Titled "The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?," the report was conducted by the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, at the request of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. (Click here for full text of the report.)
The report was provided to INTELWIRE by attorney Jesse Trentadue, who has been pursuing new information on the case through Freedom of Information Act requests and other means (link). Trentadue said he seriously questioned the report's focus on possible connections to Islamic extremists, but said it clearly illustrates the Justice Department's unwillingness to cooperate with investigations of the Oklahoma City bombing.
The report contains a number of new tidbits of information, many of which are suggestive of a broader conspiracy in the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred E. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but none of which are entirely conclusive.
According to the report, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating told investigators that President Bill Clinton's first comment to him after the bombing was, "God, I hope there's no Middle Eastern connection to this."
The report focused on three main issues:
- Whether Terry Nichols met Ramzi Yousef during the period both men were in Cebu City, the Philippines.
- Whether Nichols and McVeigh were connected to a German national named Andreas Strassmeir who was linked to domestic white supremacist organizations.
- Whether the FBI made an adequate investigation of eyewitness reports linking McVeigh to other individuals around the time of the bombing. Some of those reports generated a composite sketch of a suspect known as "John Doe #2."
In large part, the report reiterates the findings of previous investigations and media reports (see INTELWIRE reports Al Qaeda and OKC and Did Yousef and Nichols Meet?).
The report did find significant new clues that suggest a link between Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef, including material gleaned from a review of Yousef's phone records. But it stopped short of saying a connection can be proven.
YOUSEF AND NICHOLS
However, in some cases, the investigation uncovered entirely new information, or more specific information regarding previous reports.
For instance, although previous reports had indicated that Nichols brought a book on explosives to the Philippines during one of his frequent visits to the family of his Filipina wife, the committee investigation reported that title of the book was The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives.
What the report does not mention is that handwritten notes taken from Ramzi Yousef's apartment in the Philippines, dated around the period Nichols was in the country, appear to have used the same book as a reference source.
A spiral notebook found in Yousef's apartment in January 1995 contained notes in Arabic concerning the melting temperature of chemicals used in improvised explosives.
During Yousef's 1995 trial for a plot to bomb U.S. airliners, defense attorneys cited that passage from the notebook and argued that it had been lifted from The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives, a fairly well-known text in the field of explosives composition.
The Subcommittee report also found that Ramzi Yousef called the number of an apartment in New York City, whose inhabitant was a friend and neighbor to relatives of Terry Nichols' wife.
