Merovingian (European Royalty)
Associated Families:
Also by Fritz Springmeier
FEAST OF THE BEAST
THE ARMAGEDDON PLOT
Deeper Insights Into The Illuminati Formula by Fritz Springmeier
See below Link
http://www.hiddenmysteries.com//item200/item220.html
Esau hated Jacob and swore he would kill him (Genesis 27:41). But God loved Jacob and hated Esau, calling his descendants "The race the Lord will never forgive" (Romans 9:13; Genesis 12:3; Malachi 1:1-5). Esau compounded his sin by intermarrying Canaanite and Hittite Serpent seed of Cain's line, whose genealogy is not on the Book of Life as they are not related to Adam. Read the Talmud which concurs with the Bible that "Edom is in Jewry".
The "Red Sea" is so-named after Edom. Mayer Amschel Bauer honored his father Esau by changing his family name to "Rothschild", or "Red Shield". The founder of the House of Rothschild drew up plans for the creation of the Illuminati and one world government, entrusting Adam Weishaupt with its organization and development. http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/nl099.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family
EXCERPT:
Rothschild family
Rothschild family
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the German surname "Rothschild", see Rothschild (disambiguation). For one of the investment banks founded by the family, see N M Rothschild & Sons. For one of the private banks founded by the family, see LCF Rothschild Group.
| Rothschild Coat of Arms | ||||||
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 | ||||||
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| Information | ||||||
| Place of origin | Frankfurt am Main | |||||
The House of Rothschild,[1] or more simply as the Rothschilds) is a European family of German Jewish origin that established European banking and finance houses from the late eighteenth century. Five lines of the Austrian branch of the family were elevated into the Austrian nobility, being given hereditary baronies of the Habsburg Empire by Emperor Francis II in 1816. The British branch of the family was elevated into the British nobility by Queen Victoria.[2][3] It has been argued that during the 19th century, the family possessed by far the largest private fortune in the world, and by far the largest fortune in modern history.[3][4]
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/slavery.htm
EXCERPT:
INTERNATIONAL BANKERS PURSUE THEIR GOAL
Undaunted by their initial failures to destroy the United States, the international bankers pursued their objective with relentless zeal. Between the end of the Civil War and 1914, their main agents in the United States were Kuhn, Loeb and Co. and the J. P. Morgan Co.
A brief history of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. appeared in Newsweek magazine on February 1, 1936: "Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb were general merchandise merchants in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1850. As usual in newly settled regions, most transactions were on credit. They soon found out that they were bankers... In 1867, they established Kuhn, Loeb and Co., bankers, in New York City, and took in a young German immigrant, Jacob Schiff, as partner. Young Schiff had important financial connections in Europe. After ten years, Jacob Schiff was head of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., Kuhn having retured. Under Schiff's guidance, the house brought European capital into contact with American industry."
Schiff's "important financial connections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karenna_Gore_Schiff
EXCERPT:
On July 12, 1997 she married Andrew Newman Schiff,[1] a doctor, in Washington D.C.[5][6] Andrew is a descendant of Jacob Schiff. They have three children together: Wyatt Gore Schiff, (born July 4, 1999 in New York City)[7] Anna Hunger Schiff, (born August 23, 2001 in New York City)[8] and Oscar Aitcheson Schiff (born in 2006).[9][10] They currently live in New York City. As of June 9, 2010, she and husband Andrew are separated.[11]
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=10169
EXCERPT:
Vice President Gore picked Coehlo to be his Campaign Chairman. Coehlo was seen as valuable to Gore because he can raise big bucks in California— a state he knows extremely well— where Gore draws much of his $8.8 million war chest. It is here, in an early primary next March, that the campaign may well be decided.
Coehlo was closely connected to policies that led to the Democratic Party's collapse in the late '80s, from subsidies for agribusiness moguls to all-out defense of entitlements. Together, Gore and Coehlo helped lead the Dukakis-Bentsen campaign down the tubes against Bush-Quayle in 1988. Tony Coehlo is a well connected insider with access to the Intelligence Community. If Gary Condit knew he was in trouble, who would he go to? Whose advice would he ask? Birds of a feather flock together. If Condit needed help covering up an affair, an illigitimate child, a murder, who better to turn to than a man who has had his fingers in all sorts of scandals?
My question to the media is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Coelho
EXCERPT:
Coelho was born in rural Los Banos, California, to parents of Portuguese descent,[1][2] attended public schools in nearby Dos Palos, and grew up working on his family’s dairy farm. At age 15, Coelho was injured in a pickup truck accident, which doctors later suggested was the precipitating event for the onset of his epilepsy. For years after the accident, Coelho did not know he had the illness.
Coelho graduated with a B.A. from Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1964. At Loyola, he was initiated as a brother in Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity and a member of the prestigious Crimson Circle, and later was elected Student Body President during his senior year.
After the Kennedy assassination, Coelho decided to become a priest.[3] He went to a doctor for a medical exam, a prerequisite for entering into the seminary. The doctor informed him that he had epilepsy. Because of canon law, he was unable to become a priest. Once the diagnosis was reported to the state, Coelho lost both his driver's license and his health insurance.
http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/mahoney.html
EXCERPT:
Mahoney, Mary C. — of Shelton, Fairfield County, Conn. Democrat. Alternate delegate to Democratic National Convention from Connecticut, 1924. Female. Presumed deceased. Burial location unknown.
http://www.maxstandridge.net/MaryCMahoney1.html
EXCERPT:
3) MARY MAHONEY: Tied to "Clinton--Dems--Asian Pacific Campaign Money Scandal"...tied to the Starbucks murder of JOYCE CHIANG:
a) The murder of Mary Caitrin Mahoney and trial of her alleged killer, while probably not tied to the OKC bombing nevertheless involves an almost unbelievable cast of characters at a time large amounts of illegal campaign finance money were being raised and serious breaches of national security occurred.
Mahoney had landed an internship working in the office of the Secretary of Commerce, Norman Mineta (the Current Transportation Secretary) for Doris Matsui. Matsui is the wife of California Democrat Representative Robert Matsui. However, she had political connections of her own having served as a trustee of the California Economic Advisory Council with Public Official Executive Board members, Gray Davis, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.
Matsui worked closely with John Huang, with the title of deputy assistant to President Clinton. Together they raised over $3 million in campaign funds from Asia and Asian-Americans. $1.2 million had to be returned because it came from corporations and non-citizens.
It was in this time frame that Charlie Trie worked first in the Commerce Department and then transferred to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) but kept his high security clearance. Trie had been attending CIA briefings and then immediately went across the street to the Washington office of Jackson Stephens, the Arkansas broker who was a financial angel of Bill Clinton and placed phone calls to his Chinese handler in the Lippo Group in Indonesia.
b) Stephens was a partner with James Riady of the Lippo Group in the Worthen bank in Little Rock. The bank was alleged to have been involved in laundering CIA drug money. The bank (and Stephens) were involved (along with the Rose Law firm and partners Hillary Clinton, Web Hubbell and Vince Foster) in the takeover of First American in Washington D.C. by BCCI. Robert Bartlett, the then Editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal said he first starting keeping his eye on the Rose Law firm when he heard of its involvement with BCCI.
c) And there sat intern Mary Mahoney in the midst of all that activity. The Clinton’s had another reason to keep an eye on her. Mary was an open lesbian and aggressive supporter of gay rights. She had become something of a "den mother" for younger interns who claimed to have suffered sexual harassment at the hands of the president (not including Monica) She had been threatening to do something about it.
d) Mary also held a part time job as assistant cashier at the local Starbucks coffee shop. In July of 1997, she and two other employees were gunned down around closing time by what police claimed was a robbery although no money was taken. Mahoney was shot five times. One of the shots was to the back of her head gangland execution style.
