January
1997 he told
reporters that at least one gang member was involved in
the Oklahoma
bombing, according to a newspaper clip in FBI files. "Your
young Mr.
Wizard took out the Murrah building," Thomas was quoted
as saying of one
of his bank robbery
colleagues.

Thomas' ex-girlfriend told FBI agents her boyfriend stated
shortly before
he traveled to a white supremacist compound at Elohim
City, Okla., in
spring 1995 that a federal building was about to be
bombed.

"We are going to get them. We are going to hit one of
their buildings
during the middle of the day. It's going to be a federal
building," Donna
Marazoff quoted Thomas as saying during her FBI
interview.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dhEThTvp9RUJ:forums.originaldissent.com/showthread.php%3Ft%3D12488%26goto%3Dnextnewest+mcAlister++okbomb+bank+robberies&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Not a good source, I can't get the noncached version.

Also, the McCurtain Daily Gazette has been
all over this story from day 1.

[jmcgowanjm]

3. McVeigh Christmas package destroyed by FBI

McVeigh in 1994 stole from a quarry hundreds of
construction blasting caps, some which he used to explode
the Oklahoma City bomb. The FBI spent months
unsuccessfully trying to locate many of the other stolen
caps.

Agents collected witness testimony that McVeigh had
placed some of the extra caps in two boxes wrapped
in Christmas paper in the back of his car along with
mercury switches and
duffel bags.

One electric and five non-electric blasting caps were found in
the Aryan Republican Army robbers' Ohio hideout in
January 1996, along with mercury switches, a duffel bag and
two items described as a ``Christmas package,'' FBI
records show. The FBI allowed firefighters to destroy the caps
at the scene, and they were never compared to the
Oklahoma case.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1087071/posts

[Prisonerohio]

4. Oddities.

The Oklahoma City bombing has always left a sour taste in my mouth. There where to many oddities such the mysterious Arabic man said to be in the truck with Timothy McVeigh and multiple video cameras that saw nothing. Then theres people who say the explosives in the truck could never have damaged the building like it supposedly did. Of course I may just be incredibly paranoid.

[jmcgowanjm]

7. Blown out instead of blown in maybe? n/t

[RedSock]

8. not enough explosives

From this somewhat ugly site (but ti should enough to get you going):
http://www.stopcovertwar.com/McVeigh.html

"According to Department of the Army and Air Force Technical Manual No. 9-1910, entitled Military Explosives, ANFO requires a greater than 99% purity of ammonium nitrate, as well as a specific dryness, before it can be mixed with diesel fuel to create an explosive substance. The manual further spells out that even under ideal conditions (not often reached even by experts) 4,800 pounds of ANFO explosive would create a much smaller crater than the one left in front of the Murrah building, and its shock wave could not possibly wield the force necessary to compromise the building’s concrete support structure. ...

"Retired Air Force Brigadier General Benton K. Partin, former commander of the Air Force Armament Technology Laboratory, a 25-year expert in the design and development of bombs, urged Senators and Congressmen to delay the destruction of the Murrah building site. Partin stated in a news release, "When I first saw the picture of the truck bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal building in Oklahoma, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementary demolition charges at some of the reinforced concrete bases inside the building, a standard demolition technique." Partin further explained that "reinforced concrete targets in large buildings are hard targets to blast. I know of no way possible to reproduce the apparent building damage through simply a truck bomb effort."

******

also i believe there were reports that morning of several additional boimbs found inside the building and removed. those reports, of course, were never broadcast again.

[reprobate]

18. Local tv reporters said that four bombs were found by .....

.....either by bomb squad or fbi, can't remember which.

If FBI was involved and hushed it up, that means the gov't was involved, either knew about it or participated in it. But to what end? What was their motive?

In any case, it does go along with the suspicions that the gov't was involved in 9/11, specificly MIHOP.

[seemslikeadream]

20. bridge spanning the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City- Philippines

There is a bridge spanning the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building. Itís in the Philippines.

And itís made of gold ó Japanese and Nazi gold buried in underground vaults once used to imprison and torture American prisoners of war and local insurgents. Approximately 1,000 tons of the loot was liberated by Ferdinand Marcos before his ouster. Billions of dollars worth were shipped overseas by American intelligence agents and the Mafia. Much of the horde was cabbaged away in a high-security, subterranean storage cachÈ buried beneath the Zurich airport. This vault was once used to conceal European gold from Hitlerís greedy SS scavengers. Fifty years later, some of the same bullion has found its way into the campaign coffers of ultra-conservative political candidates in the U.S., according to the Las Vegas Sun.

