Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest today is James Ridgeway.
He's the former Washington correspondent for The Village Voice for, I think, a couple of decades now, DC Bureau Chief for Mother Jones.
He's the author and editor of more than 20 books and he has a new article on MotherJones.com, In Search of John Doe 2, The Story the Feds Never Told.
Listen, I want to start off the show simply by thanking you for writing about the Oklahoma bombing.
It's not the kind of thing that people get to read in magazines or journals with as much credibility as Mother Jones very often.
And it's really good to see reporting like this.
But before we get into this story, I wanted to ask you first, if I could, about Riverbend.
I'm told, I haven't read the book, but I'm told that you wrote the foreword to the book of River, the Iraq blogger girl, girl blogger of her, the book of her blog entries.
And I wonder whether you're in contact with her, if you know what's happened to her since she's left Iraq.
No, well, the thing is, I got her book published.
I was, I mean, I guess I was the one that kind of like heard about her a long time ago and then I started trying to communicate, you know, I emailed back and forth with her.
And then I got a friend of mine in New York who's editor of a feminist press to, I got interested, I got him to publish the book.
And so then it got published all over the world after that.
So that's my sort of thing with her.
But I've never, I've made a point of never, ever trying to personally contact Riverbend or to speak with her or I don't know who she is.
And I've been, I've been in touch with her by email.
I didn't, you know, I'm, I'm just, I know she exists.
And I know that sometimes, you know, people have said this is, this is a deal where a bunch of sorority sisters didn't come.
University, you know, screwing around in the afternoon, making up stories, which is, you know, really, really, really awful.
So it means totally not true.
Riverbend's family has been obviously under a tremendous pressure for a long, long time.
And I think it's a wonder that somebody didn't hunt her down and do something to her own.
But, you know, they pretty clearly have tried to get out.
And the last thing was in April.
No one's heard a word from her since.
So this may be like the Sopranos.
That may be it.
We may never hear from her again.
We may never know what happened to her.
It's just, she may just be gone.
On the other hand, she may surface somewhere.
I just don't know.
In a sense, I have this feeling day by day that she's gone.
As in dead gone?
No, not necessarily.
Like, I don't know.
But, you know, by the Soprano thing, I mean, like, it just may have stopped.
She may have stopped it.
She may have to go and she may have another life.
I don't know.
Well, I like to believe that she made it to Syria with her family in one piece and that they're able to have some sort of new start, at least before we bomb that country to smithereens.
Yeah, well, you know, we all do.
But, I mean, I think I'm trying to be in touch with people who might know where she is or who she wants to know.
And I don't, nobody knows.
Okay.
All right, let's leave that where it is and get to the Oklahoma bombing here.
The article is In Search of John Doe 2, the story the feds never told about the Oklahoma City bombing.
And before we get into the meat of the case, I'd like to pick one very small fight with you.
You use the term in this article, the Oklahoma City bombing truth movement.
And I think the phrase truth movement belongs to the 9-11 kooks who think that Dick Cheney shot a missile at the Pentagon and wired the towers with, you know, I don't know, tens of thousands of separate little bombs to bring them down.
And that, and I really hate to think that people who are interested in the truth about the Oklahoma City bombing, who've been trying to get at the truth of the Oklahoma bombing, would in any way be lumped in with the missile hit the Pentagon crowd.
Yeah, you're totally right.
I mean, that's not even a word that I use.
I mean, I don't have some edit to put that in.
Oh, I see, I see.
Basically, you know, the attitude towards people like in Oklahoma City who are trying to figure out what's going on, is that they are kooks.
And that's the attitude that the entire, you know, the mass media and a lot of the liberals have towards people.
And I mean, it's just incredible.
You know, it's true in 9-11, but it's also true in Oklahoma City more and more.
You know, people say to me, who cares, you know, it was a long time ago, nobody even remembers it.
I mean, it's just horrible.
Yeah, it is.
And and, you know, it's interesting you talk about the left, I think even a lot of the left that are really outside the Democratic Party who are into alternative media and that kind of thing.
There's really been a blackout on this story, if only because right wingers got the blame for it.
And they were happy about that.
It was people like the John Burke Society who basically, you know, in Bill Clinton's public statements, took the rap for the bombing, the forces of hatred on the radical right, et cetera, like that.
And they said, hey, as long as we're taking the blame, we ought to at least look into this story.