In March of the following year, FBI agent Bradley Garrett arrested Carl Derek Cooper for the three murders. After 54 hours of questioning by Garrett and another agent, Cooper signed a confession that he immediately repudiated as soon as he got to court. Garrett is currently in charge of the Chandra Levy "missing persons" case and was the lead agent on the Vince Foster death determined to be a "suicide."
Judge Joyce Hens Green set a trial date for April 10, 1999. This is the point at which the cast of characters becomes bizarre starting with Judge Green who was first appointed as a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
In the last year of President Reagan’s second term, Green was appointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to serve a non-renewable seven-year term. That court deals exclusively with national security and with international terrorism, and involves approving applications for electronic surveillance. Judges on that court require the highest security clearance available. In 1990, then President George Herbert Walker Bush appointed Green presiding judge of that court and she handled all emergency matters during the remaining five years of her term.
Judge Green also presided over the BCCI trial that had resulted from indictments obtained by New York Assistant District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s investigation was stopped when the FBI stepped in under the direction of Robert Meuller (currently the new FBI Director) and no further investigation ensued. Judge Green approved plea bargains that resulted in BCCI forfeiting its assets in the United States. Two defendants had been indicted, Roger Altman and Clark Clifford an influential power broker in the Democrat party. The two men had accepted the two top spots in First American after the BCCI takeover but claimed they had no idea BCCI was involved in the nearly nine years they functioned in those capacities. Altman was acquitted and Clifford never stood trial because of ill health.
Back to the Cooper trial. Before the trial even started, a controversy arose when Janet Reno announced she was going to seek the death penalty for Cooper. D.C. officials were furious claiming Reno was overstepping her bounds. The district had never asked for the death penalty in any murder case.
Reno held a hearing on the matter. At that hearing, defense attorney William Martin (not connected with the Cooper case) urged Reno to ask for the death penalty. Yes, that’s the same Billy Martin who represented Monica Lewinski’s mother, Marcia Lewis, and currently represents Chandra Levy’s parents.
To complete the cast, Judge Green then appointed attorney Francis D. Carter to represent Cooper. Carter is the Frank Carter to whom Vernon Jordan took Monica Lewinski. Carter prepared the false affidavit for Monica’s signature which put her at risk for perjury when she later testified in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Monica escaped prosecution when she was granted immunity my independent counsel Ken Starr.
With Carter as his defense counsel, Cooper was convicted despite a weak circumstantial evidence case. There were, of course, no eyewitnesses and Cooper’s fingerprints were not found at the murder scene. During his 54 hours of interrogation, Cooper had consistently denied the crime and volunteered several times to take a lie detector test. Most of the testimony against him was by FBI agent Garrett based on Garrett’s representation of what Cooper had said during the interrogation. The questioning was not recorded or videotaped although another agent took notes.
One wonders at the array of a high powered Washington judge with ties to the intelligence community and an attorney who barely escaped being disbarred (in another high profile case) in a case claimed to be a routine robbery murder case by a career criminal.
We may never know what information these women possessed that may have led to their demises. Certainly if they confided in any friends, it would take a tremendous act of courage for those friends to come forward given what happened to Chandra, Joyce and Mary. May they rest in peace.
4) FED JUDGE MATSCH'S DAUGHTER BETSY PUSHED INTO A HAWAIIN VOLCANO TO TAKE HIM OFF THE CIA DEVER S&L FRAUD CASE:
a) Judge Matsch was in military counter intelligence during the Korean "conflict." In 1987 he presided over the trial of four white supremacists who were convicted of assassinating radio talk show host Alan Berg. In 1992 his 24-year-old daughter, Betsy, died after accidentally falling into a steam vent at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. He obviously had no stomach for further involvement with white supremacists as he granted the prosecution’s motions to suppress the evidence without hesitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Chiang
EXCERPT:
Joyce Chiang (江宜玲 Jiāng Yílíng December 7, 1970–c. January 1999) was an attorney with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, who was murdered. Chiang disappeared on January 9, 1999, in Washington, D.C., and was later found dead. The story of her disappearance and the discovery of her remains in the Potomac River, which drew only local news coverage at the time, was rediscovered and received some national attention in the wake of the similar disappearance of Chandra Levy in May 2001.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0108/31/bp.00.html
EXCERPT:
Coelho was born in rural Los Banos, California, to parents of Portuguese descent,[1][2] attended public schools in nearby Dos Palos, and grew up working on his family’s dairy farm. At age 15, Coelho was injured in a pickup truck accident, which doctors later suggested was the precipitating event for the onset of his epilepsy. For years after the accident, Coelho did not know he had the illness.
Coelho graduated with a B.A. from Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) in 1964. At Loyola, he was initiated as a brother in Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity and a member of the prestigious Crimson Circle, and later was elected Student Body President during his senior year.
After the Kennedy assassination, Coelho decided to become a priest.[3] He went to a doctor for a medical exam, a prerequisite for entering into the seminary. The doctor informed him that he had epilepsy. Because of canon law, he was unable to become a priest. Once the diagnosis was reported to the state, Coelho lost both his driver's license and his health insurance.
http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/mahoney.html
EXCERPT:
http://www.maxstandridge.net/MaryCMahoney1.html
EXCERPT:
3) MARY MAHONEY: Tied to "Clinton--Dems--Asian Pacific Campaign Money Scandal"...tied to the Starbucks murder of JOYCE CHIANG:
a) The murder of Mary Caitrin Mahoney and trial of her alleged killer, while probably not tied to the OKC bombing nevertheless involves an almost unbelievable cast of characters at a time large amounts of illegal campaign finance money were being raised and serious breaches of national security occurred.
Mahoney had landed an internship working in the office of the Secretary of Commerce, Norman Mineta (the Current Transportation Secretary) for Doris Matsui. Matsui is the wife of California Democrat Representative Robert Matsui. However, she had political connections of her own having served as a trustee of the California Economic Advisory Council with Public Official Executive Board members, Gray Davis, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.
Matsui worked closely with John Huang, with the title of deputy assistant to President Clinton. Together they raised over $3 million in campaign funds from Asia and Asian-Americans. $1.2 million had to be returned because it came from corporations and non-citizens.
It was in this time frame that Charlie Trie worked first in the Commerce Department and then transferred to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) but kept his high security clearance. Trie had been attending CIA briefings and then immediately went across the street to the Washington office of Jackson Stephens, the Arkansas broker who was a financial angel of Bill Clinton and placed phone calls to his Chinese handler in the Lippo Group in Indonesia.
b) Stephens was a partner with James Riady of the Lippo Group in the Worthen bank in Little Rock. The bank was alleged to have been involved in laundering CIA drug money. The bank (and Stephens) were involved (along with the Rose Law firm and partners Hillary Clinton, Web Hubbell and Vince Foster) in the takeover of First American in Washington D.C. by BCCI. Robert Bartlett, the then Editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal said he first starting keeping his eye on the Rose Law firm when he heard of its involvement with BCCI.
c) And there sat intern Mary Mahoney in the midst of all that activity. The Clinton’s had another reason to keep an eye on her. Mary was an open lesbian and aggressive supporter of gay rights. She had become something of a "den mother" for younger interns who claimed to have suffered sexual harassment at the hands of the president (not including Monica) She had been threatening to do something about it.
d) Mary also held a part time job as assistant cashier at the local Starbucks coffee shop. In July of 1997, she and two other employees were gunned down around closing time by what police claimed was a robbery although no money was taken. Mahoney was shot five times. One of the shots was to the back of her head gangland execution style.
In March of the following year, FBI agent Bradley Garrett arrested Carl Derek Cooper for the three murders. After 54 hours of questioning by Garrett and another agent, Cooper signed a confession that he immediately repudiated as soon as he got to court. Garrett is currently in charge of the Chandra Levy "missing persons" case and was the lead agent on the Vince Foster death determined to be a "suicide."
