OKC Bombing: The Forerunner to 9/11

 

According to the federal theory, to which the news media ascribed without question, the bombing in Oklahoma City, at the Alfred P. Murrah Building on April 19, 1995, was the work of American dissidents bent on a violent overthrow of the government. Congress responded by immediately enacting legislation to give the government unprecedented latitude with the invasion of individual privacy. All evidence actually points to a well planned, sophisticated government operation put into motion months earlier, with a massive cover-up controlled by the U. S. Justice Department, and carried through and beyond the “Star Chamber” charade of trials in Denver in 1997. This documentary is full of startling facts never made public by the establishment news media about the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995.

 

The Murrah Building bombing has a number of parallels to the 9/11/01 attack. Two are that the same engineers created reports supporting the official government explanation of the attack, and that explanations in both cases the damage was blamed on outsiders attacking the buildings from without. 9/11 whistleblower and researcher Kevin Ryan documents commonalities of the investigations in A New Standard For Deception.

 

Another parallel is that the rare phenomenon of progressive collapse is used to explain the disproportionate extent of the final damage to the alleged cause in both cases. Gene Corley states:

 

It is important to understand that the bomb blast to the Murrah building was not devastating by itself — it just so happened that it was located at a critical point which undermined the whole structure of the building. What we discovered as a result of our investigation was that most of the damage and a vast majority of the fatalities were caused by the progressive collapse of the building.

 

A NEW THEORY WITH OLD FACTS

 by Pat Shannan

 

“All the evidence and expert opinion point to a conspiracy extending far beyond the involvement of McVeigh and Nichols; involvement that strongly suggests overt or covert actions on the part of federal agents without the knowledge of either McVeigh or Nichols,” says Carl Worden, Liaison & Intelligence Officer of the Southern Oregon Militia. To at least a few million people, this is certainly not any hot news, but his revelation of a very suppressed news story prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City disaster may be. (See related story)

 

There were enough clandestine characters hanging around Oklahoma City during those days to fill a James Bond movie. ATF’s paid informant Carol Howe had provided information that the Murrah Building was one of three potential targets. On April 6th, Cary Gagan gave U. S. Marshals in Denver the information that “a federal building would be blown up in either Denver or Oklahoma City within two weeks.” Then, thirty-eight minutes before the blasts on April 19th, the Department of Justice in Washington received a telephone call pinpointing the Murrah Building.

 

THE ANFO BOMB

 

The prosecution built its whole case around a bomb allegedly made from a mixture of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel oil (ANFO). For a year or more prior to the Murrah blasts, BATF had been blowing up car bombs at the White Sands (New Mexico) Proving Grounds. According to Newsweek magazine (June 5, 1995), “This project, code-named `Dipole Might,’ is designed to create a computer model to unravel terrorist car and truck-bomb attacks. By coincidence, an ATF agent assigned to `Dipole Might’ happened to be in Oklahoma City on April 19th, working at the federal courthouse, which stands across the street from the Murrah Building.” That agent, Harry Eberhart, called his Dallas office moments after the explosions to report an eruption of several thousand pounds of ANFO.

 

Yes, it was quite a coincidence! Newsweek didn’t tell us that there had not been a reported ANFO crime in the U.S. since 1970, so this Operation Dipole was about as necessary as those $600 toilet seats purchased by the Pentagon a decade or two ago. Yet one of the operatives of Dipole just happens to be across the street in back of the scene at the precise moment of the multiple detonations and, with the X-ray vision of Superman, makes an immediate diagnosis and reports to his superiors the cause of the blast. From his position, even if he had been asleep at the first blast, it would have been almost impossible for him to have missed the multiple explosions which lasted a full ten seconds. Hundreds of other witnesses are aware of this, although many were coerced into changing their stories. None was called to the federal grand jury.

 

One has to wonder what facts Agent Eberhart used to form his convictions. Experts tell us that there are two identifying signatures from a blast of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil: One is fire, the other is a lingering nitrate gas. Neither was present at the Murrah Building, evidenced by the hundreds of rescue workers on the scene without gas masks. The only flames present were the automobile fires on the street and in the parking lot of the Journal-Record Building, directly across from the Murrah entrance. All of the facts notwithstanding, the first government fabrication was born, remained healthy, and was quickly growing to early maturity. The New American magazine and William Jasper have long referred to “the government’s obstinate adherence to this tottering premise – in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary – to be one of the most troubling aspects of the case.”

 

The first expert to go public with the ANFO discrepancies was USAF Brigadier General (ret.) Benton K. Partin. Sitting in his living room in Virginia and merely looking only at photos in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News was enough to catch his discerning eye. The exposed rebar on the severed columns at the third floor level was adequate evidence for Partin. He knew that an air blast from a truck on the street could never remove reinforced concrete and steel. Then he noticed the remaining standing columns between the truck and the one taken out in the left center of the Murrah Building. He knew this was impossible, unless there were charges planted at the collapsed column.