And they've been writing, as you've now written in Mother Jones, about Carol Howe and the ATF's infiltration of this white supremacist group that was filled top to bottom with FBI informants of one description or another.
And they've been writing about this since 1996.
I've read about Carol Howe since 1996.
Yeah, Jasper, the Burke Society, I mean, he's done a lot of work on this.
Right.
And John Cash, J.D.
Cash, who's now dead, died, you know, he did all the real work in carrying this.
He found Carol Howe.
And without him, and he's from this little newspaper down in, you know, Eastern Oklahoma in the countryside.
Without him, you know, nobody would be anywhere on this subject.
And now, you know, he died, tragically died in this cloud to Jesse Trenatou to take it up.
And he's really incredible, this guy Trenatou, I mean, everybody says, oh, Jesse's a nice guy, you know, he's a really nice guy, I wish I could help him.
But, you know, I can hear him, you know, there's some crazy about him.
Well, see, the thing with his Mother Jones article that's good, this kind of the article, is that these guys in Mother Jones have actually gone to work.
There's one woman out there named Celia Perry, and then another woman named Elizabeth Gellman, they have gone to work and they put these documents on the web.
Oh, yes.
So people who think that Kenny Trenatou, the guy that was killed here, that the brother says was murdered, now they don't say hung, he hung himself.
Well, you can go look at the pictures of Kenny Trenatou, and if you think that's the guy who hung himself, good luck.
All right, now, again, for people who want to know more about this, it's the great article in search of John Doe 2 on Mother Jones, and there's a sidebar, is what Mr. Ridgeway is saying, which is, I don't know, dozens of primary sources, court documents, FBI teletypes, the deposition of Carol Howes Handler, Angela Finley at the BATF, it's an incredible resource available there, the sidebar on motherjones.com.
And now, let's get into this story.
You mentioned Jesse Trenatou and his brother Kenneth.
For people who aren't familiar, who's Jesse Trenatou and who's his brother Kenneth, and why does this have anything to do with the Oklahoma City bombing?
Okay, well, Jesse Trenatou is a lawyer, and he lives in Salt Lake City, okay, and he practices law, just ordinary law out there in Salt Lake City.
He comes from West Virginia, his family comes from West Virginia from a real poor coal mining section in West Virginia, and he was a star athlete in college with O.J.
Simpson.
He was a runner, and he had a brother named Kenny, and Kenny was a small-time bank robber in California.
And he'd take down banks, and he never shot anybody or killed anybody or anything like that, he'd just take them down.
And he got caught, and he was sent to prison.
Then he was paroled, and he got out of prison, he was on parole, he did construction work, and the parole people told him he couldn't drink.
So he said, well, I drink a lot of beer, I'm going to keep drinking beer, and you know, screw yourself.
So he, in effect, kind of like tantalized him a little bit, I guess.
But anyway, he went to Mexico, he married somebody in Mexico, he had a child, a little child when he died.
So he's coming back one night with a friend of his wife, and they were going through the border in California, and they got stopped.
And they said that he was drunk.
So then they ran a check on him, and they found that he had a criminal record, and they said that he had busted parole.
So they arrested him.
They took him in and put him up in San Diego, and then they flew him out to Oklahoma City, where there's a federal transfer center, and where, supposedly, he was supposed to have a hearing on what was going to happen to him.
This is all in the federal prison system.
And all his judicial activity had been in San Diego and in Southern California.
So it was kind of weird that he was sent out to Oklahoma City.
Anyway, this occurred in the summer of 1995, after McVeigh had been arrested, and after the FBI and the government said they cracked the case, and there were two guys, and they got him.
McVeigh was not in this transfer center, but he was in some other place.
I guess it was nearby in the same city, I don't remember.
Anyway, so Kenny Tranitou is taken in there, he calls up his family, his brother, Jesse, and he says he's okay, and he doesn't think he's going to be there long.
He figures he'll be in for six months because he busted parole, and he was drunk.
So they figure, okay, well, he's going to have this kid, he's settling down, whatever.
So the next day, they get a call from the prison warden, and she says, so, you know, I'm sorry to tell you, but your brother hung himself last night.
Now, Kenny Tranitou didn't have a record.
Nobody knows of any record of being depressed or anything like that.
And then the warden says to Jesse, or to his mother, I guess, at that time, who was alive, well, you know, we'd like to do you a favor, we'll burn the body, and we'll take care of it and send you the ashes or whatever.
And they said, and Jesse said, oh, no, no, no, tell us about it.
