For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show James Ridgeway.
He's Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones Magazine.
He writes articles for the magazine and a weekly web column on MotherJones.com.
He also writes for The Guardian and for Counterpunch and collaborates on original short videos.
Available at RidgewayNG.com.
His website is JamesRidgeway.net.
Welcome back to the show, James.
How are you doing?
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Okay.
Alright, so I'm here to talk about your great article from a couple of years back, In Search of John Doe 2, from the July-August 2007 issue, three years ago, about the mysterious missing person in the Oklahoma City bombing, or missing persons in the Oklahoma City bombing case, and the death of Kenneth Trenadue in federal custody.
And, you know, I've interviewed Jesse Trenadue, Kenneth's brother, a couple of times, but I don't think I've really asked him too much about exactly what happened to his brother for obvious reasons.
So I thought maybe I could get you on here to talk a little bit in more specific detail about what it was that happened to Kenny, and then maybe we can get further into the story of the Oklahoma City bombing.
So can you start off with telling us who was Kenneth Trenadue and what happened?
Yeah.
Poor Jesse.
I mean, I really feel pretty bad for him.
Well, what it is is like this.
Kenny Trenadue was a kind of like run-of-the-mill robber.
And he was put in jail and let out on parole, and he went down to Mexico, and I guess he got married or something, or he had a girlfriend.
Anyhow, he was coming back into the States because he wanted to get some construction work.
And he was stopped at the border, and somebody ran a check on him, and they arrested him.
And it wasn't clear exactly why they arrested him, but they arrested him.
Probably for drunk driving.
I don't know.
Anyhow, so in due course, they put him in the Oklahoma City jail where McVeigh was being held.
This was, you know, early on.
So one day, his mother gets a call from the warden of the prison and says that Kenny Trenadue committed suicide.
And that struck the mother.
Well, first of all, it's horrible.
And second of all, it struck the mother as kind of strange because Kenny Trenadue is kind of like an optimistic guy.
And the last time she talked to him, which was I guess the night before, he seemed pretty up.
You know, he was looking forward to getting out.
I mean, he was in there on kind of small-time stuff.
So anyhow, that's what the warden said.
So then the warden said, what do you want me to do with the ashes or something to that effect?
And she said, wait a second, ashes?
What are you talking about?
And so I guess then she got her son, Jesse, who is the brother of Kenny.
In addition to being an all-star athlete, track athlete, he's a lawyer in Utah.
So he got in touch with the warden and he said, what's up?
And the warden said, well, we just thought it would make it easier for you guys.
We'll burn the body and send you back the ashes.
And he said, no, send us back the body.
So in due course, then they get the body back in a box.
And they go into the funeral home and they open the box, and there's Kenny.
And he's been beaten.
His face is all screwed up.
His body is, you know, beaten.
And they start to look for ligature marks where he would have hung himself.
And they really can't find any.
So Jesse began to think that, you know, he didn't commit suicide.
So what happened then is that over a long period of time up to now, this was from the time of the Oklahoma City bombing until now, Jesse has carried out this campaign to try to find out what happened to Kenny.
And he's talked to and filed suits and so on against various medical involving various medical examiners who seem to agree that Kenny didn't die from suicide, that somebody beat him to death.
Right.
In your article, you quote two different, or at least you talk about two different medical examiners, Fred Jordan, the Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma chief medical examiner, I think, and Bill Gormley, a forensic pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
Now, what was it that they said about this man's body?
Well, they said essentially that, as I say, he didn't hang himself.
He was beaten.
So Jesse then proceeded.
He tried to, you know, do FOIAs.
He tried to, you know, run suits, get discovery.
And he got nowhere.
Eventually he ended up in the Justice Department with the FBI fighting him.
Now, Jesse's theory was that Kenny looked somewhat like some of the suspects for John Doe number two in the early days of the Oklahoma City bombing.
And his, I guess his intuition, but also then information he got from various sources, you know, suggested to him that the FBI had tried to get a confession out of Kenny as being John Doe number two.
And they succeeded, so they beat him to death, you know, in the process of trying to get a confession.
And then, you know, there's a lot of other details, but that's the basic thing.
And the FBI has fought Jesse tooth and nail all the way down the line.
They won't open discovery to him.
He's sued in federal court.
He's actually won cases in federal court.
And then he just, then the FBI just, you know, keeps on, you know, blocking him hither and yon.
