J.D. Cash’s articles in this newspaper raised
two central questions: did the federal government have prior knowledge of
the bombing conspiracy on that fateful day 25 years ago? And, if it did, was
the prior knowledge due to confidential informants among the bombing
conspirators?
The
answers to both questions are the same emphatic and very disturbing, “Yes!”
As we commemorate the 25th anniversary
of the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst incident of domestic terrorism in our
nation’s history, we now know for certain that
our government’s public account and explanation of circumstances surrounding
that heinous crime was bogus. The truth lies in a suppressed version of events,
one which was described by President Bill Clinton’s General Counsel Abner Mikva
as “not information that should be
on paper.” (Emphasis added.)
This article will for the first time present key elements of that
suppressed information, on paper for the public.
For such an order to be
issued by Mikva, the Oklahoma City bombing must have posed what can only be
described as a mortal threat to Clinton’s political future, and to the
reputation of many federal agencies involved.
During my Marine Corps career
with nearly five years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, I have seen our nuclear war-fighting plans as well as our
most sensitive intelligence reports – both were “on paper.”
The
account offered here is the result of 24 years of research on my part,
including 11 years of working closely with the legendary McCurtain Daily Gazette reporter,
J.D. Cash, and collaborating with dozens of other professional and citizen
journalists committed to uncovering the full truth behind the Oklahoma City
bombing and its aftermath.
Whatever
Mikva ordered not to be put “on paper,” was seen as more threatening to his client,
the president, than the compromise of any other information in the entire U.S.
government. But, as is the case of any federal government cover up, information
was spread far too widely among various agencies for Mikva’s edict to be
completely effective.
Over the past 25 years
records have been released, often in seemingly unrelated cases, which have
provided key elements of this mosaic – enough for us now to piece together the
core of the damaging information of such concern to the president’s senior
legal adviser.
OKBOMB, as the FBI titled the
case, was the result of a federal law enforcement operation that went terribly
wrong for reasons still unknown.
Suppressing information about
this ugly truth was Mikva’s objective when he issued his extraordinary order to
go off paper. Released as a memorandum on letterhead marked, “EXECUTIVE OFFICE
OF THE PRESIDENT,” the date was May 25, 1995, five weeks after the bombing and
after the case had supposedly been solved.
This
date was exactly three weeks after this newspaper published J.D. Cash’s first
story on OKBOMB. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were in jail awaiting trial.
Bombing conspirator and white nationalist Michael Fortier had agreed to be the
star prosecution witness against his former Army buddies.
Mikva’s order confirming the mortal threat to the Clinton
presidency was released by the Clinton Presidential Library in 2016 as one of
the 1500 pages characterized as pertinent to President Barack Obama’s
nomination of federal judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy on the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Garland arrived in Oklahoma
City just two days after the bombing and was the senior on-site Justice
Department lawyer in charge of the investigation. After four weeks, he returned
to Washington where he continued to supervise both the investigation and preparing
the government’s prosecution for McVeigh’s and Nichols’ federal court trials.
A memorandum between two
White House attorneys recorded Mikva’s unprecedented order and was intended for
Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, with this subject line: “Terrorism note for
H”.
These first two sentences
offer a candid disclosure of what will be referred to as the suppressed “Mikva
version”:
The
Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question. They say this
is because Ab [Abner Mikva] instructed
them that this is not information that should be on paper. (Emphasis
added.)
Please read this historic
statement again.
To
put it in context, at the very time the president’s General Counsel
issued his extraordinary suppression order, there was much ongoing work
on “terrorism” questions that was on paper. Oklahoma City bombing documents
publicly accessible at the Clinton Presidential Library show hundreds of pages
of legal, policy and political questions regarding terrorism being examined by
lawyers both inside and outside of the federal government.
Any question about whether
Mikva’s edict dealt with OKBOMB, was answered three years later in a media
interview. No longer in the White House, Mikva was interviewed about a dispute
concerning congressional oversight between the Department of Justice and the
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The Chicago Tribune reporter
wrote of Mikva’s admission:
Abner Mikva, a former White
House counsel, federal judge, and Chicago congressman said Congress must move
cautiously. [The Department of] Justice handles sensitive investigations, from
terrorism to organized crime, and many techniques must remain secret, Mikva
said.