But Marcos didnít recover the lionís share of the pelf. A six-month series in the Sun reported in 1993 that Marcos abandoned thousands of tons of gold hidden in his homeland. Gary Thompson, the newspaperës former managing editor, and journalist Steve Kanigher published copies of gold certificates from Credit Suisse, deposit records from the Union Bank of Switzerland, the correspondence of Corazon Aquino and letters to Reagan administration officials documenting witness accounts that lackeys of the CIA and Army Special Forces carted off an unknown quantity of the bullion. They followed one lead after another, flying around the world for 11 months to piece together an elaborate story of political corruption and greed.

The gold extraction was sanctioned by Lt. General Robert Schweitzer, President Reaganís senior military liaison to the National Security Council, and Lt. General Daniel Graham, then director of the DIA and a key consultant on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Schweitzer and retired General John Singlaub, the aforementioned veteran of the Iran-contra affair, joined the board of Nippon Star, a Japanese conglomerate with branches in the Philippines. As they explained to two plaintive Nippon Star consultants, "the company is going out of business ó the National Security Council is taking over."
Among those recruited to run the intelligence front was retired Army Colonel Dan Myers, a former aide to Watergate celebrity G. Gordon Liddy. Eldon "Dan" Cummings, a Pentagon staffer, was named vice president.

Schwartzís ambitious aide, Oliver North, was already dabbling in the gold trade. In 1985, he attempted to sell 44 tons of Marcos bullion, worth $465 million, on the black market. He blithely suggested skimming $5 million to finance the Nicaraguan contra war, but the deal fell through when North, true to form, stiffed the Israeli middlemen on the Marcos payroll.

Tapes and documents implicating American officials in the gold transfers were withheld from the Iran-contra committee by Major General Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and William Odom, director of the NSA. "It wasnít so much the mention of gold that concerned them," say Thompson and Kanigher. "It was Marcos talking (on tape) about contributions to U.S. presidential campaigns and the use of the gold proceeds to fund illegal arms deals."
To extract the gold, Ray Cline, then deputy director of the CIA, organized a working group that included a chief regulator of the S&L industry. Citibank was drawn into the operation to negotiate ownership of a Philippine gold horde secreted in the Bahamas.NASA pilots drew up a plan to transport the bullion (a link to Caslpan?)

Bo Gritz, the swashbuckling Idaho militia leader who ran for president with David Duke as his running mate, also travelled to the Philippines to participate in the gold dig. Gritz claims that he struck out ó but the Special Forces veteran has been known to spin a plausible denial or two in his time.

The upshot was that either Lana Padilla was telling the truth about Terry Nicholsí mystery trips abroad, or she is a scholar of national security studies with an emphasis on black ops. Her allusion to terrorists from the Middle East was hardly far-fetched. General Schweitzerís crew from the NSC hired a team of lawyers to sell the gold recovered in the Philippines. Much of it was sold off to Middle Eastern terrorists. Some of them have indeed been linked to the World Trade Center bombing, according to Kanigher and Thompson.
more
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/khashoggi-911.html

[jmcgowanjm]

9. And speaking of Ohio, read about the ARA-Disappearing warrants

A CityBeat investigation into the Midwest Bank Bandits -- AKA
the Aryan Republican Army -- raises serious questions about
the government's behavior before and after the
bombing. McVeigh's guilt isn't at issue; neither is that of
Terry Nichols, now serving life in prison for helping
him.

The issue is whether other right-wing plotters involved in
the bombing were allowed to go free -- and if so,
why.

http://citybeat.com/2004-09-08/cover.shtml

[truth2power]

12. Other oddities

A number of people claim to have seen McVeigh with a person who came to be known as "John Doe #2" McVeigh claimed there was no such person, but the FBI has always resisted any efforts to get them to investigate this.

Given the FBI's disinclination to look into the issue, I've always wondered if John Doe was an undercover agent of some sort whose identity the FBI doesn't want known.

[Prisonerohio]

13. John Doe

Some say John Doe was one on the Iraq's who came over with Chalbi's bunch. His purpose was to tie the bombing to Iraq. Sorry paranoid schizophrenia acting up again.

[Just Me]

19. Well, that wouldn't surprise me,...

,...not at all since the neoCONimperialists have been pushing a Middle East invasion (via Iraq) for many years.

[jmcgowanjm]

5. Each of the six individuals arrested in the BOMBROB case

had ties to Elohim City, a Christian Identity paramilitary training camp near Muldrow (OK).

The OKBOMB case focused several hundred FBI agents on
the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City on April 19,
1995.