 

Partin noted three such columns from the magazine photos and found a fourth by viewing expanded fire department photos on a later visit to Oklahoma City. Later study revealed the macabre evidence of a fifth charge having been detonated underneath the children’s nursery on the second floor.

 

General Partin’s credentials and military record are impeccable. Most of his 31-year career in the air force was spent in demolition. He headed up the USAF’s Explosive Research Laboratory. If the FBI were really looking for the truth in this case, could they find a better expert witness than Ben Partin? The theory of the ANFO bomb exploding in a truck on the street and wreaking the kind of damage seen for blocks around is akin to a pea-shooter bringing down a spaceship.

 

Take it to the bank. There was an enormous explosion inside the Murrah Building. Hundreds of witnesses confirm the fact, and the evidence was/is everywhere. Even today, three and a half years later, the pock-marked buildings on Broadway (two and three blocks away, facing away from the blasts) and elsewhere attest to the fact that this massive damage throughout the immediate downtown area could not have been administered by a solitary ANFO explosion encapsulated inside a paneled truck.

 

THEN WHAT DID DO IT?

 

A year ago following the McVeigh Star Chamber proceeding in Denver, I wrote that a better depicting title for our two-hour documentary on the subject (“Murder in the Heartland”) might have been “Chimera in the Heartland.” In Greek mythology, the chimaera was fire-breathing monster represented with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. By modern-day definition, a chimera is a creation of the imagination, an impossible and foolish fancy. Both would portray the case accurately — The chimaera in Oklahoma City; and the chimera at the Denver trials.

 

In that video documentary, we laid out three possible scenarios, before settling on #3 – General Partin’s – as being the most likely to have happened. #1 was disregarded almost as quickly as it was considered. The supposition that the truck bomb on the street ignited explosives stored by BATF and DEA on the 8th and 9th floors, which in turn decimated the floors beneath, violated as many or more laws of physics than the single ANFO bomb theory.

 

Theory #2 always had merit but was so hard to prove. How do you document evidence on a secret weapon about which maybe twelve people in the world have knowledge? We are talking about the “pineapple bomb” which had been brought to our attention by Ted Gunderson months before we began shooting the video in mid-August of 1995.

 

While in Las Vegas filming Gunderson, we got more details about this super bomb from a former CIA operative who understood how it worked and knew where it had been used in the past. He had only high praises for its inventor, Michael Riconosciuto, and lamented the fact that Michael had been “railroaded into prison to shut him up,” and referring to the former child prodigy as “by far, the smartest man I ever met.”

 

Michael Riconosciuto had literally grown up in the CIA. His father was an operative in the `50s and `60s. Michael was recruited for duty before he entered college at Cal Poly at age 17 and remained with “the company” for twenty-five years. Ted Gunderson had worked with him in the solving of no less than five murder cases during the 1980s. Much of Michael’s research efforts since the mid-1970s had been spent on developing a super bomb. Immediately upon seeing the results of the Murrah explosion on television, he called his old friend Ted Gunderson in Las Vegas and said, “That was not ANFO. That was our bomb!”

 

According to Riconscuito, the type bomb detonated was an Electro-Hydrodynamic Gaseous Fuel Device, otherwise known in the inner circles as a Barometric Bomb. It has been classified as Top Secret due to the ease with which the bomb can be created. A piece to fit the confusion puzzle at Murrah might be found in the fact that the explosive is ammonium nitrate, which is detonated approximately ten seconds later in a secondary blast.

 

The complete assembly resembles a propane tank with a zig-zag shaped wedge surrounding the outside diameter of the tank. When the primary initial blast takes place, the top of the tank flies upwards and the bottom of the tank opens up into a flower petal shape. Immediately, the ammonium nitrate mixes with the shattered micro-encapsulated aluminum silicate to create an even more devastating explosion fuel cloud. This cloud is then energized with a high potential Electrostatic Field resulting in the creation of millions of microfronts. The cold cloud is the then detonated a second time with another PETN charge, which was previously cushioned from the first blast due to a shock- absorbing cavity. This time the cold cloud ignites, creating a shock wave surpassing the traditional effects of TNT. The most astounding effect of this type of detonation is the immediate atmospheric overpressure, which has a tendency to blow out the windows of any structure within the vicinity of the blast.

 

(There were many survivors inside the Murrah Building who first felt a slight rumble, alerting some to take cover. The Water Board tape recording, replayed on our documentary video, depicts a definite “pop” some five seconds prior to the eruption.)

