The anniversary of the tragic Oklahoma City Bombing is approaching and despite the claims by the government that the case is solved, there is still a lot that we don't know.
On April 19th, 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing occurred when a Ryder truck packed with explosives was detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, leaving 168 people dead and hundreds more injured. The Murrah building housed the ATF, whom were all absent from the building at the time of the attack.
Within 90 minutes of the bombing McVeigh was pulled over near the Kansas border and arrested. He was alone and his getaway car was a old rust bucket sedan with no license plates. You think that he planned out everything so well, he wouldn't have a getaway car that wouldn't be such obvious magnet for police. There was also propaganda left on the front seat.
After a vast investigation headed by the FBI, three trials mounted against McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols. The federal indictment against McVeigh and Nichols made specific mention of “others unknown”, and when their trials were almost over, the presiding judge publicly urged the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to keep investigating. They never did, so we don't know who the other people involved are.
Neither McVeigh and Nichols received more than rudimentary explosives training when they served together in the Army and their early experiments with smaller devices were terrible. How did the duo learn to build a fertilizer bomb of such size and power? They couldn't have just looked it up online. Did they learn it from just going to the library or did some one show them how or maybe made it for them?
Who were the people seen with McVeigh on the morning of the bombing? More than 20 eyewitnesses were unanimous in telling the FBI he was not alone.
Did you know there was a different Ryder truck seen by witnesses at McVeigh’s motel in Kansas and at the state park where the bomb was assembled in the week leading up to the bombing? There was also other people seen inside McVeigh’s motel room during the same period. There were two people seen renting the bomb truck on the 17th of April, neither of them really fit McVeigh’s description.
An examination of the million pages of the official investigative files on the Oklahoma City bombing leaves more questions than answers. Front-line investigators and lawyers who prosecuted the case did not speak independently about it for many years. Leads were not pursued with the FBI’s customary fashion. Obvious suspects, like Kevin McCarthy and Lori Fortier, were offered deals by government prosecutors, usually but not always in exchange for their testimony. Others were lost or forgotten. Half a dozen right wing radicals fingered as possible suspects by government informants or by fellow anti-government warriors were not questioned about the bombing, even when it became clear they had lied about their whereabouts on April 19th.
In 1995, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were both monitoring the radical far right, but trust between the two was basically non existent due following a disastrous Waco Siege where more than 80 people died including 20 children.
The ATF didn’t tell the FBI it had an informant inside the remote community of Elohim City in Oklahoma. The informant had reported talk of bombings to the ATF, but they were afraid of triggering another catastrophe like Waco, so they decided to pull the informant out rather than act on the information. McVeigh telephoned the community, two weeks after the informant left, and there are multiple indications he came visiting days later in search of recruits.
And so, a month into the investigation, even as the government struggled to find conclusive evidence to the fact, McVeigh's role was expanded in the official narrative from leading suspect to solo mastermind.
McVeigh waived his right to further appeals and went to the execution chamber in 2001. There is no doubt in my mind that he had a major part in the bombing, but if he was still alive, maybe he would have divulged more truths to the story. If something deeper was going on and he prolonged his life in the way of filing for appeals, he probably would have been killed in prison anyway.
Larry Mackey was the No 2 prosecutor against McVeigh and the lead prosecutor against Nichols. He says that he and his team never believed 100% that MCVeigh was alone.
Louis Beam was a propagandist and an American white nationalist who was described by a senior ATF investigator as “the most dangerous man in America”. In 1992 he gave a speech to fellow radicals calling for “a thousand points of resistance” and that it was time “to fertilize the tree of liberty with the blood of both patriot and tyrant” This is the slogan McVeigh had on his t-shirt when he was arrested. Beam advocated the formation of small, secretive cells that would carry out attacks at the direction. It makes you wonder.
In 1994, Beam told career criminal Roy Byrd, who told the FBI that “something big” would happen in Oklahoma City, Denver or Dallas on the second anniversary of the fire that ended the Waco siege, which was April 19th,1995. The government never interviewed Beam to find out more. This is what makes my roll my eyes. It's too bad they didn't look into this more. What would have been the harm in questioning Beam?
According to several sources, including an FBI informant, the had been to blow up the federal courthouse next door no the Murrah building. The two buildings shared an underground garage and McVeigh’s crew was supposed to plant the bomb there.
Did you know that McVeigh allegedly studied Ramzi Yousef and the fertilizer bomb he planted beneath the World Trade Center in New York two years earlier?
Did you know that founding member of Abu Sayyaf, Edwin Angeles, turned informer in February 1995 after being arrested in the Philippine, told a local investigator that he had met an American nicknamed "The Farmer", who strong physical resemblance to Nichols. Yousef was also at the meeting.
The Ryder truck was first seen downtown 50 minutes before McVeigh later claimed to have arrived. He could not get into the garage because the truck was too tall. So he was going to park the truck in an alley between the federal courthouse and the Old Post Office building. He couldn't do that either, truck had to back out of the alley because a US Marshals Service truck was already there dropping off a prisoner.
Did you know that mysterious deaths happened to some of first responders after the bombing?
I think that we are missing a big piece of the puzzle that we might never find.
There are so many more questions left unanswered. i posted them in my previous articles.
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