And the most recent thing he wanted to do was to go and depose Terry Nichols and a couple of other guys in prison.
And the FBI fought that and so far has succeeded in the U.S. Court of Appeals from having him go, you know, do the depositions.
And then Jesse, I don't know, he got somewhere the idea, probably, I can't quite remember, but that the CIA itself had been somewhat involved in this thing in some manner.
So he put in FOIs to the CIA, and of course they denied everything, said it was national security.
But he kept pushing and pushing, and the judge actually supported him.
And he got a few documents that showed that indeed the CIA was involved in this.
Now, nobody knows to what extent or how, whether it was a significant involvement or whether it was just like everybody's reaching out to everybody else to try to figure out what was going on.
But they were involved, so he wanted to know, well, like, what was going on.
And, you know, he can't find out.
So that's what Jesse Trinitou is.
Now, Jesse is ill and he's by himself there.
And he's conducted this effort to get to the bottom of, you know, what happened to his brother.
And in the process of all this, he's begun to discover these bits and pieces of, I don't know what you want to call it, a conspiracy plot.
I mean, Chris, you mentioned the word conspiracy, and everybody says, oh, you're just a nutcase, so forget it.
But at any rate, he has...
Well, I mean, if it was just Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols that did it, it was a conspiracy.
So I think we can dispense with that.
Clearly some people planned to blow up that building, and it was by definition a conspiracy to do so.
The only question is who all was in on it.
Right.
Well, you know, like this evening, this afternoon, tonight, I was reading in the paper this morning, Rachel Maddow is going to have a show, and she's going to have a show that's based on Timothy McVeigh's interviews in jail with a couple of reporters.
And so everything is pegged to Timothy McVeigh and what a creep he was and a badass and so on.
But the fact of the matter, people who've covered the damn thing, like myself and a couple of other people, I've always suspected that this was a wider business and that it reached out to some of these far-right religious groups and possibly even further into a bank robbery gang.
And some of the stuff that Jesse has found tends to support that idea, although the idea has never been fully developed.
The government's never gotten behind looking into it.
So we now are stuck with this mythic situation in which Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, you know, got it on and went down there and blew up the building just out of the blue, basically.
And in fact, there's a history of the far-right wing in the United States, which is a movement, and there's a history, an absolutely stated, proven history that shows that they previously tried to blow up this building.
Right.
Well, and when you say far-right there, let's be specific.
You're talking about the all-the-way-far-to-the-right neo-Nazis.
I'm talking about there was, in the 80s and then to some extent in the 90s, a movement that consisted of various groupings like the neo-Nazis, the Posse Comitatus, some of the clans, the Order, the Aryan Nations, and it was all sort of pulled together by this guy, Bob Miles, who's also dead now, in Michigan.
He was a former Grand Dragon of the Klan, and he was very active in the George Wallace campaign back in the late 60s.
So there was a political movement, and it had two faces.
The first face was the political overview, you know, political activity, marches, and whatever.
And then it had an underground, which was a violent underground that killed people and robbed banks and stuff like that.
And that was called the Order.
And most of the guys in the Order were arrested and sent to jail forever in the 80s.
But there was always a thought and some discussion amongst those that were left outside that there was something called the Order Two.
And, you know, again, there was, I don't know what you want to call it, a scuttlebug or whatever, but the Order Two was in some way active in the Oklahoma City thing.
Well, and the guy who was the leader of the group that had attempted to bomb the very same building before, or at least had a plan to bomb the same building before, I guess back in 81 or something, that guy, Richard Snell, I think his name was, he was executed that day, April 19, 1995.
That's exactly right.
And the other guy who was involved with a group that tried to blow up the building has basically come forward and told his story.
And I think he pretty openly supports the notion that, you know, the same religious, you know, far-right people, they were anti-Semitic and whatever, that they were actively involved in trying to blow the thing up.
And the thing that, okay, so these guys all, you know, accused each other and so forth and so on.
But the thing that makes this all very strange is that just before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, there was a special undercover agent for the ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, People, Federal Agency, who had been sent down to a place called Ellingham City, which was a religious far-right enclave, which had people in it who had ties to the former attempted bombing of the building.
And this woman sent back reports of her conversations with people who were talking about blowing up the building.
And she sent back one report in which she herself recounts going to Oklahoma City and driving around with a group of people looking at different buildings.
So she goes up there, comes back, reports all this to her superior, and they don't do anything about it.