Judge Joyce Hens Green set a trial date for April 10, 1999. This is the point at which the cast of characters becomes bizarre starting with Judge Green who was first appointed as a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
In the last year of President Reagan’s second term, Green was appointed to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to serve a non-renewable seven-year term. That court deals exclusively with national security and with international terrorism, and involves approving applications for electronic surveillance. Judges on that court require the highest security clearance available. In 1990, then President George Herbert Walker Bush appointed Green presiding judge of that court and she handled all emergency matters during the remaining five years of her term.
Judge Green also presided over the BCCI trial that had resulted from indictments obtained by New York Assistant District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s investigation was stopped when the FBI stepped in under the direction of Robert Meuller (currently the new FBI Director) and no further investigation ensued. Judge Green approved plea bargains that resulted in BCCI forfeiting its assets in the United States. Two defendants had been indicted, Roger Altman and Clark Clifford an influential power broker in the Democrat party. The two men had accepted the two top spots in First American after the BCCI takeover but claimed they had no idea BCCI was involved in the nearly nine years they functioned in those capacities. Altman was acquitted and Clifford never stood trial because of ill health.
Back to the Cooper trial. Before the trial even started, a controversy arose when Janet Reno announced she was going to seek the death penalty for Cooper. D.C. officials were furious claiming Reno was overstepping her bounds. The district had never asked for the death penalty in any murder case.
Reno held a hearing on the matter. At that hearing, defense attorney William Martin (not connected with the Cooper case) urged Reno to ask for the death penalty. Yes, that’s the same Billy Martin who represented Monica Lewinski’s mother, Marcia Lewis, and currently represents Chandra Levy’s parents.
To complete the cast, Judge Green then appointed attorney Francis D. Carter to represent Cooper. Carter is the Frank Carter to whom Vernon Jordan took Monica Lewinski. Carter prepared the false affidavit for Monica’s signature which put her at risk for perjury when she later testified in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Monica escaped prosecution when she was granted immunity my independent counsel Ken Starr.
With Carter as his defense counsel, Cooper was convicted despite a weak circumstantial evidence case. There were, of course, no eyewitnesses and Cooper’s fingerprints were not found at the murder scene. During his 54 hours of interrogation, Cooper had consistently denied the crime and volunteered several times to take a lie detector test. Most of the testimony against him was by FBI agent Garrett based on Garrett’s representation of what Cooper had said during the interrogation. The questioning was not recorded or videotaped although another agent took notes.
One wonders at the array of a high powered Washington judge with ties to the intelligence community and an attorney who barely escaped being disbarred (in another high profile case) in a case claimed to be a routine robbery murder case by a career criminal.
We may never know what information these women possessed that may have led to their demises. Certainly if they confided in any friends, it would take a tremendous act of courage for those friends to come forward given what happened to Chandra, Joyce and Mary. May they rest in peace.
4) FED JUDGE MATSCH'S DAUGHTER BETSY PUSHED INTO A HAWAIIN VOLCANO TO TAKE HIM OFF THE CIA DEVER S&L FRAUD CASE:
a) Judge Matsch was in military counter intelligence during the Korean "conflict." In 1987 he presided over the trial of four white supremacists who were convicted of assassinating radio talk show host Alan Berg. In 1992 his 24-year-old daughter, Betsy, died after accidentally falling into a steam vent at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. He obviously had no stomach for further involvement with white supremacists as he granted the prosecution’s motions to suppress the evidence without hesitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Chiang
EXCERPT:
| Joyce Chiang | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Joyce Chiang December 7, 1970 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Died | ca. January 9, 1999 (aged 28) Washington, D.C., United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Attorney |
Joyce Chiang (江宜玲 Jiāng Yílíng December 7, 1970–c. January 1999) was an attorney with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, who was murdered. Chiang disappeared on January 9, 1999, in Washington, D.C., and was later found dead. The story of her disappearance and the discovery of her remains in the Potomac River, which drew only local news coverage at the time, was rediscovered and received some national attention in the wake of the similar disappearance of Chandra Levy in May 2001.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0108/31/bp.00.html
EXCERPT:
| THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JOHN CHIANG, BROTHER OF JOYCE CHIANG: There is strong evidence that foul play was involved. I think those comments where my sister committed a suicide are incredibly irresponsible and insensitive. Let's just draw upon the facts. First of all, my sister disappeared from Dupont Circle. Her body was found a considerable distance away from where she first disappeared. (END VIDEO CLIP) GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, CO-HOST: On January 9, 1999, Joyce Chiang vanished from the same neighborhood where Chandra Levy was last seen. Chiang's body was found three months later on the bank of the Potomac River. Suicide or homicide? And why can't the police make up their mind? Chiang's brother joins us today on BURDEN OF PROOF. ANNOUNCER: This is BURDEN OF PROOF, with Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren. VAN SUSTEREN: Hello and welcome to BURDEN OF PROOF. The two cases are strikingly similar: Chandra Levy and Joyce Chiang, both young women working for the federal government, disappeared from the same area in Northwest Washington. The search for Joyce ended in tragedy. Her body was found by a canoeist on the rocky shoreline of the Potomac River. This morning, her brother met with Washington police Chief Charles Ramsey. Roger Chiang joins us today here in Washington from the center of our studio panel -- to the left, Stephen Samaniego (ph); and on the right, former Washington detective Trevor Hewick, now a private investigator. Roger, I'm sorry. Your last name is Chiang. ROGER CHIANG, BROTHER OF JOYCE CHIANG: Chiang. Thank you. VAN SUSTEREN: Chiang, yes. Roger, tell me, when was the last time you saw your sister? R. CHIANG: I actually saw my sister the morning that she disappeared on January 9, 1999. We were both in our apartment. We shared an apartment together in Dupont Circle. And she was all bundled off and headed off to work on that cold Saturday morning. VAN SUSTEREN: And was there anything unusual about her that day? R. CHIANG: Absolutely not. And that was my point to Chief Gainer when I met with him earlier today, is that is no D.C. detective bothered to investigate or to talk to me during the course of Joyce's disappearance and death. And for them to make conclusions about my sister Joyce, I think, without even interviewing me, her brother, her roommate, I thought was a lax in part of their investigation. VAN SUSTEREN: All right, but I want to talk a little bit about the facts of the disappearance and subsequent finding of her body. But let me talk about this morning. When you met with Chief Gainer, what was the point of the meeting? R. CHIANG: The point of the meeting: Chief Gainer and Chief Ramsey have been saying two different things to me and to the press. And so I just called him up last week after some of his initial comments were printed and reported on the media, and I wanted clarification. And so he called me up yesterday and invited me into his office. We talked for a good 40 minutes this morning. And he explained to me why he came to his conclusion about saying Joyce was probably a suicide, even though nothing has been official and yet there are some things that also indicate a homicide. So he was just clarifying the police's position and the police's statement on my sister's case. VAN SUSTEREN: Do you think it was suicide or homicide? R. CHIANG: I really -- I frankly believe it is homicide. And I've talked to Chief Gainer this morning. And I presented him with some of the evidence that I was briefed upon by the FBI in regard to Joyce's case. VAN SUSTEREN: Which is? I mean, what makes you say it's a homicide? R. CHIANG: There was a tear in my -- what do I believe that makes me believe this was a homicide? VAN SUSTEREN: Yes. R. CHIANG: A tear in my sister's jacket that was found along the crime scene. My sister received an anonymous page from a pay phone at Dulles the night that she disappeared. My sister -- there was this message that I showed to Chief Gainer, this picture that I brought to him this morning, this message painted on a board, on a brick wall behind a Starbucks that says: "Good day, J.C. May I never miss the thrill of being near you." The police never investigated it. VAN SUSTEREN: Where was this Starbucks? And you are holding up the picture now. I don't know if the camera can pick it up. But where is this Starbucks where this message is? R. CHIANG: Sure. The Starbucks is at Connecticut and R streets Northwest. VAN SUSTEREN: Which is near the point where your apartment was and where she disappeared