Another Sad Anniversary

April 19, the anniversary of both the Branch Davidian catastrophe and the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City. The bad memories have faded for media and most of the public aside from the family members of loved ones lost, but do we really know entirely what was behind the retaliatory strike on the Murrah Building?

For instance, several hours after the event Abdul Hakim Murad, a childhood friend of both Ramzi Yousef and the perpetrator of 9/11, KSM, took credit for the attack. Here's what a report prepared by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said about it:

For example, of all the cities in the world, convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols were in Cebu City in the Philippines at the same time three months before the Oklahoma City bombing. Yousef was the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center attack as well as the mastermind behind the planning of other high-profile attacks on Americans.

Furthermore, Ramzi Yousef’s phone records, from the months before he detonated the first World Trade Center bomb in early 1993, show calls placed to the Filipina neighbor and close friend of Terry Nichols’ in-laws in Queens, New York. The opportunity for interaction between American terrorist, Nichols, and al-Qaeda terrorist, Yousef, is evident.

One indicator that this terrorist act had broader implications came directly from Abdul Hakim Murad, Yousef’s roommate, childhood friend, and fellow convicted terrorist. On the day of the bombing, Murad claimed responsibility for this terrorist act from his jail cell in New York. He bragged to his prison guards, verbally and in writing, that the bombing of the Murrah federal building was the work of the “Liberation Army.”

His confession was similar to the one Yousef had made two years earlier in the immediate aftermath of the first attempt to destroy the Word Trade Center. Hours after he drove a Ryder truck into the garage of the north tower of the World Trade Center and detonated the deadly bomb, Yousef called the FBI from a pay phone in Newark International Airport and boasted that the “Liberation Army” had conducted the attack. He then boarded a plane and escaped, ending up in Manila, Philippines.

The notion of an Arab terrorist accomplice was basically squelched by the big media after the John Doe Number Two hysteria fizzled out a short while after the attack. And that was that. We never had a 9/11 type commission to find the truth, it was simply good enough to blame two lone wolf anti government rednecks and move on. And that narrative occasionally serves some political factions quite well.

Meanwhile Murad, Yousef and Nichols are sitting in jail in Colorado and Uncle KSM is about to go on trial again at Gitmo. He never took credit for Oklahoma City--and surely would have had he been involved. Nor did Yousef, but then again neither drove the truck or lit the fuse. It's amazing the loose ends of this story have never been tied up.