March 27, 2004

Did the Oklahoma bomber have help from al-Qa'ida's explosives expert?

Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies has not just pushed the Bush administration deep on to the defensive over its approach to terrorism. It also pokes a stick into another hornet's nest by asking whether the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was not in some way linked to al-Qa'ida.

Nobody, least of all Mr Clarke, is suggesting that al-Qa'ida carried out the bombing, which was pinned primarily on Timothy McVeigh, with help from his old army buddy Terry Nichols. But his book stirs up some troubling unanswered questions about Mr Nichols' many trips to the Philippines in the years preceding the bombing and raises the possibility that he received explosives training from Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993.

Hmmm. This could be very interesting.
I've heard lots of rumblings about the likely Islamist connection with the OKC blast ever since it happened: I'll never forget the authorities stopping "Middle Eastern-looking" men in a rented car behaving oddly on the day of the bombing here in Dallas.
Let's hope that Nichols tell us something to get a "deal" during his upcomong trial.
Due to the FBI having mishandled or lost some of the evidence of this case and the fact that Timothy McVeigh went to his execution so quickly with no real explanation as to why he did it, we may never really know.
All I can say is that it looked like a typical Islamist truck or car bomb (like some in liberated Iraq, the first WTC blast, Bali, etc.) and the rubble of the Murrah building resembled the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa 3 years later almost exactly.
If you read McVeigh's bio, he "changed" in his loyalties when he served in Operation Desert Storm.
I think he was "turned" overseas and either became a Muslim or became so full of hatred against the United States that he embraced the goals of the radical Islamic world.
Don't forget that we now know that the Saudis have funded and dispatched Waahab Islamist clerics to infiltrate our military's chaplain program as well as that of U.S. prisons. (See below for a reference to Jose Padilla, who converted to Islam in prison.)
His (and Nichols's) loyalty to a "great cause" like Islamist jihad would explain McVeigh's willingness to kill children as well as other innocents in that building and to consider them merely "collateral damage."
It's my opinion that the entire "cell" that planned and carried out the OKC bombing was never caught, simply because the FBI stopped when McVeigh turned himself in.
And as so many have pointed out, the OKC John Doe #2 looks exactly like jailed would-be "dirty bomber" and IslamoFascist Jose Padilla.
As I said earlier, we may never know with certainty, but if this Al Queda/Abu Sayaf connection proves true, the OKC bombing would have been our second attack on American soil by Islamist terrorists after the first WTC bombing.