from, right? R. CHIANG: Right. My sister was headed to that Starbucks for cup of tea that night. And that was the last place anybody had placed her. And then I also presented him with one final piece of evidence, which I think is really the most compelling of evidence that suggests foul play. My sister disappeared on January 9. A couple found her government American Express card at that park, at the crime scene on January 10, and turned it into Park Police. They in turn never gave it back to me or called me until January 20. By the time the FBI got to the crime scene, there was an additional piece of evidence dumped on the scene, wrapped in newspaper dated January 11, two days after my sister disappeared, and a day after some of the evidence was found. And the FBI has indicated to me that that is perplexing to them. And that may signify that someone went back after the fact to dump that piece of additional evidence. VAN SUSTEREN: What was Chief Gainer's explanation to why he thinks it is suicide? R. CHIANG: Well, he says that there was an ongoing investigation into my sister at her place of employment. And that may have caused her to be depressed or unhappy at the time. And my point to him was, again: You never questioned me. I saw my sister the night before she disappeared. I saw my sister the morning she disappeared. And her state of mind was fine, nothing outstanding that would make her unhappy. And, actually, she was feeling good that day. And so I countered that suggestion. VAN SUSTEREN: All right, now, we talk about the investigation. She was a lawyer at the immigration service here in Washington, the federal government. R. CHIANG: Right. VAN SUSTEREN: And from what I understand, is that she apparently had had some relationship with a co-worker. That relationship had soured or broken up -- and that she was upset about that relationship. Did you ever see any sort of upset or sadness in her about that relationship? R. CHIANG: Well, the fact of the matter is that that was an old relationship. And they had broken up months beforehand. And nothing in the months after that indicated anything bad. Nothing lingered from that breakup. And the police and the FBI say that they questioned the ex- boyfriend. And they ruled him out as well. So I don't know where that whole situation stands, frankly. And I think that's an additional part that can be probed as part of the overall investigation into Joyce's case. VAN SUSTEREN: OK. Stand by for a second, Roger. http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Gary_Condit EXCERPT: Congressional careerCondit was elected to Congress in a 1989 special election, after House Democratic Whip Tony Coelho resigned. His most important committee assignment was as a senior member on the House Intelligence Committee in the months and years prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. According to Salon, Condit voted against President Bill Clinton most frequently of all Congressional Democrats.[5] In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Condit publicly demanded that Clinton "come clean" on his relationship with the young woman; this demand would become part of a film clip aired often during Condit's own sex scandal.[8] Chandra Levy scandalIn May 2001, Condit became the subject of national news coverage after the April 30 disappearance of Chandra Levy, a young woman working as a Washington, D.C. intern originally from Condit's district. Police questioned him twice, and Condit denied having an affair with her; however, after Levy's aunt went public with conversations she had had with her missing niece about the adulterous liaison, police questioned him a third time, and Condit confessed to the relationship.[1][9] When the affair began, Condit was 53 and Levy was 23. While Condit was not named as an official suspect in the disappearance, Levy's family (and subsequently the national media) suspected that Condit was withholding important information about the intern's disappearance. Public interest was very high, and Condit's reputation suffered not just from the contrast between his "pro-family" politics versus his adultery with a woman two years younger than his daughter, and his attempts to mislead the police, but in particular, from an incident in July, two months after Levy vanished, in which Condit was caught trying to hide a gift box in a dumpster in one of Washington's Virginia suburbs.[1] Suspicion deepened when Condit tried to avoid answering direct questions during a televised interview with news anchor Connie Chung on August 23. This followed news reports that Condit had an affair with flight attendant Anne Marie Smith.[10] Condit disappeared from the news after 9/11. Despite the allegations against him, Condit was allowed to keep his seat on the Intelligence Committee, and he did not lose his security clearance. Condit was one of just a handful of members of Congress who were cleared to see the most sensitive information on the attacks. On December 7, he announced he would run for re-election. He lost the primary election in March 2002 to his former aide, then-Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, and left Congress at the end of his term in January 2003. (See "Trivia" below) It was the first election Condit ever lost.[11] Condit's most notable vote in his last months in office was the House of Representatives resolution to expel Congressman James Traficant after his conviction on corruption charges. In the 420-1 vote on July 24, 2002, Gary Condit was the sole "nay."[12] After an extensive search, Levy's remains were discovered May 22, 2002, by a man hunting for turtles with his dog in a secluded area of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. That month, a medical examiner officially declared that Levy's death was the result of homicide. The case remains unsolved. Brothers in public eyeMedia investigations also uncovered sordid information about both of Condit's brothers. At the time, his brother Burl — a police sergeant in Modesto, California — had shot himself in the buttocks during a frivolous firing episode and was the focus of a 1999 gun-buying scandal. Burl claimed to have taken one gun from the police department's surplus property, though records showed he took nine; there was confusion about how many, if any, of the guns he paid for.[13][14] Burl ran twice without success for the office of Stanislaus County Sheriff. His opponent, Jim Trevena, complained that Burl was illegally using his brother Gary's campaign funds in the race for sheriff. Gary was a state assemblyman at the time and had not yet won his Congressional seat.[7] By 2006, Burl Condit had left the police force and was working as part-time civilian city employee assigned to the police department's weapons training range.[15] In 2001, Condit's other brother, Darrell Wayne, was wanted on outstanding warrants from Modesto (drug possession) and from Darrell's then-current residence, Florida (DUI).[16] In 1998, Darrell had resisted a ticket in Ceres for riding a bicycle on the wrong side of the road by telling the arresting officer that his brother the Congressman and his brother the police sergeant would get the Ceres officer "in big trouble."[7] Darrell's arrest record at the time of the Levy scandal extended from 1968 through 1996.[17] Florida wanted him for probation violation with a bond set at $50,000. He had been charged by Monroe County, FLA in November of 1996 with driving with a suspended license, driving under the influence of alcohol and possession of marijuana.[18] The probation violation arose from the DUI charge.[17] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060221_oklahoma_city_bombing/ A Coverup Under Two Presidents: The Unsolved Mystery of the Oklahoma City Bombing |
Posted on Feb 21, 2006
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| AP |
Search and rescue crew members attend a memorial service in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on May 5, 1995. |
Long before the Iraq war, long before 9/11, the U.S. government had already mastered the art of fluffing its intelligence on a looming threat, botching the response and then working furiously to cover its mistakes.
The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building—at the time the worst peacetime atrocity committed on U.S. soil, with 168 dead and hundreds more injured—has been largely overshadowed by the destruction of the World Trade Center and all that has followed. But the storyline is nevertheless unnervingly familiar.
The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building—at the time the worst peacetime atrocity committed on U.S. soil, with 168 dead and hundreds more injured—has been largely overshadowed by the destruction of the World Trade Center and all that has followed. But the storyline is nevertheless unnervingly familiar.
Like the failure to prevent 9/11, this is a case of the federal government first failing to recognize or act on crucial warning signs and then claiming there were no warning signs at all. It’s about coming up with a plausible cover story and sticking to it, no matter what. In contrast to the most glaring failures of the Bush administration, though, the government’s bluff on Oklahoma City has gone largely uncalled. Timothy McVeigh, the alleged mastermind, was sentenced to death and executed, while Terry Nichols, supposedly his only accomplice, is serving a life sentence. And that, for most people, has been the end of the story. Only the dogged persistence of a handful of amateur investigators, academics, journalists and lawyers has revealed more uncomfortable truths about the bombing and who might have committed it. Thanks to a flurry of Freedom of Information and other lawsuits, the FBI’s own paperwork is beginning to seriously contradict the official version of what happened. And more is being revealed all the time.