So they sent the body.
So they opened the coffin in West Virginia, and there's all this makeup that had been applied to Kenny, and they scraped the makeup off, and they began to find these cuts and these beating marks, and they didn't find anything that would clearly show that he was hung.
I mean, they didn't find his ligature stuff on his neck, but his face was barely beaten.
But you can see all these pictures, you don't have to believe anything I say.
And so Jesse said, this guy, you killed my brother.
So he started a legal process to try to demonstrate, you know, to try to find out what had happened.
Right, and now the brother, Jesse, he's a lawyer, right?
Yeah.
They messed with the wrong guy's brother in this situation.
Yeah, so he starts out and he does it, and he brings suits, and basically the justice department held the grand jury, and they said they didn't find anything.
You know, maybe there was some bad activity by the prison guards.
They didn't go through various, you know, perfunctory rules that they should have gone through.
But there's nothing bad that happened here, and the guy hung himself.
And there was even an office of Inspector General, they made a big report on this case, and there was some political interest done by a Republican, Senator Hatch, because it was the Democrats who were running the government then, it was Janet Reno.
You know, this wasn't some Republican job, this was the Democrats who were running things.
Anyhow, so they basically, end all, be all, this thing was that they found that nothing happened, that nothing untoward happened to Kenny Trinity, and he just hung himself.
Even he might have looked bad, but that's because he kept throwing down while he was trying to hang himself.
He kept pulling himself up and trying to jump off the sink or whatever, and he just kept screwing up, and he just kept flying across the room, hitting his head, and he'd get back up and try to hang himself again.
It didn't work.
Finally, he succeeded, so, well, you know.
That's basically what these people are saying.
And now the coroner didn't buy that, though, right?
The coroner didn't buy it, he said the guy looks like he's been killed, and then they're burning some experts, and they all say he looks like he's been killed, and nobody believed a single, solitary thing of the government's position.
And just before, I guess, the grand jury met, or they settled the thing, the coroner changed his position.
And he said, oh yeah, he hung himself.
Okay, now, just to recap here briefly, there's a guy named Kenny Trinidadau, he's on parole, he's arrested crossing the Mexican border near San Diego, he's picked up for his parole violation.
This is in the summer of 95, a couple of months after the Oklahoma bombing, and he's transferred to a federal prison in Oklahoma for the time being.
He talks with his family on the phone, he says, you know, I have a hearing in the morning, et cetera, et cetera.
The next day they find out he's dead, and it is quite apparent on examination of the body, all the photos, again, at motherjones.com, that this guy was murdered, and in fact, I believe you quote the coroner as saying he's been tortured and killed.
And so now the question is, why was he killed, and what does this have to do with the bombing in Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh?
Yes, okay, so nobody knows why he was killed, you know, they can't figure it out, you know, they don't think he hung himself, and then Jesse's got a telephone call from somebody, I guess a couple of telephone calls, and he thought they were nuts.
And they said, well, you know, your brother looks a lot like a guy who might, first they say he looks a lot like John Doe number two, the sketch of John Doe number two, which he does sort of look like, you can see that for yourself too, you don't have to believe me.
And then someone said, well, he looks like this guy named Richard Guthrie.
Richard Guthrie was head of another group of bank robbers called the Midwest Bank Robbers, otherwise known as the Aryan Republican Army, which is our white supremacy group, that robbed a bunch of banks, and Richard Guthrie was also thought to be possibly John Doe two.
And Richard Guthrie was arrested, and he was found hanging in his cell.
Isn't that interesting?
So the guy that they mistook for Guthrie supposedly hung himself, and then the actual Richard Guthrie hung himself as well.
Right.
And I think there was another prisoner, a prisoner who said that he heard Kenny trying to keep being beaten up, and they said he was crazy, and he hung himself too.
So there were three guys that hung himself.
That sounds like a case for Perry Mason.
Yeah, it is.
Exactly.
Okay.
So this goes on, and so, and Jesse gets nowhere.
So, but he starts to think about it, people start putting in the idea that maybe his brother was mistaken for John Doe two, and it turns out they both had the same kind of tattoos and same kind of look and so forth and so on.
So he puts in an FOIA request for documents on the Oklahoma City case, documents from the FBI, and on the theory that maybe these documents might show something, might reveal some little thing that would suggest whether in fact the government thought that his brother Kenny was hooked up, was maybe John Doe number two, and that somebody was trying to get beat a confession out of him.