“If Chairman Hyde starts asking
about all the dollars they spent in Oklahoma City, that can compromise
some very, very delicate information,” added Mikva, a Democrat.
“How much of that does he really
want to get into?” (Emphasis added.)
Mikva belatedly attempted
damage control, having blurted out some sensitive words of his own about the
suppressed truth, but it was too late. His claim that this matter was a budget
issue is ludicrous. The Justice Department and the FBI had previously boasted
about the 82 million dollars spent on OKBOMB, presenting this figure as yet
another indicator, albeit a phony one, of the thoroughness of the
investigation, and assurance that all perpetrators had been identified and
convicted. (Mikva died in 2016 without public comment on his “not-on-paper’
order.)
Adding to the critical
importance assigned this suppression effort are other White House records
showing that Garland met during this period with Mikva’s Deputy General
Counsel, Elena Kagan, who now serves on the U.S. Supreme Court.
This
document from the Executive Office of the President confirms what had been
obvious to J.D. Cash and others who observed this unprecedented suppression of
evidence and obstruction of justice in a federal criminal case.
More
importantly, we now know why OKBOMB federal prosecutors suppressed evidence on such a massive level:
it incriminated more than a dozen additional perpetrators who
either directly participated in the bombing, or provided support to the wider
conspiracy that murdered 168 of our fellow citizens.
The
version crafted by Garland and presented in the federal trials of McVeigh and
Nichols was a bogus one whose purpose was to conceal the identity of federal informants who were members of
the wider bombing conspiracy.
These accusations are so contrary
to the conventional version of OKBOMB constructed by Garland that the reader is
justified in wanting to see evidence behind them.
THE
BOGUS GARLAND VERSION
In addition to using it in
the McVeigh and Nichols federal trials, the Clinton administration peddled
Garland’s bogus version to the national media, whose unquestioning acceptance
qualifies them as complicit in what later historians could justifiably term
“show trials” equal to those conducted in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
Lawyers at the highest levels
of the Clinton White House Office of General Counsel and the Department of
Justice perpetrated the greatest fraud ever foisted on a federal criminal case.
Yet, the great majority of
the main stream media enthusiastically accepted this bogus version, as did the
trial judge who was determined not to allow evidence of a broader conspiracy in
his courtroom.
Judge Richard Matsch
succeeded in keeping the first trial narrowly focused on Timothy McVeigh. For
the guilt-or-innocence phase of the trial, Matsch’s refusal to entertain
questions about “others unknown” as listed in the indictment was
understandable.
But,
for the sentencing phase where evidence of other conspirators was a statutorily
mandated factor for mitigation, Matsch’s stringent exclusion of such evidence
constitutes a denial of due process. As such it has been severely questioned by
at least one legal scholar, Daniel Capra of Fordham University law school.
Matsch made the prosecution’s
challenge much easier when he largely ignored egregious misconduct of both
investigators and prosecutors, especially on the questions of prior knowledge
and of the broader conspiracy.
By his failure to seriously
question government mendacity, even when presented with strong evidence of
corrupt practices, Matsch greatly facilitated the acceptance of this bogus
Garland version both inside and outside his courtroom.
THE
SKEPTICAL CASH VERSION, ADMITTEDLY INCOMPLETE
This third version, skeptical
of the bogus Garland one, and until now unaware of Mikva’s suppressed version,
is largely based on the truly extraordinary investigation by McCurtain Daily
Gazette reporter John David “J.D.” Cash, as published in this newspaper.
Over the past 13 years since
J.D.’s death, bits and pieces of the suppressed truth have continued to seep
into the public domain, validating his reporting and adding important details
that further reinforce the stellar work of what was all too often, a lone voice
speaking truth to power.
We now have at least a
partial answer to the question: exactly what did Mikva’s directive refer to
when he ordered that “working on the terrorism question… is not information
that should be on paper”?