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.
And we know that, as the lone-bomber theory has come under increasingly skeptical scrutiny in recent years, the FBI and other federal agencies have expended considerable energy blocking access to their investigative paper trail. When one of the government informants from the spring of 1995 went public about her role, she found herself prosecuted—unsuccessfully—for allegedly harboring her own bomb plots; she has since gone to ground, too afraid to say more. At least one key government official, the state medical examiner in Oklahoma City, has indicated he was not given key information he needed to do his job. And one of the senior FBI agents involved in the early stages of the bombing probe now believes that enough new evidence has come to the surface from the files of his own agency to warrant a new federal grand jury investigation.
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.
The person who has done most of the recent work in unmasking the mysteries of Oklahoma City is Kenney Trentadue’s brother Jesse, a Salt Lake City lawyer who has not only fought to have his brother’s death recognized as murder, not suicide, but is also suing the FBI to release a trove of documents that might shed light on the links among McVeigh, Guthrie and a group of Guthrie’s associates widely suspected—at least outside the confines of the Justice Department—of being McVeigh’s bombing accomplices.
Jesse Trentadue has been all over the federal government like a bad case of lice ever since the authorities at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City unsuccessfully tried to arrange for Kenney’s battered body to be cremated before the family had had a chance to look at it or even learn what kind of injuries he had sustained. He not only insisted on the family taking receipt of the body, he has also raised question after question about the government’s credibility. Jesse has gotten a prison guard to admit under oath that he lied when he testified about seeing Kenney hanging by a bedsheet, gotten the authorities to admit they never told the medical examiner’s office that someone else’s blood was found in Kenney’s cell, and cast compelling doubt on the suicide note Kenney supposedly scrawled in pencil on his cell wall saying he had lost his mind.
Over the years, as the Kenney Trentadue case has become increasingly intertwined with the Oklahoma City bombing case, Jesse Trentadue has won some key allies in both the federal prison bureaucracy and law enforcement. Just over a year ago, a former FBI agent gave him two heavily redacted agency teletypes connecting some of the dots between Richard Guthrie and McVeigh. Trentadue took the documents to federal court to demand unredacted versions, along with any other documents that might shed light on the Guthrie-McVeigh connection [legal briefing]. The legal process is grinding on, but Trentadue has already obtained one key ruling in his favor from U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball and squeezed more than 100 pages of (even more heavily) redacted documents out of the FBI.
Even in redacted form, these documents prove for the first time that FBI investigators were pursuing links between the Oklahoma City bombing and a series of 22 bank robberies carried out across the Midwest in 1993-1995 by a neo-Nazi group calling itself the Aryan Republican Army. Guthrie was a member of the ARA. So too were two members of a skinhead band from Philadelphia, Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy, as well as an old friend of Guthrie’s, Pete Langan, the brains behind the gang who also, curiously, happened to be a closet transvestite with a penchant for shaving his pubic hair and painting his toenails pink.
All were tried and convicted on robbery charges only. But it’s now clear the feds thought they were involved in a whole lot more.
The first teletype, from January 1996, puts BOMBROB, the FBI’s code word for the bank robbery investigation, under the general heading OKBOMB, its name for the bombing investigation. The second teletype, from August 1996, spells out what the ARA was suspected of planning with the tens of thousands of dollars it stole from the banks. In the subject line, the ARA members’ names are grouped along with the topic “Domestic Security/Terrorism.” The “threatened harm,” it says, included political assassination, genocide and bombings. Guthrie and another member of the gang are reported to have admitted giving someone—the name is blacked out—part of the bank robbery loot.
It is already widely suspected that the financing for the Oklahoma City bomb came from the ARA, and indeed that McVeigh was an occasional participant in the bank robberies. McVeigh once told his sister Jennifer that money he passed on to her had come from a bank heist. Does this document show that the FBI had evidence cementing the link between the ARA and McVeigh?
For a certain answer to that, we will have to wait a little longer. Judge Kimball has seen unredacted versions of all the released FBI teletypes, and is expected to rule imminently on whether to make them public. He has indicated fairly strongly that he will, having ruled last May that “the public’s interest in knowing the information [in the teletypes] outweighs the interest of the [named] individuals in keeping such information confidential.”
His ruling could, if it goes in Trentadue’s favor, finally blow the cover of the government’s version of the Oklahoma City bombing. The McVeigh-as-lone-mastermind theory was certainly useful in securing a conviction and death sentence against McVeigh—something that was far from a foregone conclusion at the time of his trial. But that does not mean the government necessarily believes that it is the whole truth; the involvement of McVeigh and Nichols may, rather, have been all that the feds were in a position to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Several things about the lone-mastermind theory have never mind sense. The official version does not explain how McVeigh and Nichols could have successfully built the huge fertilizer bomb on their own without any explosives training. (Guthrie, by contrast, had received weapons instruction when he was training, unsuccessfully, to be a Navy SEAL.) It stretches credulity by suggesting that McVeigh drove the fully primed bomb more than 300 miles from Kansas to Oklahoma City—something that ordnance experts say would have carried a high probability of premature detonation. (An alternative theory holds that McVeigh and his accomplices assembled the bomb in Oklahoma City on the morning of the attack.) It cannot explain how every single eyewitness who saw McVeigh as he made his final preparations for the attack saw him with someone else (and not Terry Nichols, either). And it does not account for the financing of the operation: McVeigh was jobless and broke from 1992 on, and yet he spent months shortly before the bombing frantically crisscrossing the country, staying in motels and making several sizable purchases. He paid cash for everything.
If McVeigh did have accomplices, then one place he might have found them was a white supremacist religious compound in rural Oklahoma called Elohim City. The feds were deeply suspicious of Elohim City, seeing it in the early spring of 1995 as potentially another Waco. Its residents included the notorious White Aryan Resistance leader Dennis Mahon, a shady German called Andreas Strassmeir and an occasional ARA member called Michael Brescia. Its visitors included other ARA members and McVeigh, going under the pseudonym Tim Tuttle.
It later emerged that Mahon’s girlfriend, Carol Howe, was an informant for the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. She was the one who heard plans being hatched—by Mahon and Strassmeir—to blow up a government building, accompanied Elohim City residents on one of three reconnaissance trips to Oklahoma City, and reported seeing McVeigh on the premises. We also know, from evidence that emerged during the pretrial discovery process, that McVeigh called Elohim City two weeks before the bombing and asked to speak to Strassmeir.
The January 1996 FBI teletype made public by Jesse Trentadue adds two intriguing details to this. One is that McVeigh, when he made his phone call, “was believed to have been attempting to recruit a second conspirator to assist in the OKBOMB attack.” And the other is that there was a second informant at Elohim City, working on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based civil rights organization whose lead lawyer, Morris Dees, has been the scourge of racists and neo-Nazis from one end of the country to the other.
The teletype says the Southern Poverty Law Center informant was at Elohim City two days before the bombing when someone—the name is redacted—put in a phone call to the compound. If true, this is an incendiary revelation, because it suggests that the center knew far more about the Oklahoma City bombing than it let on in its immediate aftermath. In an e-mail he wrote to Jesse Trentadue in January 2005, Mark Potok, who edits the center’s Intelligence Report, flatly denied that the SPLC had an informant, “or anyone else,” at Elohim City. Two years earlier, however, Morris Dees, when asked at a meeting at Southeastern Oklahoma State University whether his organization had had any inside source at Elohim City, made no such denial. Rather, he dodged the question, acknowledging that his organization worked closely with the FBI and other federal agencies but omitting any precise details.