So, and the reason he puts in for these documents is that some guy inside the FBI slipped him two documents that said that the FBI was in fact pursuing a wider conspiracy, that there weren't just two guys, that they were actively looking at the Midwest bank robbers at a place called Elohim City, which is this right wing white supremacy column in Oklahoma, and they in fact were looking at a conspiracy.
So, knowing that these documents exist, Jesse puts in for them.
The FBI comes back and says, they don't exist, we don't have any documents.
So then he takes the documents to the judge in federal court and he says, well, I know they exist.
And the judge just went crazy on the FBI, he said, turn them over.
And the FBI said, well, we can't, because we're going to reveal informants.
The name's an informant, we can't reveal informants.
So the judge said, redact them, turn these documents over.
These documents are on Mother Jones' website.
Okay, so he turned them over and all these documents show that they were pursuing a conspiracy here, and they never showed these documents to the McVeigh defense lawyers ever.
So, which is, you know, pretty irregular, but then that's the way things are done, I guess.
So, anyhow, so then Jesse has, you know, the idea that there's something going on here.
So then he begins to rip this stuff, he starts to look at the Oklahoma City bombing more carefully and to go into it.
And he said over and over again, you know, I may never find you killed my brother, but I'm going to find the guy who blew up the Oklahoma City building, you know?
And so it goes on like this.
And the thing that's so, that becomes really interesting about this, which, you know, this is all documented.
This is like nothing, I'm not making, I'm not guessing or supposing stuff here, it's all documented.
So, there are four informants, four federal informants, who are in touch with this Elohim City community and who are reporting to the government, to the ATF, to the FBI, and possibly other places in the government, Justice Department, before the bombing.
Okay, now that's Robert Millar, the head of the group, Carol Howe, the ATF informant, and then who else is that?
Mayhorn and Strassmeier round out the four?
No, there's an informant who was connected with the ARA in Cincinnati, and there was an informant who basically gave information to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and that information was passed to the FBI.
But that informant was not physically in Elohim City, he was just very, very tied into this group.
But the key informant, it seems to me, is not Carol Howe, but Robert Millar, who ran Elohim City, and he was afraid that the FBI was going to raid his place, because it was around Waco, and that they were going to get it, and that they were going to get taken down.
So, he was trading information with the FBI, because he didn't want to get taken down, or at least he wanted to know when he was going to get taken down.
So, you get guys out of there.
Well now, J.D.
Cash tells the story, and I believe this is also in the secret life of Bill Clinton by Ambrose Evans Pritchard, that there was a plane ride with, I believe it was Bob Ricks, who was the spokesman for the FBI during Waco, and then had become the head of the Tulsa office.
And they were in an airplane together, I think with the state police and the ATF, and the ATF guy was discussing Carol Howe and the undercover informant, and that Bob Ricks at the FBI said, Elohim City is our matter.
We'll handle it.
We're not going to have ATF screw up and get another Waco on our hands.
We will take care of this.
You guys are off the case.
Well, I don't know about that plane ride, but it's definitely for sure, when this case started, that the FBI appears, they said they appear in the Carol Howe case, which is in Tulsa, and they basically kind of like start running things.
And I don't know what the deal is with them and the ATF, but they start running things.
There isn't much question about that.
And as you'll see on the Mother Jones website, that the judge in that case, in a sealed hearing, said, well, it would really be terrible if the information that Carol Howe's handler, the ATF woman, would be really terrible if that stuff got out and infected the trial of Timothy McVeigh.
Right, you quote that in your article.
Amazing.
And now let's get this straight just to make sure the audience understands.
The ATF had an informant inside this white supremacy group where they talked about blowing up federal buildings as well as other violent acts against the state.
And she implicated these other people besides Timothy McVeigh.
These are people that McVeigh was associated with, also people who Richard Guthrie was associated with.
And, of course, it seems likely from all the evidence that this guy, Kenny Trinidadau, was killed in a mistaken identity because they thought that he was Richard Guthrie.
And during McVeigh's trial in federal court in front of the Rocky Mountain News and everybody, you know, God and Sunshine and everyone, they held this mock trial where they pretended that none of this reality existed at all.
And when Stephen Jones, not the kooky 9-11 kook professor but the lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, an entirely separate individual, when he tried to put Carol Howe on the stand in the McVeigh trial and when Michael Tiger tried to do the same thing in the Nichols trial, the federal government and the judicial branch conspired together to exclude this woman.
