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Iraq
Connections to U.S. Extremists By Kelly
Patricia OMeara
komeara@InsightMag.com
In the
global war on terror, law-enforcement officials
may need to look in our own backyard for clues
about who sent anthrax to Capitol Hill and TV
anchormen.
Whos
behind the deadly anthrax letters? That is the
hot-button question of the moment. While federal
law-enforcement officials have come up short in
connecting the postal poison to Osama bin Laden,
Iraq or any other individual terrorist or state
sponsor of terrorism, experts well-versed in
terrorism wonder why more attention hasnt
been focused on a connection much closer to home.
For
example, considerable evidence that may prove
helpful in the ongoing investigation has been
made public in other recent terrorism cases.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1995
bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City and the relationship of
convicted bombing conspirator Terry Nichols to
elements of Iraqi intelligence.
During
the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the convicted
mastermind behind the Oklahoma City bombing,
information surfaced concerning Nichols
frequent visits to the Philippines; McVeigh
attorney Stephen Jones later wrote about this
extensively in his book Others Unknown: Timothy
McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy.
According to Jones investigation, Nichols
made numerous trips to the Philippines beginning
in 1990, many lasting more than a month.
Nichols
reportedly attended a meeting in the early 1990s
on the predominantly Muslim island of Mindanao, a
hotbed of fundamentalist activities, at which
Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan
Amin Shah were present. The themes of the meeting
were bombing activities, providing firearms
and ammunition, training in making and handling
bombs. Yousef was the mastermind of the
World Trade Center bombing in 1993; Murad and
Shah were convicted in a 1996 conspiracy to blow
up 12 U.S. jetliners.
Laurie
Mylroie, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. who is an expert
on Iraqi terrorism and author of Study of
Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and
Saddam Husseins War Against America, was a
consultant to Jones during the Oklahoma City
investigation. She tells Insight the
connection of Terry Nichols, the Philippines and
Ramzi Yousef is a very important point that
neither the FBI nor the press pursued.
Mylroie adds, I doubt that Nichols has ever
been asked about his connections to Yousef
because the government didnt want to know.
It wanted to say, Here are the
perpetrators; we arrested them and we brought
them to justice. Case closed.
Mylroie
continues: The fact is, Ramzi Yousef was in
the Philippines at the same time as Nichols and
visited the same city out of which the Oklahoma
City bombing was planned. I doubt that connection
ever was pursued. Only the people in charge of
the investigation can explain their motives in
failing to focus public attention on this, but I
can guess. Remember that before the bombing
[President Bill] Clinton was in deep political
trouble but, by dealing with it in the fashion he
did, his kite rose and he was able to make it
look like the FBI did a splendid, knockdown
investigation. It was kind of like, Okay,
Tim McVeigh is the mastermind; Terry Nichols
assisted him; dont ask any more
questions. That settled, with
Clintons tremendous capacity to feel
everyones pain, he improved his own
position.
But
suppose the investigation had been done another
way, says the terrorist expert, such as
saying, Terry Nichols has all these
suspicious contacts in the Philippines, and
were gonna pursue them because it may be
theres been a foreign bombing on American
soil. More important is that there were
other Americans involved in the McVeigh/Nichols
bombing, and they could be involved today in
other terrorist activities. But the FBI just
isnt going to recognize it. The kind of
irresponsibility that I and others believe the
Clinton administration committed is so
mind-boggling that many well-meaning people just
cant believe it, even though there is
significant evidence a standard of
probable cause. They find it hard to accept
because it would follow that the White House and
the FBI were corrupt.
A
recent Fox News program appeared to support
Mylroies contention of an FBI cover-up.
Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report
announced on the Fox and Friends show that
top defense officials say that in all the
evidence used against Timothy McVeigh to execute
him in the Oklahoma City bombing, that he had
Iraqi telephone numbers on his person. He had
information about Iraq which has led some
officials to think that he was an Iraqi agent and
maybe was doing Saddam Husseins business in
Oklahoma City.
Bedard
further claimed that the FBI says this is
crazy, there is no evidence. DOD [Department of
Defense] comes back and says, Thats
because you didnt tell us it was a
cover-up. The theory is that he [McVeigh]
got those numbers from some militia groups out
west which he was associating with. This led the
FBI to tell the guys at the Pentagon, Go
fight your war.
Bedards
news is news to those who conducted
the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing.
This startling information never was brought
forward at any time during the investigation or
trial. At no point in the last six years nor the
$50 million investigation did such evidence ever
surface or did anyone connect McVeigh to an Iraqi
agent, let alone turn up Iraqi telephone
numbers on his person or in his effects.
Jones tells Insight that we spent
considerable time and money investigating the
connection between Nichols and the Philippines
and Iraq, but I certainly dont know
anything about McVeigh and Iraqi telephone
numbers.
While
Nichols ties to the Iraqis are
well-documented in numerous books and independent
investigations, such as the recent report of
Oklahoma state Rep. Charles Keys, he also had
ties to other militant groups. For instance, he
attended meetings in Michigan of the Posse
Comitatus, a militant, right-wing organization
founded by Col. William Potter Gale and headed by
James Wickstrom. Members of Posse Comitatus,
according to legal documents released prior to
McVeighs trial, have for years been in
contact with Iraq and other rogue Arab nations
that share a hatred of Israel.