“We did notify the FBI and Janet Reno six months before the Oklahoma bombing that we had strong information that there was going to be a serious domestic terrorism strike,” Dees added. “Within minutes after it [the Murrah Building bombing] hit the news ... we called the criminal division of the FBI and said ‘quit looking at Muslim businessmen who visit Oklahoma, you got to be looking at people involved in this Patriot movement.’ ”
We still have no clear idea of who knew what about the bombing, when they learned it, what attempts, if any, were made to prevent the calamity and why any such efforts failed. What we do know, however, is that the government had a lot more information than it was willing to admit publicly—or even to turn over to the defense teams in the various bombing trials that have taken place since 1997.
One trove of hitherto unseen FBI documents cropped up on the eve of Timothy McVeigh’s execution in 2001, delaying his death at the federal death row facility in Terre Haute, Ind., by almost a month. More were leaked to John Solomon, a Washington-based Associated Press reporter, in 2004—including a Secret Service file
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.
And we know that, as the lone-bomber theory has come under increasingly skeptical scrutiny in recent years, the FBI and other federal agencies have expended considerable energy blocking access to their investigative paper trail. When one of the government informants from the spring of 1995 went public about her role, she found herself prosecuted—unsuccessfully—for allegedly harboring her own bomb plots; she has since gone to ground, too afraid to say more. At least one key government official, the state medical examiner in Oklahoma City, has indicated he was not given key information he needed to do his job. And one of the senior FBI agents involved in the early stages of the bombing probe now believes that enough new evidence has come to the surface from the files of his own agency to warrant a new federal grand jury investigation.
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.
The person who has done most of the recent work in unmasking the mysteries of Oklahoma City is Kenney Trentadue’s brother Jesse, a Salt Lake City lawyer who has not only fought to have his brother’s death recognized as murder, not suicide, but is also suing the FBI to release a trove of documents that might shed light on the links among McVeigh, Guthrie and a group of Guthrie’s associates widely suspected—at least outside the confines of the Justice Department—of being McVeigh’s bombing accomplices.
Jesse Trentadue has been all over the federal government like a bad case of lice ever since the authorities at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City unsuccessfully tried to arrange for Kenney’s battered body to be cremated before the family had had a chance to look at it or even learn what kind of injuries he had sustained. He not only insisted on the family taking receipt of the body, he has also raised question after question about the government’s credibility. Jesse has gotten a prison guard to admit under oath that he lied when he testified about seeing Kenney hanging by a bedsheet, gotten the authorities to admit they never told the medical examiner’s office that someone else’s blood was found in Kenney’s cell, and cast compelling doubt on the suicide note Kenney supposedly scrawled in pencil on his cell wall saying he had lost his mind.
Over the years, as the Kenney Trentadue case has become increasingly intertwined with the Oklahoma City bombing case, Jesse Trentadue has won some key allies in both the federal prison bureaucracy and law enforcement. Just over a year ago, a former FBI agent gave him two heavily redacted agency teletypes connecting some of the dots between Richard Guthrie and McVeigh. Trentadue took the documents to federal court to demand unredacted versions, along with any other documents that might shed light on the Guthrie-McVeigh connection [legal briefing]. The legal process is grinding on, but Trentadue has already obtained one key ruling in his favor from U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball and squeezed more than 100 pages of (even more heavily) redacted documents out of the FBI.
Even in redacted form, these documents prove for the first time that FBI investigators were pursuing links between the Oklahoma City bombing and a series of 22 bank robberies carried out across the Midwest in 1993-1995 by a neo-Nazi group calling itself the Aryan Republican Army. Guthrie was a member of the ARA. So too were two members of a skinhead band from Philadelphia, Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy, as well as an old friend of Guthrie’s, Pete Langan, the brains behind the gang who also, curiously, happened to be a closet transvestite with a penchant for shaving his pubic hair and painting his toenails pink.
All were tried and convicted on robbery charges only. But it’s now clear the feds thought they were involved in a whole lot more.
The first teletype, from January 1996, puts BOMBROB, the FBI’s code word for the bank robbery investigation, under the general heading OKBOMB, its name for the bombing investigation. The second teletype, from August 1996, spells out what the ARA was suspected of planning with the tens of thousands of dollars it stole from the banks. In the subject line, the ARA members’ names are grouped along with the topic “Domestic Security/Terrorism.” The “threatened harm,” it says, included political assassination, genocide and bombings. Guthrie and another member of the gang are reported to have admitted giving someone—the name is blacked out—part of the bank robbery loot.
It is already widely suspected that the financing for the Oklahoma City bomb came from the ARA, and indeed that McVeigh was an occasional participant in the bank robberies. McVeigh once told his sister Jennifer that money he passed on to her had come from a bank heist. Does this document show that the FBI had evidence cementing the link between the ARA and McVeigh?
For a certain answer to that, we will have to wait a little longer. Judge Kimball has seen unredacted versions of all the released FBI teletypes, and is expected to rule imminently on whether to make them public. He has indicated fairly strongly that he will, having ruled last May that “the public’s interest in knowing the information [in the teletypes] outweighs the interest of the [named] individuals in keeping such information confidential.”
His ruling could, if it goes in Trentadue’s favor, finally blow the cover of the government’s version of the Oklahoma City bombing. The McVeigh-as-lone-mastermind theory was certainly useful in securing a conviction and death sentence against McVeigh—something that was far from a foregone conclusion at the time of his trial. But that does not mean the government necessarily believes that it is the whole truth; the involvement of McVeigh and Nichols may, rather, have been all that the feds were in a position to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Several things about the lone-mastermind theory have never mind sense. The official version does not explain how McVeigh and Nichols could have successfully built the huge fertilizer bomb on their own without any explosives training. (Guthrie, by contrast, had received weapons instruction when he was training, unsuccessfully, to be a Navy SEAL.) It stretches credulity by suggesting that McVeigh drove the fully primed bomb more than 300 miles from Kansas to Oklahoma City—something that ordnance experts say would have carried a high probability of premature detonation. (An alternative theory holds that McVeigh and his accomplices assembled the bomb in Oklahoma City on the morning of the attack.) It cannot explain how every single eyewitness who saw McVeigh as he made his final preparations for the attack saw him with someone else (and not Terry Nichols, either). And it does not account for the financing of the operation: McVeigh was jobless and broke from 1992 on, and yet he spent months shortly before the bombing frantically crisscrossing the country, staying in motels and making several sizable purchases. He paid cash for everything.
If McVeigh did have accomplices, then one place he might have found them was a white supremacist religious compound in rural Oklahoma called Elohim City. The feds were deeply suspicious of Elohim City, seeing it in the early spring of 1995 as potentially another Waco. Its residents included the notorious White Aryan Resistance leader Dennis Mahon, a shady German called Andreas Strassmeir and an occasional ARA member called Michael Brescia. Its visitors included other ARA members and McVeigh, going under the pseudonym Tim Tuttle.
It later emerged that Mahon’s girlfriend, Carol Howe, was an informant for the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. She was the one who heard plans being hatched—by Mahon and Strassmeir—to blow up a government building, accompanied Elohim City residents on one of three reconnaissance trips to Oklahoma City, and reported seeing McVeigh on the premises. We also know, from evidence that emerged during the pretrial discovery process, that McVeigh called Elohim City two weeks before the bombing and asked to speak to Strassmeir.
The January 1996 FBI teletype made public by Jesse Trentadue adds two intriguing details to this. One is that McVeigh, when he made his phone call, “was believed to have been attempting to recruit a second conspirator to assist in the OKBOMB attack.” And the other is that there was a second informant at Elohim City, working on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based civil rights organization whose lead lawyer, Morris Dees, has been the scourge of racists and neo-Nazis from one end of the country to the other.