All right, so the bombing takes place, and then for some reason or other, this special agent gets accused in a case, I guess.
Well, if I can stop you there for a second, the way I remember it was the ATF wanted to do something about it, and they had planned, or at least were beginning preparations for some kind of Waco-type raid on Ellingham City, and the FBI told them, no, you're off the case, we'll handle this as soon as they got word of it.
They said, this is our operation going on at Ellingham City, and we don't need you coming in and mucking it up.
Then the building blew up.
That's probably true.
It might be true, it might not be true, but there definitely was some discussion among law enforcement.
They did run surveillance flights over the top of Ellingham City, and there was discussion of Waco, you know, a Waco-type thing.
Whether or not they had any real interest in doing it, who knows?
I don't know.
But here's the thing.
So this informant, I'm calling her a special agent, but she's really an informant, she gets charged with, I don't know, this all gets very complicated, but anyhow, she had a boyfriend who was a Klan guy, and I think she was charged with him for making bombs or something.
Yeah, well, they trumped up charges against her to keep her from being able to testify at McVeigh's trial.
Right, but they did have a secret hearing, which was sealed, and in which the agent in charge of her, her handler, recounts all this stuff.
So it's not just this woman making these stories up, or some outsider making these stories up.
This is the ATF employee telling a judge what I just told you, and the judge then seals the record, and he says somewhere along the line that it would be terrible if this all came out, because it would screw up the Timothy McVeigh trial, which was then going on in Oklahoma City, I mean in Denver.
So, I mean, I don't know.
Wouldn't you think that somebody would want to look into all this stuff?
Yeah, well, here's the thing.
I've got a couple of big reasons why I think they're not.
The first big reason why I think they're not is because I'm of the opinion, or at least the belief, or something, that a great many of those neo-Nazis were actually either undercover FBI informants or were undercover FBI agents.
In the case of Andre Strassmeier, he was not a Nazi.
He was pretending to be a Nazi.
He was working for the U.S. government and pretending to be a Nazi.
And it looks to me like he was the provocateur, like he made the thing happen.
And even if he didn't, and even if it was some kind of sting gone wrong, like the first World Trade Center bombing, where they could have stopped it, but they screwed it up and it took place anyway, well, then still, you have to bury that, all the prior knowledge, all the ATF and FBI and everything.
You're talking about 169 counts of criminally negligent homicide on the part of how many different ATF and FBI agents, and who knows who else.
So they had to cover that up.
But then secondly, and this goes to what you said about Matt out there, James, and that is the politics.
Bill Clinton came out immediately and blamed the Oklahoma bombing on Rush Limbaugh, who took my, I'm a libertarian, so I don't have a dog in this left-right fight, but from my perspective, Rush Limbaugh is basically a middle-of-the-road establishment Republican.
And somehow he and everybody to the right of him were responsible for blowing up Oklahoma City.
And they attacked every patriot group and every militia group for doing it.
But you know who they never attacked for doing it?
The Nazis.
They never attacked what you call the far right here, the order.
The guys who actually had, of course, been infiltrated by the feds and were the ones who did it.
Instead, they tried to say, oh, you know, the 1990s Tea Party blew up the building.
And they're still saying that.
That's why Matt, I was doing the special tonight, is to say everybody who is an anti-government protester, this is even the commercial all week long, anti-government sentiment doesn't always cause bombings, but sometimes it does.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Well, Mother Jones is doing the same thing.
Yeah, I know.
I'm moving towards a libertarian position, I'm afraid.
Well, you're welcome.
Come on in.
But here's the thing.
I mean, Bill Clinton, you know, used that whole situation as an incredible platform on which to build all this anti-immigrant stuff and all the stuff to clamp down on prisoners in jails.
Prisoners that don't have the right to sue the government.
I mean, he built all this anti-habeas corpus stuff on top of this.
You're referring to the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act?
Yeah, yeah.
It became a platform, you know, on which to build, I mean, a really, really anti-civil rights administration, so to speak.
But there's old Jesse Turnidew all by himself.
I mean, there was J.D.
Cash, but J.D.
Cash died.
And here's a reporter down in eastern Oklahoma.
So there's Jesse Turnidew, left all by himself.
And he's got one federal judge in Utah, which is the most amazing thing in the world, who supported him.
And then, of course, he ran into the Court of Appeals, which is like, forget it.
So I don't know what will happen.