Threats posed by a wide
variety of anti-government groups, including neo-Nazis and white supremacist
factions were characterized in these terms:
DUE TO SPECIFIC THREATS BY
SUBJECTS AGAINST FBI PERSONNEL, AND SUBJECTS’ CONTINUED POSSESSION OF WEAPONS
AND EXPLOSIVES, SUBJECTS ARE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.
FBI
Undercover Agents (UCA’s) reported on the extremists’ apocalyptic and
threatening language:
… foresees all out war with
the U.S. Government by his group and other groups like the AN [Aryan Nations,
an Idaho-based group].
… announced that open war
with the U.S. Government would come within the next year.
… discussed carrying out a
series of political assassinations and what [name redacted] describes as ‘an
operational plan’ has been prepared.”
These groups were not just
talk. The Bureau reported that members had constructed and detonated IED’s
(Improvised Explosive Devices) at their training sites, and had even sent IED’s
through the U.S. mail.
By 1992, FBI headquarters was
coordinating activities among at least half the FBI 50-plus field offices, from
Seattle to Baltimore, and Jacksonville, Florida to Phoenix. Such widespread
activity directly contradicts consistent FBI claims that it had no large-scale,
anti-white supremacist effort during the years preceding the Oklahoma City
bombing.
It is
important to note that this accounting is based largely on only partial records
released by the FBI after attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom Of
Information Act (FOIA) complaint in federal court. A full accounting would no
doubt include other offices, especially Oklahoma City, for which only very
limited records have been released.
J.D. Cash’s articles in this newspaper raised two central questions: did
the federal government have prior knowledge of the bombing conspiracy on that
fateful day 25 years ago? And, if it did, was the prior knowledge due to
confidential informants among the bombing conspirators?
The answers to both questions are the same emphatic and very disturbing,
“Yes!”
The critical node for the
wider conspiracy identified by Cash is Elohim City, a white supremacist
compound on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border then under the total control of the
late Robert Millar. Government records leave no doubt that Millar and McVeigh
were, contrary to all public statements, closely involved in the plot to bomb
the Oklahoma City federal building. Another member of their conspiracy was
Andreas Strassmeir, a German national and FBI operative who successfully
infiltrated Elohim City from 1991-1995.
Although Strassmeir was
supposed only to report on the targeted group of neo-Nazis, substantial
evidence suggests that his extreme language provoked the most violent actions
of the bombing conspirators.
It is now irrefutable that in spite of federal law enforcement having
prior knowledge of the bombing conspiracy, they failed to prevent McVeigh’s
attack. The cause for this failure remains hidden in Mikva’s suppressed
version, but there is no doubt that the FBI’s importing a “pretend Nazi” from
Germany was a major contributing factor.
While J.D. Cash’s articles in this paper formed the foundation of the
skeptical version, his death prevented him from seeing the fruit of his work as
these hitherto suppressed facts have surfaced.
What is crystal clear is that while Cash’s honest reporting has stood
the test of these last 25 years, the surfacing of suppressed evidence
increasingly exposes Garland’s version as a fraud.
Roger
G. Charles is a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps and
award-winning investigative journalist who has worked with a wide variety of
media outlets, including Newsweek, Vanity Fair, ABC (Nightline, Prime Time Live
and 20/20, CBS's Sixty Minutes II, and the BBC. In addition to his research
into the Oklahoma City bombing, he was worked on such topics as detainee abuse
at Abu Grahib prison in Iraq (as part of a Peabody-winning team at CBS) and the
failure of the U.S. military to provide troops in Iraq with adequate body
armor. In 1996 and 1997 he was a consultant on the Oklahoma City bombing for
ABC's 20/20, helping to produce pieces that questioned the official version of
what hap- pened. He also worked as an investigator for Stephen Jones and the
legal team defending Timothy McVeigh in his federal trial. Charles was born in
Texas, raised in West Virginia, graduated from the US Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Maryland in 1967.
Copyright © Roger G. Charles
Copyright © Roger G. Charles
