We now know, from court records and official documents, that at least two undercover operatives were gathering information on Timothy McVeigh and a group of like-minded white supremacists in the early spring of 1995, one of whom gave her government handlers specific information about a plan to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
We know that, after the bombing, the government expended considerable energy trying to track down a John Doe 2 and other possible accomplices of McVeigh and Terry Nichols—the “others unknown” cited in the federal indictment—before abruptly changing tack nine months later and insisting that McVeigh was the lone mastermind behind the attack and, eventually, that no one else other than Nichols had been involved.
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Perhaps most unnerving is the trail of dead bodies that has turned up over the past decade under less than transparent circumstances. A neo-Nazi bank robber called Richard Guthrie, one of the leading John Doe 2 candidates—though never publicly identified as such—was found hanging in a prison cell in July 1996. Kenney Trentadue, a man who looked very much like Guthrie, right down to a snake-motif tattoo on one arm, and appears to have been mistaken for him when he was picked up on a parole violation on the Mexican border in the summer of 1995, wound up bloodied and traumatized from head to toe in his cell at a federal detention facility in Oklahoma City. The feds claimed he hanged himself. An inmate who later came forward and claimed he witnessed Trentadue being beaten to death by his interrogators was himself found hanging in a federal prison cell in 2000.
<snip>
The full lessons from all this remain to be learned, in part because we are very far from getting to the bottom of the mystery. But it’s clear that the intelligence failures and institutional coverups we have seen in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war are part of a historical pattern.
The FBI, in common with other federal agencies, is interested in defending its own bureaucratic interests first and establishing the truth only a distant second. It is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to admit mistakes, even if that means allowing people suspected of posing a significant threat to public safety to go free. Dennis Mahon, who is banned from travel to Britain and other countries because of his political activities, has never been seriously troubled by the Oklahoma City bomb investigators. Andreas Strassmeir was allowed to leave the United States and return to Germany in early 1996 even though it was clear at the time that he had had contact with McVeigh immediately before the bombing and might, at the very least, have made an important witness. Several of the ARA bank robbers, meanwhile, have completed their sentences and are now free.
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Link:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060221_oklahoma_city_bombing/
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