The FBI’s BOMBROB investigation was much smaller. It
involved a wide-ranging search for a group of neo-Nazi
bank robbers in the mid-1990s whose stated goal was
the overthrow of the U.S. government through
violence.

http://mccurtain.com/deespart3.htm

[jmcgowanjm]

6. "trentadued"

We do know from a separate source that McVeigh
was extremely
interested in Trentadue's case: Trentadue took up a large
chunk of space
in McVeigh's correspondence with a writer from
Esquire magazine, published
shortly after his execution in 2001. McVeigh also told Hammer
he had come
up with a new verb participle, "trentadued", meaning
murdered by the
federal government. The Trentadue family has gladly
adopted the term as
its own.

http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~archives/ABOLISH/rick-halperin/mar04/1140.html

[PinkTiger]

10. I'm a former news reporter who covered much of this and a bank robbery

That I believe may have ties, in a strange way, to all this.
The FBI covered up a lot of informaton, and protected informants who were more than likely responsible for a banker's death in Noel, Mo. in 1989 and who were allowed to go free.
Instead of going after the real perpetrators, they hung a rap on two brothers who had no motive, little opportunity and no experience in this type of crime - it was a brutal kidnapping and murder. I covered this case for seven years, and I never believed they were guilty of the crime. Instead, the MO (the drowning in a weighted chair) was one used by an FBI informant who had ties to the Iran Contra gun runs in Arkansas, and related issues.
The information I have about this guy that connects him to the Iran Contra case and the murders (all were paid hits) are not on public domain -- I got the info from a private investigator working with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation and the public defender who represented the Agofskys.
The connection to the Oklahoma Bombing case is, all these people - the ones in Elohim City, Jerome Bargo, McVeigh, knew each other and worked with the FBI in obtaining funds for the Iran Contra deal. The bank that was "robbed" in Noel, Mo., where the banker was abducted and murdered, happened to be one of the banks allegedly used to launder the funds. The banker, Dan Short, turned information into the FDIC the day before he was murdered that implicated the bank's owner (I won't give the name here) in bank fraud. This man, who is still alive, was indicted for check kiting in 1983 (I think) but received a slap on the wrist - he had to give $100,000 in resitution to people in the community through a food giveaway. Most people who do this do federal time of about 20 years.
I saw the FDIC papers on this - but they were never allowed as evidence in the trial against the Agofskys.

Here's a link on the brothers:
http://www.ocolly.com/issues/1997_Fall/970905/stories/sentence.html

Here's a link on the FBI Informant who keeps escaping custody:
http://www.mugshots.com/Criminal/Violence/Jerome+Alan+Bargo.htm
Here;s another:
http://www.couriernews.com/archivedstory.asp?ID=3600

[GoddessOfGuinness]

14. Good work on your part

I hope this isn't the reason you're a "former" reporter.

[underpants]

15. But but they don't look like the terrorists types

Google William Krar and read the UPI criticism (yes UPI) of Ashcroft and note the complete lack of attention paid to the Eric Rudolph trial. These are there people.

[Minstrel Boy]

16. Strassmeir says "it was a government 'op' that went wrong"

Andreas Strassmeir fled the country after the bombing and is currently back in Berlin. In one interview that has been widely reported, Strassmeir is quoted as saying:

"It's obvious that it was a government 'op' that went wrong, isn't it? The ATF had something going with McVeigh. They were watching him, of course they were. What they should have done is make an arrest while the bomb was still being made instead of waiting till the last moment for a publicity stunt. They had everything they needed to make the bust, and they screwed it up."

"Whoever thought this thing up is an idiot, in my opinion. I am told they thought it would be better to put a bigger bomb in there. The bigger the better. It would make them more guilty....McVeigh knew he was delivering a bomb, but he had no idea what was in that truck. He just wanted to shake things up a little; you know, make a gesture."

"The bomb was never meant to explode. They were going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn't come at the right time... Maybe he changed the time, you never know with people who are so unreliable." "I have heard that the truck was expected in the middle of the night, between two and three in the morning. The truck had a transmitter, so they could track it with a radio receiving device. I don't know how they could have lost contact. I think there was misinformation that the operation had been canceled."

This writer, for one of many, would like to know where Strassmeir got his information. Many believe that Strassmeir was a government informant involved in a sting operation that went terribly wrong. They believe that Andreas Strassmeir is the John Doe #2 and that once the authorities realized it was one of their operatives who they were looking for, they ceased the search and covered it up by denying any evidence to another person. I am inclined to agree with that summation.
http://eyeonhate.com/mcveigh/mcveigh5.html

Strassmeir and "John Doe No. 2":

[Bridget Burke]

17. Yet another reason to oppose capital punishment....

Our Justice Department was so eager to give McVeigh the early departure he desired. If he were still cooling his heels in the pen, he might have eventually decided to talk.