What we're going to have now is people like Rachel Maddow concocting, you know, this myth, which is the FBI myth, which comes out of their, you know, their efforts to, what's this, the TV show even now about it?
What do they call this thing they've been talking about?
They profile people.
They make up profiles of people.
Oh, I don't know what TV show you're talking about, but yeah, I do know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they got a whole unit down at Quantico, and they did some profiling of Waco, and guess what?
They were wrong.
And every time you get a serial killer, they'll do a profile.
And every time you get this far-right stuff...
Same with the anthrax, too.
Yeah, they did it wrong.
And then they did a profile of the far-right guys, and they said, well, you know, they had a bad childhood, and somebody kicked them in the balls when they were five years old, whatever.
And that's the way they excuse the whole thing.
And Timothy McVeigh was a nasty little screwball running around school doing stuff with people.
Then he went in the Army and got some cuckoo ideas, and then he went over and took a look at Waco and got even crazier.
And that's how you explain it.
And the people he was around, you know, have nothing to do with any of this, and the possibility that there were others involved are just not there.
You know, and then I'm saying what happens now is that the whole thing is being shoved under this myth, which is now being concocted.
It was just run by the FBI people and the government people.
Now it's been taken up by the left, the so-called left.
No, it's not really the left.
It's the liberals in the form of, in this case, Rachel Maddow, who I don't have anything against or anything like that.
But, I mean, when I read this thing in the Washington Post, I thought, oh, my God, are these people out of their minds?
Well, and, you know, here's the thing, too, is you have the right to be a bit upset about this, and if only, James, because the lie is so obviously a lie.
I mean, we got two dozen-plus witnesses say that they saw McVeigh with other people in Oklahoma City that day, that morning.
And even the official story is that Terry Nichols is not John Doe II, that he was two states away at the time of the attack, even if he participated in it.
And then the FBI story is just that, no, those two dozen-plus witnesses who saw McVeigh with other people that morning, who saw McVeigh with other people in the days leading up to it, the witnesses who can definitely place two different rider trucks, who can place witnesses, the Chinese delivery guy who saw a motel room full of people, none of whom were McVeigh, the fact that they deliberately did not check the fingerprints from the motel room or the yellow mercury against the database, the fact of Carol Howe's very existence, I mean, the fact that the first grand jury had, the feds threw one of the grand jurors off the jury because he kept asking questions about what actually happened here.
And the whole thing has been the biggest farce from the very beginning.
I mean, how dare anyone not be outraged and not be insulted by the giant steaming pile of lies.
There is no John Doe II.
Come on.
No, no, they got off the John Doe II.
I think Rachel Maddow was John Doe II.
Well, when I was reading the Washington Post this morning, I mean, I read this thing from her show where she's letting him talk, and Tim McVeigh is talking about how, you know, he lit the fuse and he was sitting in the truck and he was afraid it was going to blow up before it really did.
And there's all this other evidence, like you're saying.
Maybe it's not evidence, but at least it's people who saw things about other people involved in this getting out of the cab of the truck and so on and so forth.
So I guess you just forget all that, and we now have a dead man, right?
A guy who was, before he died, he gave these interviews.
And we now have the word of a dead man about what actually happened, and that's it.
Forget it.
Story over.
Right?
And, wow, see, this is the thing.
And, you know, you're an older gentleman.
I'm a young guy, sort of, kind of.
But at the time that this happened, I was in high school, and I knew they were lying that day.
I went over to my friend's house after school, and a mutual friend, or a friend of his was over there, who had been Marine Corps Special Forces, Force Recon in Vietnam, and who taught bomb-making school, and who was already that day saying, look, there was a bomb here, here, here, and here.
And this is how the building was taken out.
Of course, there's news footage.
I'm sure you've heard or seen the clips of the news footage where three different times that day the police said, the federal police said, everyone get back, call off the rescue efforts, because we found another undetonated bomb inside the building.
Now, there's kind of confusion about whether maybe a couple of those bomb scares were actually they just wanted to get rid of the video cameras, or they wanted to get rid of things that the ATF had no business having up in their offices, something like that.
But, anyway, just from the very first day, April 19, 1995, I didn't believe them.
And then they come and tell me there's no John Doe II.
Because the right wing was pinned for this crime, the patriot right, like, say, the John Birch Society, for example, they were all over this thing from the very beginning.