And you quote in your article the judge saying, well, this would be terrible if this woman is allowed to say things that basically will produce braiding material for the trial going on down the street.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's right.
In America.
Well, it struck me as pretty weird, but I mean, you know, like I say, who knows, these things are all pretty weird.
Yeah, well, and, you know, this is the biggest crime ever before September 11th.
You know, we have to remember how big of a deal this was, where they hold these two mock trials worthy of the Soviet Union, where, you know, they admit that Nichols couldn't possibly be John Doe, too, because he was in Kansas at the time.
And they just look at the camera and say, well, there is no John Doe, too, and there never was.
And the two dozen witnesses, 24 witnesses who saw him with McVeigh that morning, well, they're all crazy or something.
There's no such thing.
And there never was.
And the American media bought it.
The American people bought it.
And here this woman who was working for the BATF, they arrested her for having a piece of pipe in her garage and for having white supremacist materials and calling her a terrorist, when, of course, that was all part of her costume, basically, to get away with being an undercover informant.
They set her up on these bogus charges of which she was acquitted just to keep her out of the McVeigh trial.
Well, they not only set her up on those charges, but, you know, somebody in law enforcement, FBI or ATF, leaked her identity, which then made it pop, which threatened her, perfectly threatened her.
And finally somebody from the ATF, I guess their handler, you know, put her in a safe place.
But, I mean, they basically held this woman up and said, okay, well, here she is.
Here she is.
Here's your name.
You figure it out.
You can do what you want to with her, basically, with what they're saying.
And, you know, there was a BBC program not long ago, I guess in March or something, in which Danny Colson is this FBI guy who's in charge of some of the Oklahoma stuff or all of it.
He said that on the basis of all these witnesses that have been seen, he thought there should be another grand jury investigation of this Oklahoma City situation.
And, you know, of course, that never came to anything.
Nobody's going to touch this with a 10-foot pair because in the first place the Republicans are too chicken to do it because this is our Democratic administration, you know.
Clinton took this domestic, huge domestic terrorist activity and used it as a device to get more, to actually lay part of the road for the Patriot Act and to get immigration controls, stricter immigration controls.
So, you know, but the Republicans aren't going to do that now because, you know, they're in a mess.
It's really terrible.
Well, and you're right.
I mean, that's the thing is both parties have such a vested interest in maintaining the cover-up.
How are Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch to come clean now and say that they had, what, some perfectly good reason that they never held hearings on the biggest crime since Wounded Knee?
Well, you know, there were some people in the Congress who were able to hold hearings on Waco.
You know, well, thinking of holding a hearing on Waco, they ought to be able to hold an investigation, an independent investigation or something that more or less passes as an investigation, independent investigation on Oklahoma City.
You know, all this stuff about how, you know, there were these two guys.
Well, of course, they killed one of them.
And so he's out of the way.
Now, Jesse Tranter is trying to depose Nichols, and he's got, you know, pleadings in federal court asking to depose Nichols, and I'll bet any government, of course, is opposing that.
And, you know, who knows whether he'll get him.
But he's the one person that's really tried to open this up, the one person.
And now, if I can get back to a little bit of the specifics about Elohim City and Carol Howe, I was going through the primary sources.
Again, oh, I'm sorry, if you're just tuning in, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with James Ridgeway, the D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine, has a great new article called In Search of John Doe 2, the story the feds never told about the Oklahoma City bombing.
And there's a sidebar that has dozens of links to primary sources, great primary sources, including the pictures of Kennedy's dead body and also tortured to death body.
And also, one of the documents that you have there is the direct and cross-examination of a woman named Angela Finley Graham, who was the ATF handler of the informant Carol Howe.
And under cross-examination in those documents, she admits that even though she had basically stopped coming to Carol Howe for information in November, I think, of 1994, that Carol Howe contacted her in February of 1995, two months before the bombing, and said, hey, listen, I'm coming to Oklahoma City and we're all going and it's a big outing and I'm not sure what's going on.
Finley told her to go, and she actually was in the car, they drove around and cased the building, and Finley admitted, the ATF handler, admitted that the next day Carol Howe came and picked her up and drove her around and showed her all the places they stayed and the building that they cased, which was the Alfred P. Murrah building.
She admitted this under oath.
The other thing about this whole situation that makes it a little more deeper is that the same people around Ellingham City, some of the same people were involved in an effort to blow up the Murrah building in 1983.