The teletype says the Southern Poverty Law Center informant was at Elohim City two days before the bombing when someone—the name is redacted—put in a phone call to the compound. If true, this is an incendiary revelation, because it suggests that the center knew far more about the Oklahoma City bombing than it let on in its immediate aftermath. In an e-mail he wrote to Jesse Trentadue in January 2005, Mark Potok, who edits the center’s Intelligence Report, flatly denied that the SPLC had an informant, “or anyone else,” at Elohim City. Two years earlier, however, Morris Dees, when asked at a meeting at Southeastern Oklahoma State University whether his organization had had any inside source at Elohim City, made no such denial. Rather, he dodged the question, acknowledging that his organization worked closely with the FBI and other federal agencies but omitting any precise details.
“We did notify the FBI and Janet Reno six months before the Oklahoma bombing that we had strong information that there was going to be a serious domestic terrorism strike,” Dees added. “Within minutes after it [the Murrah Building bombing] hit the news ... we called the criminal division of the FBI and said ‘quit looking at Muslim businessmen who visit Oklahoma, you got to be looking at people involved in this Patriot movement.’ ”
We still have no clear idea of who knew what about the bombing, when they learned it, what attempts, if any, were made to prevent the calamity and why any such efforts failed. What we do know, however, is that the government had a lot more information than it was willing to admit publicly—or even to turn over to the defense teams in the various bombing trials that have taken place since 1997.
One trove of hitherto unseen FBI documents cropped up on the eve of Timothy McVeigh’s execution in 2001, delaying his death at the federal death row facility in Terre Haute, Ind., by almost a month. More were leaked to John Solomon, a Washington-based Associated Press reporter, in 2004—including a Secret Service file
containing the extraordinary revelation that government agents had access to security videotapes of the Murrah Building in which “the suspects” (more than one) are seen exiting the Ryder truck containing the bomb three minutes before the explosion.
When Terry Nichols was retried on state murder charges in Oklahoma that same year—in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by prosecutors to get him sentenced to death—the defense team tried to use the Solomon documents as exculpatory evidence for their client on the basis that the more others were involved, the less significant Nichols’ own role would appear to have been. They also made a passionate case
When Terry Nichols was retried on state murder charges in Oklahoma that same year—in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by prosecutors to get him sentenced to death—the defense team tried to use the Solomon documents as exculpatory evidence for their client on the basis that the more others were involved, the less significant Nichols’ own role would appear to have been. They also made a passionate case
that Nichols had been denied a fair trial because the FBI and other agencies had improperly concealed relevant evidence.
The judge in the Oklahoma case, Steven Taylor, refused to grant them satisfaction on that front, saying he simply did not believe the official documents stating that the government had access to security video footage of the Murrah Building. As for any link to the ARA bank robbery gang, he called it a “dry hole.” “There is absolutely no evidence of any overt act by the bank robbers in bombing the Murrah Building,” Judge Taylor insisted, “nothing at all to link the bank robbers to the crime that is being tried before this court.”
That, though, was before Jesse Trentadue came forward with his own stash of official documents. Trentadue is an undeniably colorful character, filling his legal briefs with trenchant statements about the federal government’s iniquities and writing taunting e-mails to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and others whenever he feels he has won a little victory over them. Last May, when Judge Kimball issued a ruling ordering the FBI to produce every document Trentadue had requested, the subject line of his e-mail to Mueller read: OH MY GOSH DARN BIGGEST FRIGGIN’ HECK!!! “After you read [the judge’s] order,” he wrote, “you are going to need a case of Preparation H!”
If Trentadue is unorthodox in his approach, he is nevertheless effective. In 2001, he secured $1.1 million in damages from the Justice Department for the emotional distress his family suffered over his brother’s suspicious death. That judgment has since been upheld on appeal, although the amount is still being litigated. Over the past year, his assault on the FBI has been equally dogged. When he first made a request for a copy of the January 1996 teletype, the FBI told him it did not exist. When he followed up that request with his own redacted copy of the teletype, along with a declaration from a former FBI special agent giving very specific information on where it was likely to be filed based on information on the teletype itself, the FBI said it had conducted a computer search for the terms Trentadue had requested and come up empty. Such a search, the FBI contended, was all that was required of the agency under the Freedom of Information Act.
Judge Kimball vigorously disagreed. “The court finds that the FBI’s search was not reasonably calculated to discovery [sic] the requested documents,” he wrote in his order last May. The FBI then announced it had 340 relevant documents in its possession and promised to release them all as ordered. When push came to shove, however, the number of documents it actually produced near the end of July was just 25; all were so heavily redacted that in places whole paragraphs were whited out and no significant new information could be gleaned from any of them. “The 340 number,” the FBI explained, “... included numerous multiple matches that actually identified the same document.” Oddly, the batch of 25 documents itself contained multiple versions of the same files; once the duplicates and draft versions were removed, the number of new documents numbered just 17.
Once again, Judge Kimball was unimpressed and ordered the FBI to give him unredacted copies of everything to examine in camera so he could decide for himself whether there was any valid reason to keep the redacted parts secret. At first the FBI resisted vigorously, going so far as to announce the day after Kimball’s new order that it had reopened the Oklahoma City bombing investigation and that it was therefore no longer obliged to respond to any related FOIA request. In the end, though, the FBI produced the documents as ordered, and Kimball conducted his examination of them behind closed doors last November. His decision on their publication is still pending.
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.
Even if the FBI has valid reasons for thinking that a broader prosecution of McVeigh’s accomplices could not stand up in court—because the evidence is lacking, or because the case might have to be built on the testimony of neo-Nazis and convicted bank robbers—there is no excuse not to be more forthcoming about what the agency knows, and never mind whose pride gets hurt in the process. America deserves to be told everything possible about the Oklahoma City bombing, just as it deserves to be told everything about 9/11. That includes the full factual record of the crime itself, the conduct of the investigation, the leads that could not be solidified and, yes, the false trails and the screw-ups. In an ideal world, Congress or the FBI itself would be the guarantor of full disclosure. As it is, we have to rely on dogged individuals like Jesse Trentadue to squeeze the information out drop by drop.
The judge in the Oklahoma case, Steven Taylor, refused to grant them satisfaction on that front, saying he simply did not believe the official documents stating that the government had access to security video footage of the Murrah Building. As for any link to the ARA bank robbery gang, he called it a “dry hole.” “There is absolutely no evidence of any overt act by the bank robbers in bombing the Murrah Building,” Judge Taylor insisted, “nothing at all to link the bank robbers to the crime that is being tried before this court.”
That, though, was before Jesse Trentadue came forward with his own stash of official documents. Trentadue is an undeniably colorful character, filling his legal briefs with trenchant statements about the federal government’s iniquities and writing taunting e-mails to Robert Mueller, the FBI director, and others whenever he feels he has won a little victory over them. Last May, when Judge Kimball issued a ruling ordering the FBI to produce every document Trentadue had requested, the subject line of his e-mail to Mueller read: OH MY GOSH DARN BIGGEST FRIGGIN’ HECK!!! “After you read [the judge’s] order,” he wrote, “you are going to need a case of Preparation H!”
If Trentadue is unorthodox in his approach, he is nevertheless effective. In 2001, he secured $1.1 million in damages from the Justice Department for the emotional distress his family suffered over his brother’s suspicious death. That judgment has since been upheld on appeal, although the amount is still being litigated. Over the past year, his assault on the FBI has been equally dogged. When he first made a request for a copy of the January 1996 teletype, the FBI told him it did not exist. When he followed up that request with his own redacted copy of the teletype, along with a declaration from a former FBI special agent giving very specific information on where it was likely to be filed based on information on the teletype itself, the FBI said it had conducted a computer search for the terms Trentadue had requested and come up empty. Such a search, the FBI contended, was all that was required of the agency under the Freedom of Information Act.