This
fits with the Oklahoma City defense teams
conclusions concerning Dennis Mahon, long
suspected of being a player in the conspiracy to
bomb the Murrah building. Mahon is described in
Jones book as a virulent racist and
avowed enemy of the U.S. government and is
a high-ranking member of the White Aryan
Resistance (WAR) movement. The defense team
reports that its investigation shows the
Iraqi government has given Dennis Mahon thousands
of dollars over the past six years, and Mahon has
been banned from entering Canada and the United
Kingdom and is classified by Interpol as an
international terrorist. The FBI did not
bother to interview Mahon in connection to the
Oklahoma City bombing.
Beyond
Nichols and Mahon, there are others with
connections to domestic militant groups
sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists. These
include Larry Wayne Harris, a licensed clinical
and public-health microbiologist who was arrested
in Las Vegas in February 1998 for conspiring to
possess biological agents and toxin, to
wit: anthrax and anthrax precursors for use as a
weapon. At the time of Harris arrest
he was on probation for a 1995 conviction for
fraudulently obtaining bubonic-plague toxins.
According to the 1998 Las Vegas FBI complaint,
Harris told a group about plans to place a
globe of bubonic-plague toxins in a New York City
subway station, where it would be broken by a
passing subway train, causing hundreds of
thousands of deaths.
Furthermore,
in a 1996 letter to Aryan Nation founder Pastor
Richard Butler, the white-supremacist leader says
Harris requested that Butler publish his
manuscript on germ warfare, in the preface of
which Harris described an encounter with an Iraqi
who provided a lengthy commentary on biological
warfare and detailed the progress of the Iraqi
program in the United States. Butler did not
publish the manuscript but confirms that, until
his arrest in 1998, Harris had been a member of
the Aryan Nation.
Whether
any of these men or organizations are involved in
or have knowledge of the current flurry of
anthrax attacks is anyones guess, just as
it is anyones guess whether anyone in law
enforcement is so much as curious about what
these organizations and individuals might have to
contribute to the current investigation.
Still
there are other clues pointing to possible
domestic involvement in the anthrax attacks that
might be checked. Beyond the acknowledgment that
all the anthrax-infected letters have been mailed
from within the United States, the letters sent
to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)
and NBC Nightly News anchorman Tom Brokaw also
share similarities to past domestic terrorism.
For
instance, federal law-enforcement officials have
confirmed that the handwriting on both the
Daschle and Brokaw letters is the same, and the
media, FBI, and Daschle himself have referred to
the handwriting as childlike scrawl.
An identical reference to a childlike
scrawl was made by Associated Press
reporter Russ Bynum in a June 1997 article
updating the investigation into a series of
bombings around Atlanta. Authorities
released a letter claiming responsibility
for the Jan. 16 [abortion] clinic blast and the
Feb. 21 [gay] nightclub bombing [that] was
written by the Army of God, Bynum reported.
The letter is scrawled in childlike block
letters.
That
letter spoke of the ungodly communist
regime in New York and called for
death to the New World Order, the nom
de guerre "signature" of accused
abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph.
In
addition to the letters sent to Daschle and
Brokaw, more than 100 abortion clinics also
received letters containing white powder, of
which a handful made reference to the Army of
God, an extremist antiabortion group.
The
connection may be of some interest because the
FBI charged fugitive antiabortionist Rudolph for
the Atlanta abortion clinic, gay nightclub and
Centennial Park bombings. The Army of God claimed
responsibility for those bombings, but it appears
the FBI believes Rudolph himself uses the term
the Army of God.
It is
not known whether Rudolph is a member of the
Aryan Nation, but it has been reported widely
that he lived in a trailer at the Christian
Identity Church of Israel in Schell City, Mo.,
and as a teen-ager participated in at least one
Aryan Nation ceremony. Furthermore, the FBI has
produced a profile of the alleged bomber that
states: Rudolph learned the radical
ideology of the Christian Identity Movement as a
teen-ager and espouses the view that the white
race is Gods chosen nation. The FBI
maintains that Rudolph appears to have been in
contact with the Aryan Nation.
Butler
of the Aryan Nation tells Insight any allegations
that his organization is involved in any of the
current terrorism events are false. According to
Butler, We dont have anything to do
with the Iraqis. Theyre not white people,
but were sympathetic to them. Were
not into spreading plagues, but I say more power
to whoever [sic] is doing what he thinks is best.
Thats between him and his God. But
weve never trained with the Iraqis or
learned from them how to build bombs. For that
you just have to go on the Internet to get the
information.
When
asked if it was possible that a member of his
organization could be involved in the mailing of
the deadly anthrax letters to take advantage of
the current crisis, Butler says he couldnt
rule it out. Biological is something that
is beyond most of us, but it could be a copycat
thing or Eric Rudolph or something like
that. Laughing, Butler puts the situation
in perspective, They had 500 FBI guys
looking for him [Rudolph] in the hills of North
Carolina and now weve got an army looking
for bin Laden. I guess this shows that they like
to make a target of one man at a time.
Affiliations
dont necessarily make a connection or prove
culpability, but in the midst of the largest FBI
investigation in history there are many who are
wondering why these groups and individuals have
not been questioned. They might have useful
information.
Kelly
Patricia OMeara is an investigative
reporter for Insight.
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