Sunday, April 17, 2005
Al Qaeda and Oklahoma City
Fox News just ran a trailer announcing that they will run a story later tonight wondering whether al Qaeda had a role in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. I am not one of the conspiracy theorists on this subject, but last fall I did write on this strange passage from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies:
That was the entire passage -- there was no disclaimer, no qualification. It looks for all the world as though Richard Clarke believes that there is an al Qaeda connection to Oklahoma City, but is unwilling to say quite that much without evidence. It will be interesting whether new evidence surfaces, and whether Clarke says anything about it.
Another conspiracy theory intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlike on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American boyfriend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.
Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the Al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. government? We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several Al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.
That was the entire passage -- there was no disclaimer, no qualification. It looks for all the world as though Richard Clarke believes that there is an al Qaeda connection to Oklahoma City, but is unwilling to say quite that much without evidence. It will be interesting whether new evidence surfaces, and whether Clarke says anything about it.
2 Comments:
By 
geoffrobinson, at
Sun Apr 17, 09:05:00 PM:
A reporter from OK City wrote a book about this topic. She thinks there is something to this.
By geoffrobinson, at
Mon Apr 18, 09:03:00 AM:
