Speaking of Vast Conspiracies..

Yet another Clinton points to a vast right wing conspiracy. Strange that, considering it now seems fine and dandy for a former president to believe in a conspiracy involving millions without proof but if right wingers so much as whisper about Obama's missing college records they are labeled kook birther racists. Yes yes, Clinton says this stuff for political reasons and the media surely knows it, but they could be so much more useful by doing their jobs.

For instance, asking the First Conspiracy Buff about the recently released Oklahoma City bombing tapes that contain, according to the Salt Lake City lawyer who FOIA'd them from the FBI, Nixon-like gaps shortly before the explosion:

"Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence," Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because "they had run out of tape" or "the tape was being replaced."

"The interesting thing is they spring back on after 9:02," he said. "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see."

The story also contains this comment:

An FOIA request by Trentadue for 26 CIA documents was rejected in June. A letter from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which reviewed the documents, said their release "could cause grave damage to our national security."

Surely he of vast conspiracies could have shined some light on that puzzling question. The David Gregories of the world told us the Murrah complex was taken out by a couple of right wing nuts operating in a small rag tag group in retaliation for Waco (which Clinton once obliquely blamed on Rush Limbaugh) so why would anything associated with this case harmful to national security?

Well, they could be BS'ing to prevent release. Or perhaps the answer lies with the mythical John Doe number two. The FOIA lawyer happens to be the brother of convicted bank robber Kenneth Trentadue, a federal prisoner who evidently committed suicide by beating himself to death while passing through the US Marshal prisoner transfer center in Oklahoma City in August 1995. Lawyer Trentadue believes his convict brother was beaten to death by the Feds after they either mistakenly placed him in an Ayran gang or mistook him for John Doe Two. For reference here's a picture comparison:



Not a striking resemblance. Anyway, why would they want to crop the surveillance videos, assuming they did? The only reason that makes sense is if they showed two people in the Ryder truck, giving the story a kind of Jayna Davis direction.

Actually this speculation isn't new but for some reason has never taken off in a Dan Brown kinda way. Here's Fox in the late 90s:

"The government tried to tell us that there was no John Doe 2 in the truck with McVeigh," Lawton said. "We got witnesses that saw him in the truck, saw him get out of the truck, walk across the street and get into a brown Chevrolet pickup with two more John Doe 2's. That makes three."

But aside from shadowy Arab connections Fox also provided the domestic angle:

“There's also some bank robbery surveillance tapes that were disposed of in some way that could've involved McVeigh with the Midwest robbery gang. There's just a lot of unanswered questions there,” former FBI agent Danny Coulson said.

Between the years of 1992 and 1996, a gang of white separatists who called themselves the Aryan Republican Army robbed banks throughout the Midwest and stole nearly $500,000 before being caught. Rumors have persisted that the ARA was tied to McVeigh.

“The Midwest bank robbers of course are somebody that should be looked at. Terrorists historically finance their operations through bank robbery, armored car robbery,” Coulson said. “Coincidences just aren't coincidences, there's some reason for it.”

Peter Langan, one of the gang’s leaders who is serving a life sentence for his role in the robberies, told FOX News in an exclusive interview that some of the Midwest bank robbers were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.

What if Nichols and McVeigh were connected to a vast anti-govt cabal the FBI decided didn't need to become dinner table conversation? Such a scenario might explain some loose ends, like why Nichols wasn't sentenced to death (they wanted a chance to glean some intel out of him later--indeed mafia hitman Greg Scarpa later got Nichols to give up a huge ammo stash under his Kansas home while in prison), or why Nichols traveled to Cebu City in the Philippines in 1994, the same location where Ramzi Yousef was hiding out and planning Bojinka. There were similarities between the WTC 93 bomb and the Murrah bomb.

Which brings us to the significance of Richard "Boogie to Baghdad" Clarke. In his book "Against All Enemies" he spoke about the Oklahoma City bombing--here's Laurie Mylroie describing what she saw as a Clarke dichotomy:

But while Clarke totally rejects the possibility that Iraq was behind the first attack on the Trade Center, he nevertheless entertains the possibility of a foreign dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing: "Ramzi Yousef and [Terry] Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days.... Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American?... We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States."

There was other circumstantial evidence suggesting someone named "the farmer" made contact with the AQ cell there. Nichols wrote out a will on his last trip, which either made him deathly afraid of flying or deathly afraid of dealing with an Islamic terrorist cell.

Continuing the wild speculation for a moment, if Nichols did get his bomb recipe from Yousef's group perhaps John Doe Number Two was an Arab there for support or to witness. Or perhaps he was actually another white supremacist helper. Maybe the FBI thought Trentabue was their guy or was involved with the gang and used some enhanced interrogation techniques before they were legal. Perhaps any new Obama investigation of torture should be extended back into the 90s.

Of course this may also be a big load of hooey. The Trentadue family received a 1.1 million wrongful death settlement in 2007 but the govt has continued to fight the award, so there's a monetary aspect in play. The Jayna Davis stuff has never been overly compelling to me, a lot less so than the Philippines connection, which itself is circumstantial, although it's beyond dispute there were many Islamists in the Oklahoma City area during the 90s, including Zacarious Moussaoui. Cashill is the only major writer covering all these conspiracies and he's no doubt making a living off them right now. The money must always be followed.

Whatever the case, the bombing and subsequent investigation will remain one of two weird events during the mid 90s, both of which happened on the watch of both Clinton and Clarke. If there was an Islamic terrorist connection in either or both events perhaps history would look different right now. Perhaps a few things might make more sense.

But conservatives would be foolish to completely dismiss the threat of anti-govt militia terrorists recently defined in Napolitano's DHS alert. Doubtless some of that was for political effect but she was was also involved in the Oklahoma City investigation. Stop and consider the after-effects of a neo-Nazi group pulling off an attack against this president and the resulting chaos and possible rioting in American cities. Sounds made to order for AQ, recently shown to have a few followers in place here already.