They were asking questions, interviewing explosives experts, interviewing Ray Brown from the U.S. Geological Survey, who had the seismographs from the first bombing and from the demolition of what was left of the building to compare, and all this stuff.
There have been people following this story all along, James.
It's just, to me, this is, I guess I'm sorry for making a long speech on you, but this is one of the things that really got me interested in politics and hating government a lot when I was a teenager in the 1990s, was first they can blow up Waco, then they can blow up their own damn building and say it was revenge for Waco, and it makes Waco okay after the fact.
It turned out they didn't even kill Koresh and 80 people, they just killed McVeigh that day or something, and it was perfectly fine because of the Oklahoma bombing.
So I resent the hell out of that, and that's why I'm still talking about it 15 years later here.
Well, you're probably the only one talking about it.
One of the few, anyway.
Well, I don't know about all that, but I will say, and I don't share a lot of these political views that you've got, probably, but the John Birch Society people did a really good job.
Yeah.
I used to talk to them a little bit.
They were kind of like they thought they were talking to the commies and stuff, but it's okay.
Yeah, Bill Jasper, William Jasper is the guy's name.
Yeah, he was pretty good.
Yeah, he's done a lot.
He had a lot of things.
I mean, I don't agree with a lot of his points and stuff, but he did a lot of work, and a lot of it was pretty good.
But, like, you know, you're saying, well, you talk to this recon guy, well, I called the IRA people about the bomb, and I know that in the government they started out with this koo-koo stuff about the Middle East, you know, blaming Saddam, and then they quickly dropped that because they all knew, the FBI all knew right off the bat that it was the far right.
Yeah, sure, because they had infiltrated Elohim City.
Well, you know, in the 60s, the FBI infiltrated the Klan to such an extent they were bumping into each other all over the Klan.
You couldn't tell which was which.
Well, let me ask you about Andre Strassmeier specifically, because he's really kind of the linchpin to the idea that, you know, we're not just talking about maybe some federal informants, like, you know, a guy who was going to be prosecuted, but was flipped and turned state's witness as long as he promised to go along or whatever, who kind of betrayed his handlers.
There's really no indication anywhere in the world, is there, that this guy, Andre Strassmeier, was really a Nazi.
I mean, he was an undercover cop there at Elohim City, wasn't he?
Well, I think so.
I think what it was is this, is that, I mean, Jesse found out really recently that the CIA did admit to a cable that was sent right after the bombing to diplomatic sources abroad, they didn't say where, to check out something.
So they were, it must have been Strassmeier.
And the general idea was that Strassmeier was some kind of, yeah, an informant, agent, whatever, of probably NATO.
And it may have been because people were, I mean, they were, the government or the international, whatever, was interested in all this gun show stuff and the traffic in arms, that they thought there was something, I guess, bigger going on than probably what there was.
And that he might have been sent here originally to get into that.
And, of course, nobody knows.
I talked to him when I did that article, and he was making miniature toys for a museum in Germany.
So you went to Germany to meet him in person?
No, no, I didn't go there.
I talked to him on the telephone.
Well, and what did he have to say?
No way, I didn't do it?
Oh, yeah, yeah, he said he didn't do it.
But they all say that.
Well, you know, Roger Charles, I spoke with him last week, and he reminded me that in the book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton by Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the telegraph reporter.
Right, right.
In his conversation with Strassmeier, he basically has him at the edge of admitting it, and then he just says, I got to go.
But he's sort of, Pritchard is saying, come on, just come clean.
Just, don't you want to get this off your conscience?
Don't you just want to tell us?
And he's like, I can't.
I just can't.
Or something like that, that, you know, man.
Too bad there's no such thing as justice or independent real media in this country or something.
What a story, huh?
This is bigger even than O.J.
Simpson.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, like, if you start writing, and if you start trying to connect the dots between what happened then and now, and look at what's going on and what's different about now and then, people just laugh at you, and they say, oh, well, the Tea Party thing, they're all involved in treason.
That's a bunch of crap, you know?
And those guys are the Tea Party kind of guys.
I can remember when Bush was running against Reagan in 1980, and there were people like that hanging around, and they were always hanging around all over the place.
And Reagan people just shut them up, and they didn't like them, and they didn't get anywhere.
Well, you know, there's an article out today where they did a survey at the Washington Mall protest, the last Tea Party protest on Tax Day, and they said that they're just about evenly split.
