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July 24, 2004
Who wasn't looking? (Who's STILL not looking?)
Here's the latest earthshaking conclusion about the Sandy Berger affair: "We don't know what he was thinking when he did it." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)I'm tempted to ask, "What did you not know about what he was thinking and when did you not know it?" While I'm troubled by a number of aspects of the scandal (bad security, repeated incidents, long investigatory delays), I previously attributed this to the old boys network mentality coupled with overzealous partisanship by a man who confused national security with getting his own job back. I hope I was right, and that that's all there is to this. But the problem is, there's the distinct possibility of another, far more sinister motivation: The woman who wrote the definitive book on a Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City bombing says the classified terror-threat report at the center of a criminal investigation of former Clinton aide Sandy Berger might include information about a high-level al-Qaida operative having visited OKC ahead of the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building.Good question. Might the long delay in the Berger investigation raise the possibility of a bipartisan coverup that failed? Just a thought. I am not trying to generate conspiracy theories here, but the questions about Oklahoma City have not gone away. Bodansky's no conspiracy nutjob; he does his homework. And it was Richard Clarke himself who raised the Oklahoma City connection on page 127 of his recent book, Against All Enemies. (Via Glenn Reynolds.) Similar suspicions were voiced by former CIA Director Woolsey in 2002: Former CIA Director James Woolsey also expresses skepticism that Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, and his accomplice Terry Nichols, sentenced to life in prison and awaiting further trial on murder charges, could have planned and executed this monstrous crime all by themselves.Those who permitted the investigations to run short? Now who might they have been? Last fall, Rand Simberg noted Berger's past attempts to cover up the Khobar Towers blast, and speculated that there'd be even more motivation to cover up Oklahoma City: we've never really found all of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing, for the same reason, with an additional one. Not only would proof of a Middle East connection have required undesired action on the part of the Clinton administration, but it would have diluted the politically-useful message that this was the sole act of "angry white men," the same ones who'd been stirred up by Rush Limbaugh into giving the Republicans control of Congress the previous fall.If there was anything touching on Oklahoma City in the files Berger handled, it would certainly have been political dynamite which both parties would consider worth covering up. If the right people are looking the other way, it's a lot easier to grab the right stuff. Just a thought. I'd hate to see a national security betrayal of such magnitude be passed off as a partisan political scandal (with pants and socks tossed in as if for comic effect). posted by Eric on 07.24.04 at 10:59 PM
Comments
You needn't worry about generating conspiracy theories. Where this differs from my critique on leftist theories about Bush's service record is that here we know that one individual illegally removed documents and that these documents were destroyed. With the Bush affair, all we know is that service records are missing, but that has no impact on national security. Varius Contrarius · July 25, 2004 03:51 PM |
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To even dream that there might have been a Muslim connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is very Politically Incorrect, since it places at least some of the blame on followers of The Religion Of Peace rather than solely on Dead White European Male Gun Owners. A very dangerous thought.