 

After the Las Vegas visit, I decided that the video of the Murrah Building mystery could not be complete without an interview with Michael Riconoscuito. Ted Gunderson agreed and set up the appointment. I met him at the Atlanta airport in September of `95, and we drove together to the federal lockup in South Carolina where Riconosciuto was being held on a thirty-year sentence for drug-possession – a charge which he, too, complains of being a phony one created only to remove him from circulation.

 

Meanwhile, Partin and Gunderson were in the midst of a talk show feud. Partin resented the intrusion into his bailiwick by a neophyte touting some unknown super weapon, while Gunderson, admittedly operating on limited and second-hand information, was convinced his sources were legitimate and that the CIA certainly could be harboring a secret weapon about which even the top brass of the USAF would not be aware. They reached a stalemate when Partin refused to go on the air anymore with Gunderson.

 

COULD BOTH HAVE BEEN CORRECT?

 

I was dumbfounded as everyone else. After talking with a dozen or more highly experienced munitions and detonation personnel – from farmers who had blown away stumps to Navy Seals who had sunken ships – I knew that a simple ANFO bomb had not wreaked this kind of havoc. General Partin’s facts in evidence served to confirm what had been only theories of many others such as this writer who barely passed high school chemistry. But even those who flunked Physics and Logic could understand the Partin report. Apparently this group did not include the some 60 congressman and senators to whom Partin hand-delivered his eight-page letter on Capitol Hill. Only one had the courtesy to respond, said “It’s too deep for me,” and passed it on the FBI.

 

What if both Partin and Gunderson were right? How would it mesh? During our prison interview, I asked Michael Riconoscuito: Could there have been four of the super bombs placed at the strategic third-floor columns pointed out by General Partin?

 

“No way!” Michael responded unhesitatingly. “I was surprised there was so little damage as it was.” His experience had taught him that a simultaneous detonation of four of the Barometric Bombs would have made downtown Oklahoma City look like a post-war Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He admits on camera that the CIA had used one in Beirut in 1984.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s say a single super bomb was on the third floor in between the front column damage and the center column damage pointed out by General Partin. How do you account for the numerous columns left standing, some even between the bomb [wherever you place it] and the collapsed columns? His reply was sincere but failed to convince me. “That’s indicative of our bomb. It skips around and passes over. It also can be omni-directional or set low enough to encompass only a 15 degree pattern.” In fact, we believed this revelation to be so confusing that to use it in the documentary would serve more to dilute than enhance his theory. We left it in the can.

 

For three-plus years, I remained satisfied that the building was blown from the inside and that the truck bomb was but a diversionary “firecracker” which might have removed a few windows at best. Then came the similar explosions at the embassies in Africa and the TV pictures, which looked like a re-run from April of `95. The talking heads said it was ANFO in a truck. Witnesses in the first reports (always watch for the early reports) said that they heard a “pop,” followed six or seven seconds later by this tremendous and very familiar eruption appearing to go straight up through the building. One rescuer wondered out loud to a reporter, “How can we have dead people on the 14th and 15th floors from a truck bomb on the street?” FBI agents did not have to travel to Nairobi to know that a fertilizer bomb was not responsible for this catastrophe.

 

All the OKC discrepancies began creeping back. No OKC witnesses recalled seeing any other truck parts that fateful morning, except that dubious rear axle with the supposed VIN which allegedly directed the FBI to the Kansas rental agency and McVeigh. (Ford Motor Company wrote to Ted Gunderson that year saying that FORD does not put Vehicle Identification Numbers on its rear axles.) But where were the front seat, the yellow RYDER-lettered panel pieces, and the steering column? Surely ANFO could not disintegrate an engine block. And what blew that 12 x 30-foot crevice eight feet deep into the earth through the asphalt and concrete?

 

In 1997, pictures surfaced of a large Ryder truck parked in a small military compound and secured behind a Cyclone fence. Hawkers of the photos said they were taken in “early April of 1995, near Oklahoma City.” Not exactly true. We found the man who was responsible. He is a charter pilot in Tulsa who prefers we not use his name and to do so would serve no useful purpose. This man had heard of the black helicopters and unmarked military convoys rumored to be moving around the country. In November of 1994, he was flying from Oklahoma City back into Tulsa when he noticed the aforementioned military installation beneath him. He grabbed his camera, fired a couple of shots, and promptly forgot about it. Not until long after the Murrah disaster did he happen to be combing through some of his old pictures when he noticed the yellow Ryder truck parked right there among all the unmarked army green!

 

Was this Ryder truck later blown up in the Oklahoma wilderness by Operation Dipole Might and were these the parts displayed in the Denver courtroom to further hoodwink the jurors? The small military compound outside of Tulsa was dismantled only days after the bombing. When the prosecution team hauled a half a ton of Ryder truck parts into the courtroom in Denver a short time later, we knew the likely significance of this second Ryder truck. No witnesses could remember seeing anything like these wrinkled remains on the streets of Oklahoma City.

 

 

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