Was It al Qaeda That Bombed Oky City?

Hmmm; d'ya s'pose this was one of the files that Sandy Berger forgot to stuff down his pants last summer?

Bombshell new evidence ignored by the FBI suggests a link between the Oklahoma City bombing and the man who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing and who later drew up the blueprint for the 9/11 attacks, Fox News Channel's Rita Cosby is set to report Sunday night.

"It's amazing to me that not more has been made of those phone records," Oklahoma City attorney Michael Johnston tells Cosby for her 10th-anniversary special on the 1995 attack.

Given who was POTUS at that time, it doesn't amaze me at all.

The explosive new evidence shows that OKC bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols repeatedly called a boarding house in [the Philippines'] Cebu City, an establishment that has been linked to al-Qaida Twin Tower bomber Ramzi Yousef.

The same kind of ANFO fertilizer fuel bomb was used in that attack and the one two years later that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

Additional phone records dismissed by earlier investigations show that repeated calls were made from Terry Nichols' home to a place called Star Glad Lumber in the Philippines.

"Star Glad Lumber is operated by a man whose brother and cousin were both notorious terrorists, splinter groups of the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines," Johnston tells Cosby....

Cosby's special report will also delve into claims made by Yousef's al-Qaida partner in the Philippines, Abdul Hakim Murad – who was captured on the spot after Yousef fled.

On the morning of April 19, 1995 – the day of the OKC blast – Murad reportedly told a guard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City where he was being held that he and Yousef were behind the attack.

Reporting for Insight Magazine in 2002, investigative journalist Kenneth Timmerman detailed the episode:

"Lt. Philip Rojas, a prison guard, asked Murad what he thought [about the blast] and found his response so startling that he informed his superiors. They, in turn, called the FBI.

"Special Agents Francis J. Pellegrino and Brian G. Parr arrived later that morning, within hours after the Oklahoma City blast. 'Murad responded to the guard's question by stating that the Liberation Army was responsible for the bombing,' they reported in a witness report. 'A short time later, Murad passed a note to the guard, again claiming that the Liberation Army was responsible for the bombing in Oklahoma City.'"

Timmerman said that the "Liberation Army" was a fictitious organization used as a code by Yousef and other al-Qaida members in announcing their responsibility for terrorist attacks.

In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense. At the time - less than six months after the disastrous 1994 mid-term elections that witnessed the end of three generations of Democrat congressional hegemony - Bill Clinton was struggling for "relevance" as Newt Gingrich was steamrolling the "Republican revolution" right over the top of him and his party. They desperately needed something, anything, to throw the GOP on the public relations defensive.

As if on cue, the Murrah building blew up in Oklahoma City.

Of course, disasters always provide presidents with opportunity to commiserate, inspire, and rally the nation, as the last few years have amply demonstrated. But this one also provided Clinton with the propaganda hook he needed to smear the Right and get back into the political game: Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers.

When those crazy militia goobers turned up as the primary suspects in the attack, Mr. Bill must have seen unclasping bra hooks. They were the answer to his immediate political woes. Consequently, he had absolutely no incentive to see an investigation pursued beyond them. He had the PR theme he wanted, and didn't need any additional factors clogging up the propaganda machinery, to say nothing of a foreign connection to Islamist terrorists that were already waging war against the United States. My goodness, that might have compelled him to do something really "extreme" like invade Afghanistan in order to crush the Taliban and destroy bin Laden's base of operations.

Remember, that was before Sick Willie's re-election the following year. If it had gotten out that we had been attacked from without, as opposed to within, he'd have had little choice about starting the GWOT six years early if he expected his "triangulation" strategy to succeed, and that might have complicated things with the Democrat base, even for him.

In short, Oky City had to be laid at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and the "extreme haters" that had "seized power" the previous fall.

And, whaddaya know, the FBI didn't do any digging beyond the immediate perps.

Thus was another stepping stone to 9/11 allowed to go unanswered.

I said on numerous occasions in those years that Clinton's weak, "multilat" foreign policy was going to generate disasters in the years ahead. The only questions were where, when, and how.

Something tells me we won't be out of the woods into which he got his lost for quite some time yet, despite the best efforts of President Bush and the "neocons."

But the biggest disaster that befell the country wasn't ANFO fertilizer fuel bombs, but the election that put that corrupt hillbilly mercenary in power in the first place.

And just think: his moll is waiting in the wings for the encore.

If that isn't terrifying, I'll stuff Sandy Berger down my pants.