Judge Kimball vigorously disagreed. “The court finds that the FBI’s search was not reasonably calculated to discovery [sic] the requested documents,” he wrote in his order last May. The FBI then announced it had 340 relevant documents in its possession and promised to release them all as ordered. When push came to shove, however, the number of documents it actually produced near the end of July was just 25; all were so heavily redacted that in places whole paragraphs were whited out and no significant new information could be gleaned from any of them. “The 340 number,” the FBI explained, “... included numerous multiple matches that actually identified the same document.” Oddly, the batch of 25 documents itself contained multiple versions of the same files; once the duplicates and draft versions were removed, the number of new documents numbered just 17.
Once again, Judge Kimball was unimpressed and ordered the FBI to give him unredacted copies of everything to examine in camera so he could decide for himself whether there was any valid reason to keep the redacted parts secret. At first the FBI resisted vigorously, going so far as to announce the day after Kimball’s new order that it had reopened the Oklahoma City bombing investigation and that it was therefore no longer obliged to respond to any related FOIA request. In the end, though, the FBI produced the documents as ordered, and Kimball conducted his examination of them behind closed doors last November. His decision on their publication is still pending.
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.
Even if the FBI has valid reasons for thinking that a broader prosecution of McVeigh’s accomplices could not stand up in court—because the evidence is lacking, or because the case might have to be built on the testimony of neo-Nazis and convicted bank robbers—there is no excuse not to be more forthcoming about what the agency knows, and never mind whose pride gets hurt in the process. America deserves to be told everything possible about the Oklahoma City bombing, just as it deserves to be told everything about 9/11. That includes the full factual record of the crime itself, the conduct of the investigation, the leads that could not be solidified and, yes, the false trails and the screw-ups. In an ideal world, Congress or the FBI itself would be the guarantor of full disclosure. As it is, we have to rely on dogged individuals like Jesse Trentadue to squeeze the information out drop by drop.
From one of the above links:
4) FED JUDGE MATSCH'S DAUGHTER BETSY PUSHED INTO A HAWAIIN VOLCANO TO TAKE HIM OFF THE CIA DEVER S&L FRAUD CASE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/oklahoma/stories/judge.htm
Richard Matsch Has a Firm Grip on His Gavel in the Oklahoma City Bombing Trial
By Lois RomanoSpecial to The Washington Post
Monday, May 12, 1997; Page B01
DENVER -- When a defense lawyer asked the judge in the Oklahoma City bombing case the other day if he could approach the bench to clarify a minor point, the judge impatiently snapped, "No!" Earlier, when a prosecutor asked a potential juror one too many times for assurances that she could vote for the death penalty, he was brought up short when U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch huffed, "Move on!"
As the trial of defendant Timothy J. McVeigh begins its third week of testimony here, the whirlwind pace of the proceedings is due in no small part to this 66-year-old jurist who wears cowboy boots beneath his robes.
Although they sometimes describe Matsch (pronounced Maych) as "curt" and "irascible," lawyers also praise him for being an exacting and fair judge who puts a premium on legal ethics, preparation and punctuality. He starts his court precisely at 9 a.m. every day and ends promptly at 5 p.m. A portrait of Gen. George Patton hangs in his office. He is a slight man who sports a thick mustache and -- outside of court -- a tall cowboy hat.
Lance Ito he's not.
"I knew he would run a tight ship," said Stephanie K. Seymour, chief judge of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, who appointed Matsch after the appellate court recused all of Oklahoma's federal judges from the case. "I got out my book of judges and looked down the list. I saw Judge Matsch's name and that was pretty much it."
Indeed, when Seymour was faced in late 1995 with selecting a judge to hear the emotionally charged and complicated case, the specter of the O.J. Simpson courtroom circus hung over the nation's judiciary. Ito was widely ridiculed for losing control of his courtroom, allowing the attorneys to stretch the trial on ad infinitum.
Consequently, Matsch's selection was well received by both defense lawyers and prosecutors on the capital case, in which McVeigh is charged with blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killing 168 people. And his appointment came as no surprise to the legal community in Colorado, where, for more than 20 years, he has presided over the state's highest-profile federal cases with an iron hand and little regard for public opinion.
Lawyers speak of him with a combination of fear and respect. One former prosecutor relishes telling the story of the time Matsch assailed a potential juror who showed up for duty wearing very short shorts. He dismissed the man after humiliating him before the court. The next juror, who also happened to be wearing shorts, looked horrified. But before he could come forward, Matsch recessed for lunch. When he reconvened, the same juror was called forward -- this time wearing a three-piece suit.
For years, Matsch resisted pressure to end forced busing in Denver, doing so only two years ago in a landmark decision in which he ruled that the city had met its legal burden to end segregation in the public schools. He is perhaps best known for presiding over the trial a decade ago of four white supremacists charged with murdering popular local radio talk show host Alan Berg. Lawyers familiar with the case say he gave the defendants their dignity and due -- until two of the men were convicted. He then sentenced the triggerman and the getaway driver to 150 years each in prison, saying they had "forfeited their right to live in society."
He was widely criticized in 1992 when -- despite intense political pressure -- he permitted the Ku Klux Klan to hold a rally in Denver on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, after the city had denied the Klan's request for a parade permit. "All ideas are equal under the First Amendment," he wrote in his ruling.
In the Oklahoma City case, Matsch angered relatives of the victims when he ordered them out of his courtroom last summer, invoking a federal rule that bars potential witnesses from hearing other trial testimony. Earlier this spring, Congress passed a law specifically to overturn Matsch's ruling.
"He is pretty fearless," said Denver criminal attorney Phillip Figa, who has tried cases before Matsch. "He consistently does what he thinks is right based on the law and due process -- not what's politically popular."
"He expects you to be thorough and professional and get on with it," said Miles Cortez, president of the Colorado bar association. "I don't go into his courtroom unless I'm very prepared because if he catches me fumbling around, I pay the consequences."
Born in Iowa, Matsch graduated from the University of Michigan and its law school and was appointed to the federal bench by Richard Nixon in 1974 after spending the previous decade on Colorado's bankruptcy court. Lawyers who have appeared before him say he betrays no political ideology in his opinions. From the outset, they say, he insulated himself from the legal community, rarely attending official bar events and making his home about 30 miles outside Denver.
But many of the lawyers who once found him distant and cranky say they noticed a major change after a freak accident took the life of his 24-year-old daughter in 1992. Elizabeth Matsch and her boyfriend were taking a steam bath in a crack in the steam flats of a Hawaiian volcano when a burst of steam startled them. Elizabeth Matsch lost her footing, slipped farther into the crack and couldn't be rescued because of the intense heat.
Her father is said to have worn her bracelet to court for several years afterward. "There is no question he was a different man in the courtroom," said one lawyer who asked that his name not be used. "He ran his cases the same way, but you saw more of a sense of humor, more compassion, more tolerance."
Some prosecutors do complain quietly that Matsch seems to give the defense much leeway in his courtroom. In the Oklahoma City case, he has ruled for the defendants on some major issues -- moving the case out of Oklahoma and granting defense motions that McVeigh and co-defendant Terry Nichols be tried separately. And although the defense's financial records are sealed, there has been much speculation about the amount of taxpayers' money being spent by McVeigh's court-appointed attorney, Stephen Jones. Matsch has allowed Jones to assemble a 14-member team, some of whom have even traveled abroad to interview experts or witnesses. Some estimates have put the cost of McVeigh's defense in the millions.
"He tends to believe that the government and the prosecution have the resources and don't need to have the same level of protection," says Mike Norton, a former U.S attorney from Denver and practicing lawyer here.
Said another legal source who knows Matsch well: "He simply doesn't care what the press and the government think. When this is all over, and if McVeigh is convicted, he wants to make sure [McVeigh] can never say he didn't get a fair shake."
http://extras.denverpost.com/bomb/report2.htm
EXCERPT:
http://www.rense.com/general11/levy.htm
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