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.

.....Jayna Davis, author of "The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing," points out the writing of the report was in the same timeframe Yossef Bodansky, former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, confirmed that Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden's lieutenants, traveled to Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995 " to insure the smooth execution of the pending terrorist strike against the Murrah federal complex," said Davis.

"Bodansky explained that he did not confirm Al-Zawahiri's mission to the heartland state until late 1999," Davis told WND. "This revelation coincides with Richard Clarke's drafting of the Berger-directed review regarding the realization that al-Qaida had reached America's shores."

Asked Davis: "Was Bodansky's confirmation that the chief lieutenant of the bin Laden terror network traveled to the U.S. to oversee final preparations for the 1995 terrorist strike on the Oklahoma City federal building included in Clarke's draft reports that are now officially missing from National Archives?

"Did Berger and Clarke review Bodansky's skillful analysis of the Murrah Building bomb that drew striking parallels to the techniques used by known Islamist groups for operations in Argentina and elsewhere?"

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.

Woolsey believes the work of persistent investigators, reporter Jayna Davis and Middle East expert Laurie Mylroie, are onto something, as many clues in their separate probes point ominously toward Baghdad.

"[W]hen the full stories of these two incidents [Oklahoma City and the first Trade Center bombing] are finally told,” he told the Journal, "those who permitted the investigations to stop short will owe big explanations to these two brave women. And the nation will owe them a debt of gratitude.”

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





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Comments

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.

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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