Half of them are social conservative, warmonger, Palin supporters, and half of them are fiscal conservative, and they're pretty much evenly split.
So it's pretty hard to take your average McCain voter and your average Ron Paul fan and try to conflate them with McVeigh.
I mean, to me, McVeigh is much easier conflated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation than with the populist right.
Yeah, it's really interesting how Ron Paul really has thrown a big wrench into the whole thing.
Isn't it great?
I mean, I remember him in New Hampshire, and he's quite a guy.
It's really too much.
He really gets them down.
It drives people crazy, you know.
The people in Washington can't deal with that.
Yeah, that may be the best part of it is their discomfort, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, I think Ron Paul is just...
Of course, I like Kucinich, too, but, you know, they start out kind of like tenderly saying that Kucinich is okay, then they turn on him and say he's an idiot.
And I don't know.
Look, if you can make head or tails out of this stuff, it's beyond me.
But I hope you...
Do you broadcast this before Rachel Maddow gets her stuff on?
Well, you know, we're actually not live on the radio today.
It will play tomorrow on the radio in Austin, but it will be up on Antiwar.com tonight, hopefully by the time her show airs.
And I'm actually running today on Antiwar.com the transcript of my interview with Jesse Trinidou from just a few weeks ago under the title, They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Well, you ought to call them up and tell them.
Well, I'd like to.
You know, I just don't know why anyone, no matter what their political agenda, would want to adopt and repeat the ridiculous lie that there's no John Doe 2.
I mean, there is 2.
In fact, here's one that I only just recently learned this.
And my fault, James.
I should have known this for years.
And I only just found this out when I just got into the very beginning of Paul Hammer's new book, McVeigh's Death Row Cellmate.
He mentions this, and I went and, with some help from some Facebook friends, tracked down this article.
It was a Scripps Howard News Service article.
It ran in the Houston Chronicle, but it was a nationwide article on the Scripps Howard News Service.
And it was about how when McVeigh was pulled over on the side of the road, there was a brown pickup truck with him.
And this is not Jaina Davis's brown pickup truck that she and Judy Miller tried to conflate with Saddam Hussein.
This is a brown pickup truck driven by an Arizona chemist, and perhaps informant for the FBI named Coburn, C-O-B-U-R-N.
And apparently when they arrested McVeigh, the state trooper just let this truck go.
And he even had his own little cover-up for a couple of days before he brought in the tape.
And, of course, this wasn't shown at the trial.
They only showed a small bit of the video at the trial, and it was just with McVeigh already in the back seat in their search in the car.
But apparently J.D.
Cash and Roger Charles are of the opinion that this guy, Coburn, was part of the group that likely built the bomb that morning in Oklahoma City, that the Geary State Lake bomb that Terry Nichols was involved with was the decoy, that the real bomb, and we know there were two rider trucks.
That's not in dispute at all.
That is a fact.
But then the possibility, I guess, here is that Mr. Coburn and the brown pickup truck, perhaps a federal informant himself, was involved in actually putting the bomb together that day.
Well, didn't Jesse have that in one of his suits?
He's got pictures of that guy.
I think he does.
Yeah, well, there's a lot, and I do have my PDF files, my collection of Jesse Trinidou files.
As, in fact, I was going to ask you about this, and thanks for reminding me, it seems like they've taken down the Jesse Trinidou resources at Mother Jones.
And you guys had such a great page of PDF files put together there of all different things.
The article's still there, In Search of John Doe II, The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Maybe you can talk to your editor about getting that sidebar back up.
They're intent on nailing all these people.
Yeah, well, but, you know, then again, we're talking about innocent people.
One guy murdered in his cell in a case of mistaken identity, and the people who murdered Kenny Trinidou, they got away scot-free.
To this day, those murderers are still free.
And whoever else helped McVeigh kill 168 people, 169, depending if you count a pregnant woman's fetus there.
You know, never mind politics and agendas.
There are murderers on the loose.
Well, that's true.
That's absolutely true.
I mean, let justice be done, though the heavens fall and all that, right?
Let's put Bill Clinton in the dock, see what he has to say about this cover-up.
Yep, and, well, also Holder.
Oh, yeah, thanks for bringing that up.
What do you know about Eric Holder in this, James?
Well, he, I don't actually know very much about Holder, but Holder was one of the people who was involved in swatting Jesse down and making, giving him a run around.