In other words, there was a group of people who were also, you know, far-right, you know, white supremacy types, who thought God had given them the message that they'd better go and blow this place up, and they started to construct a missile.
And the guy who was building the missile lost it in some way, and the thing blew up on him.
And they thought, well, that was another message from God, that he didn't want him to blow it up right then.
But so this whole subject of blowing up this building is not something that just was hatched, you know, in some sort of talk between an informant at Ellingham City and her agent or some guy who was, you know, shooting his mouth off.
This has a history, a real history.
You know, it's not something that people have made up.
It's like serious history of things that happened, and it's just like, you know, I mean, if you can consider what actually happened, the people who were actually involved in these things, if this can't be taken in and considered in a trial, you know, in a first-degree murder trial, I mean, what's the point, you know?
Right, yeah.
We are getting to that point, I think, in this country where the law is just make-believe, and we really have the rule of men.
It seems more and more like that.
And again, this is the one that I always go back to, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.
This is the biggest crime since FDR let Pearl Harbor be bombed or something since the second battle of Wounded Knee or, you know, pick your major atrocity in American history.
This is the biggest thing since that, before September 11th, and the Republicans in Congress during Clinton years refused to hold a single subcommittee hearing about a single fact or aspect of this case whatsoever.
I mean, that ought to be enough to shock people right out of their slumber right there, I think.
Yeah, well, you think.
Well, can you tell me what you know about Andre Karl Strassmeier?
You mentioned Danny Coulson, one of the FBI agents in charge of this case, and his call for a new grand jury, which there have been multiple grand juries, as I'm sure you know, none of whom ever did anything but rubber-stamp what the FBI said.
Yeah, right.
Coulson has expressed his interest in knowing more about Strassmeier and his suspicion that Strassmeier actually was in on this plot and so forth.
Can you tell me what you know about this guy?
Well, I talked to Strassmeier, and Strassmeier is in Germany.
He's in Berlin.
So the thing is this.
Is it Strassmeier is a Civil War reenactment fan.
You know, there are a lot of people who, I don't know much about this, but there are a lot of people who like to reenact battles in the Civil War.
I mean, a lot of people, thousands of people, it's the thing.
Sure, we see it on TV.
Okay, so he really was into that stuff, and he came over here to go with some battalion or something and do this.
Somehow or other, he got sort of passed around a community, and it's kind of clear.
Anyway, he ends up with a guy named Kirk Lyons, and Kirk Lyons was an attorney in North Carolina, and he represented various people involved in the Aryan nations, I guess.
I don't know, I can't even remember.
I think he's married even to somebody involved out of the Aryan nations.
And he represented Reverend Millar at Elham City.
So he said that Andy Strassmeier was hanging around.
He couldn't get rid of him, and he was a really nice guy, but he was kind of like a misfit, and he didn't know what to do.
So finally, he decided that maybe the thing to do with him was getting married.
And so Elham City is a polygamous community.
It's a religious community that's polygamous.
So he told me that he thought, well, we'll get him to go up there and maybe get married, maybe find somewhere to get married.
So Andy Strassmeier had been in the military, in the German military.
And he was, I think, in a panzer division.
His father is a very well-known and well-placed official in the West German government.
This was just when the war was kind of coming down and things were getting organized.
Okay, so he goes up there and he takes over security at Elham City.
And he teaches these guys in one way or another some, I don't know, military tactics or something.
And the idea of the girlfriend kind of like disappeared because all the women were Canadian.
And so he's not going to become an American citizen by marrying a Canadian woman.
So I kind of like felt a piece of that idea.
And then, so he's there for quite a while.
And he admits to having met Tim McVeigh, at least at one point at some gun show.
Claims he never talked to him again, didn't know him.
But he did know guys who were hooked up with the Syrian Republican Army who used to come through there and sleep overnight and hang out.
Well, now the story is, too, that right after McVeigh rented the truck with his, over the phone on his Liberty Lobby calling card, that as soon as he was done making arrangements for the truck, that he called Elohim City and left a message for Andy the German.
That's right.
I mean, that's, you know, that telephone call was tracked and it took place.
I mean, you know, Strassmeier said he didn't have anything to do with it, but...
So do you believe him?
Do you believe Strassmeier that, you know, this is all just, it looks bad, but it's not bad that he had nothing to do with this?
Or do you think he was a German cop, you know, undercover infiltrating these guys at the rocket tower or what?
I don't know.
