NEW LIGHT ON OKLAHOMA CITY

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DEMOCRACY NOW - A Salt Lake City lawyer searching for the truth behind
his brother's death has uncovered a wealth of new information that could
implicate the FBI in the Oklahoma City bombings. The documents he dug up
suggest the FBI knew about the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in advance but did little to prevent it. Jesse Trentadue's
brother Kenney Trentadue was found dead in his prison cell in Oklahoma
City in August 1995. The FBI calls it a suicide, but Jesse maintains
Kenney was beaten to death during an interrogation. Jesse believes the
FBI mistook his brother for the missing second suspect in the Oklahoma
City bombings - the so-called "John Doe #2." His research also suggests
that the bombing was not the work of one or two men, but involved a
wider network connected to the far-right white supremacist movement.

INTERVIEW WITH JESSE TRENTADUE AND JOURNALIST JAMES RIDGEWAY
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/03/1348240
Released: August 01, 2007

JAMES RIDGEWAY, MOTHER JONES - Jesse believes that McVeigh's contact was
[Andreas] Strassmeir, a fixture in many Oklahoma City theories. There
has been much speculation, aired most recently on the BBC show
Conspiracy Files this year, that Strassmeir had ties to U.S. and German
intelligence and might (along with his government contacts) have had
advance knowledge of the plot. In February 2007, Jesse filed a
declaration in court signed by Nichols stating, "McVeigh said that
Strassmeir would provide a 'safe house' if necessary. McVeigh...said
that Strassmeir was 'head of security at some backwoods place in
Oklahoma.'" Strassmeir left the country in early 1996; he was later
questioned on the phone by the FBI.

Kirk Lyons, Strassmeir's U.S. attorney, who has defended a number of
far-right figures over the years, says the reality is far simpler;
Strassmeir came to the United States to take part in Civil War
reenactments, liked it here, and, hoping to find a bride, ended up at
Elohim City. Lyons insists that Strassmeir was never a spy, except in
the minds of conspiracy theorists. ("These silly right-wingers think I
am Mossad," he says. "I've given up arguing with these nutsy cuckoos.")

Reached at his home in Berlin, Strassmeir told me that he met McVeigh
once, at a gun show in 1993, but that they never spoke again. He said he
had no intelligence affiliations and had no clues to the Oklahoma City
attack before it happened; but there were definitely informants at
Elohim City, he added, and sometimes surveillance planes flew overhead -
probably, he thought, to check out the marijuana fields that "some of
the rednecks" had planted. . .

The oklahoma City bombing prefigured 9/11 in many ways. There were the
missed clues; the federal informant who actually had contact with the
conspirators; the turf-conscious agencies failing to share and act on
vital information; and in general, a domestic-intelligence program
incapable of translating surveillance into action. Just as they would
misunderstand the nature of Al Qaeda, the FBI and other agencies never
viewed the far right as a political movement with the strategic and
tactical ability to deliver a major attack. Intelligence on these groups
suffered from the broader inadequacies of domestic intelligence,
especially in the use of untested freelance informants recruited under
threat of prosecution. But with federal police forces and the Justice
Department responsible for policing themselves, and the details of their
work often shrouded in secrecy, the system remained unaccountable. The
bombing "grew out of a definable social movement the authorities didn't
understand," says Leonard Zeskind, a researcher who has tracked the far
right for more than 30 years. "It went unsolved because of the character
and gross mismanagement of the investigation. It was an outrageous
crime, and the size of the crime magnifies the level of incompetence.".
. .

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://
www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/07/in_search_of_john_doe_no_2.html



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