They really did go to great lengths in the Justice Department to screw up Jesse Trinidou.
I mean, for somebody who, they claimed he was a nut and didn't have anything, but for somebody who was a nut and didn't have anything, they sure did spend a lot of money putting him down.
And my theory, my feeling about these kind of things is, I don't see what anybody has against hearing all sides.
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
Same thing with 9-11.
It doesn't bother me that people they accuse of being conspiracists, I don't agree with them, but it doesn't bother me that they want to talk.
Who cares?
I mean, they might have something to say, you know?
What is this business of shutting people up on grounds that they're not credible?
I don't get it.
Yeah, well, I mean, I've always thought that the whole theory of this society was really based on the free market of ideas.
And as long as we're all still free men exchanging what we think is the truth, that's how we'll get to it, and then we'll be able to figure out what's the right thing to do, right?
Well, that's right, but that's wrong.
That's not what's going on here.
Apparently not.
All right, well, listen, James, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking an interest in this story, and frankly, how much I appreciate being able to say, See?
James Ridgeway over at Mother Jones says so, too, and you don't have to be a John Birch guy to know that they're lying to you about the Oklahoma City bombing.
Yeah, just remember that I did all this work.
I started doing this work in the early 1980s, and I've done it all.
I did the bulk of this work at the Village Voice.
And you know what?
In fact, let me ask you a little bit about the whole radical right thing, too, because, of course, it's not just Mattow.
It's the Southern Poverty Law Center, and here they're trying to put Judge Napolitano and Ron Paul in here with the Klan and all this stuff.
So let me ask you this.
In terms of actual Jew and black guy-hating, neo-Nazi, racist, Hitler-loving white supremacists, how many people are we really talking about?
Is this somewhere between .0001 and 50% of the right or what?
Give me an actual reflection, because the SPLC is telling little old black ladies, be afraid, send us your money because the Klan is coming again.
Well, you know, you can't tell in terms of a political movement how many people are involved because it comes and goes.
But the core of this stuff, I think there were two kinds of cores to it.
One was the old Klan, and there was a revival of the Klan in the 1980s, and it was made into a more aggressive force.
But the other one is the Christian Identity Movement, and the Christian Identity Movement is a definite thing.
It's an offshoot of, what do you call it, a nostrum of Christianity, which is racist.
And the thing that's interesting about it is, and I don't know if most people just write it off and say it doesn't matter to anything, but there's a lot of Christian Identity people who live cheek-by-jowl with major Christian denominations.
And you know, the whole thing about the Protestant denominations is that none of them will attack each other.
You know, when push comes to shove, they all just shut up.
So you can't get any information out of them.
It's the biggest wall of silence I've ever run across.
So I don't know.
Well, you know, I'm in Los Angeles now, but I grew up in Austin, Texas.
And, you know, I'm surrounded, all of my friends, parents, or whatever, the community that I grew up in, everybody was a Methodist or a Baptist, and almost everybody was white, and none of them were racist at all.
Maybe somebody's grandma occasionally.
But, you know, the idea, I mean, they wouldn't even tolerate anything that even smacked of anything not politically correct or whatever.
And that was in the 1980s, you know, when I was a little kid.
I mean, it seemed to me like racism is the most marginal thing, even on the right.
And it has been for a long time.
I mean, they're trying to say that basically the populist right is, you know, again, they never attack the actual Nazis because the actual Nazis are all cops.
So instead they attack everybody on the populist right and pretend that everybody on the populist right are the Nazis.
Or the terrorists, or whatever.
Yeah, they made a lump of proletariat out of the populist right.
And, you know, it's been 15 years since that Oklahoma bombing, and yet Robert Mueller just the other day came out and said domestic terrorism is as great a threat as Al Qaeda.
Yeah, well, he really screwed that one up, didn't he?
Well, I mean, it sounds like he's setting you and me up to go get, you know, we'll be declared unprivileged enemy belligerents, and we won't have the rule of law at all.
Well, he was the head of the FBI when they had all those hijackers rent apartments in San Diego.
They all got through his screen pretty easy.
Yeah, well, maybe they were too busy entrapping people and provoking people to, you know, prevent real damage.
But I guess that's the way it goes.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show and your effort again on this, James.
Okay, thanks a lot.
Thanks again.
Bye-bye.
All right, everybody, that is James Ridgway, and he is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.
You can find them at motherjones.com.
Also check out his website, jamesridgway.net.