I mean, I've asked Strassmeier, okay, you know, of course he says he wasn't a spy and he wasn't doing anything bad.
And Lyons, Lyons, who's a lawyer, says he was just a misfit, a screw up.
And Lyons says he got him out of there because he thought they were going to get raided, because Millar told him that he was scared they were all going to get raided, so they got Strassmeier out and sent him back to Germany.
Now, you know, there is a theory that Strassmeier might have been some kind of an undercover agent for either the German military or more likely some kind of a NATO agent.
And the reason for that is, there's a lot of activity between the East German skinny head movement and some American white supremacist, you know, far right wing people that would go back and forth and visit them.
And in particular, there was a guy in Kansas named Gary Lauck, and he'd set up a party, you know, like a political party, I mean, named after Hitler's old party, and he didn't amount to much of anything here.
But he got the Germans really up in arms and made them mad because he'd go over there and fool around.
So it's possible that, you know, it's conceivable that NATO or Germany or, I don't know, the U.S., you know, wanted to figure out what was going on here, and they put somebody in who could go to gun shows, because there's a lot of activity, you know, buying weapons, small weapons.
I don't know how much validity to put in that, but that's an idea that's been discussed at some point.
Now, are you continuing your investigation into this matter, or is this...
Well, I've been writing about this subject since, I don't know, 1983.
So I kind of go and come and go on.
The right wing gun show circuit.
Not the right wing gun show circuit, but the far right, underground, and the political movement.
And so I go on and I survive, you know, every now and then I do something, but I haven't done much in recent years.
This I did really because of the Trinity situation, and it's very kind of, you know, it's really hard to figure it out.
It's kind of complicated.
And, of course, the government says there's nothing in it.
Well, I've gotten my hopes up about this before, and I'm going to not let myself overdo it this time, but I really hope that the visibility that this article brings will bring us another step toward finally making it okay for a regular reporter out there to, you know, talk about this, investigate angles on this.
I mean, after all, we're talking about, well, 24 different people saw somebody riding shotgun with McVeigh that morning, and that person has not had to face the gas chamber for it.
He's running free still, whoever this guy is, you know, presumably that's not okay.
Well, you'd think it wasn't okay, but, you know, this has been going on for a long time, and so far the government has certainly managed to quash all the efforts to get at it, you know, to get at the possibility of conspiracy.
Yep.
All right, well, we could do this for another couple hours, I'm certain, but we're running all out of time here, so let me just thank you again very much for your time today and for writing this article.
It's called In Search of John Doe 2, The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing.
He's James Ridgeway from MotherJones.com.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and, you know, I like talking about the Oklahoma bombing a lot because...
Because to me, it's a great archetype example of how the totalitarian government who rules this planet partitions out information in such a way that we, the masses, are forced to base our conclusions on erroneous...
Oh, I'm sorry, wrong meeting.
I thought this was the meeting at the docks, no?
Oh, shit, that's tomorrow night.
All right.
Based on a sketch of two men believed to be the bombers, one sketch showed a dead ringer for Timothy McVeigh, but John Doe 2, according to the FBI, turned out not to exist.
So authorities focused their attention on Timothy McVeigh, who was charged with a crime just two days after the bombing.
Research of witness Terry Nichols' home in Harrington, Kansas, turned up a receipt for nearly a ton of the type fertilizer used to make the bomb, and Tim McVeigh's fingerprints were found on the receipt.
Right away, the defense took the jury to the Dreamland Motel, where McVeigh stayed before the bombing.
Two witnesses say they saw a Ryder truck here on Easter Sunday.
That's important because the bomb truck wasn't rented until the next day, Monday.
Then the defense called Jeff Davis, who says he delivered food to McVeigh's Dreamland room, but the man inside wasn't McVeigh.
No agents forewarned about a bomb in Oklahoma City.
Did they know the Murrah Building was a target?
The ATF says no, absolutely not.
But tonight in a story you'll see only on the News Channel, you're about to hear otherwise from people who were at the Murrah Building that morning.
We asked some simple questions and we can't get any answers, so it makes us that much more curious, you know?
Where the hell were they?
The News Channel did ask for a private meeting with ATF officials to discuss the credibility of these witness reports, but the ATF refused, saying they had no more to say on the subject.
What he told him is that he thought that they had received a tip that morning of the bomb.
Yet another witness, a rescue worker, says after she talked with an agent at the bombing scene, she also suspected the ATF was warned an agent stayed away from their office that morning.
I asked him if his office was in the building, and he said yes, and I asked if there were any ATF agents that were still in the building, and he said no, we weren't here.
Witness number one approached an ATF agent nearby.
He claims he asked the agent what had happened, and witness number one says this is what the agent told him.
He started getting a little bit nervous.
He tried reaching somebody on a two-way radio.
I couldn't get anybody, and I told him I wanted an answer right then.
He said they were in the briefing.
None of the agents had been in there.
They had been tipped by their pagers not to come into work that day, plain as day out of his mouth.
They were tipped.
Why wasn't anybody else?
There was a lot of people, good people, died down there, and if they knew, they should have let everybody else know.
I seen McVay was with another person.
Do you have any doubt in your mind that there was a passenger in the Ryder truck?
That's even more.
I have no doubt there was.
There was definitely a second person no matter what.
There was two people in this vehicle.
John Doe number two, there was a $2 million price put on his head, and now they're saying there's no John Doe number two.
And our witnesses picked out a photo lineup.
The news channel shared the information and surveillance tapes of this man with the FBI.
They've had some of that material long before our reports went on the air.
I'm in the building, and I looked out the window, and I seen a delicious truck, and I seen the man get out of the truck.
She was just 10 feet away from the man depicted in this sketch when he stepped out of the Ryder truck.
He was olive complexion, and he had black curly hair.
He was wearing the baseball card, but his curls were sticking out of his head.
It was short in the back, but you could still see the curls in his hair.
He was not American.
He was foreign.
He didn't tell about it, his skin, his face, the way his face was.
We asked FFO Dan Vogel if John Doe number two is still part of the investigation.
Does he exist?
The answer, yes.
The FBI is still trying to locate and identify John Doe number two.
The man in our reports is Iraqi.
Today the FBI says they are not pursuing a Middle Eastern connection.
This doesn't...
And the details are chilling.
We'll also focus on surveillance cameras, cameras that caught the bombing on tape, and maybe the men behind the bombing.
The news channel has new information tonight that there's a chance surveillance tapes could be the smoking gun evidence.
Now, we asked candid questions in a rare face-to-face meeting with ATF officials close to the investigation.
We learned that video collected from downtown businesses the morning of April 19th may someday be played before adjuring.
Officials won't say who or what exactly is on the tape.
However, numerous sources have confirmed the tapes exist and that they reveal more than one bomber.
So what evidence are they asking for?
They're asking for video taken from the Ryder trucks from the Regi towers.
Well, Kevin, it's a question we've all been asking.
We've been asking that question since we first broke the story that surveillance cameras aimed at the federal building could have captured all those involved on tape.
Now, sources have confirmed those tapes exist and that they show more than one bomber.
The FBI also confirmed those tapes exist when they refused to release them, claiming the video is part of a criminal investigation.
And now, for the first time, we get an on-the-record response from the head of the Dallas office, ATF.
We learned that videotape could be unveiled as part of the prosecution's case.
No officials will discuss specifically what's on the video, but we have been able to recreate some of what may have been captured by downtown surveillance cameras through the eyes of the witnesses.
Let me say, first of all, what I have done today.
I've renewed my call in the Congress to pass the anti-terrorism legislation that's up there that I've sent.
I have determined to send some more legislation to the Hill that will strengthen the hand of the FBI and other law enforcement officers in cracking terrorist networks, both domestic and foreign.
I have instructed the federal government to do a preventive effort on all federal buildings that we have today, and we're going to rebuild Oklahoma City.
Now, over and above that, I have asked the Attorney General, the FBI Director, and the National Security Advisor to give me a set of things which would go into a directive about what else we should do.
I don't want to prejudge this issue, but the nations of this world are going to have to get together, bring our best minds together, and figure out what to do about this.
The victims of the Oklahoma City bombing have been given not vengeance, but justice.
Due process ruled.
The case was proved.
The verdict was calmly reached.
And the rights of the accused were protected and observed to the full and to the end.
Under the laws of our country, the matter is concluded.
Life and history bring tragedies, and often they cannot be explained.
Oh, I say it, I say it again, you've been hanged.
You've been took.
You've been poof-winged.
Bamboozled.
Let us pray.
Run amok.
The government didn't do a good job of proving that Terry Nichols was greatly involved in all of this.
Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.
How many fingers am I holding up, Miss?
Four.
And if the party says there are not four, but five, then how many?
Five.
