04/17/15 – Roger Charles – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
Next up is Roger G. Charles.
He is the author with Andrew Gumbel of the book Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters.
He was previously a news producer for ABC 2020, right?
Welcome back, Roger.
How are you?
Good to be with you.
I was not actually a producer.
I was an associate producer and consultant.
Oh, there you go.
Well, anyway.
But that's how you got turned on to this story in the first place.
Am I right about that?
That is correct.
A guy named Don Thrasher, unfortunately no longer with us, hired me to be his assistant as he was in 1996 beginning to peel back the onion, so to speak, and try to make sense of what was obviously a myth constructed by the federal government as to what really happened in the Oklahoma City bombing and who was really involved and so on.
All right.
Now your co-author, Andrew Gumbel, has a new piece for the anniversary here, Running in the Guardian.
I'm sorry?
I have seen it, yes.
So he has a quote here from Larry Mackey, the number two prosecutor against McVeigh.
And, you know, it's just a very cop way of putting things, if you ask me.
But you can tell what he means where he says, If you had said to us, does anybody in the room have 100 percent confidence that McVeigh was alone?
If so, raise your hand.
We would have all kept our hands in our lap.
So, in other words, if you believe McVeigh had helped that we didn't prosecute, raise your hand.
They would have all raised their hands.
They all believe that they let people get away with mass murder.
That's a quote from, you know, slightly unpacked, but not really, from Larry Mackey, the number two federal prosecutor against McVeigh.
So whoever could he be referring to, Roger?
You know, there's no question that some of the Midwest bank robbers, the Aryan Republic Army, if that's what you want to call them, Pete Langan, Richard Guthrie, and their crew had some sort of role.
I've just finished some review and research for a piece that will be coming out over the weekend, probably, updating people on what we know about Andreas Karl Straussmeier, who's clearly now, I can say the evidence is overwhelming, people on the record and off the record, but on the record, a number of people that Straussmeier was, at a minimum, an informant, and very likely a provocateur in the center of the conspiracy.
And anyhow, it's just, as much as I've done this for the last almost 19 years now, Scott, I'm still just, when I put it all together, it just kind of amazes me how lazy or whatever, largely, the mainstream media was.
Not everybody, but the exceptions were rare.
They just swawed the government's line, hook, line, and sinker, and consequently, people with direct responsibility for the murder of 168 of our fellow citizens have escaped any kind of accountability.
And that includes, by the way, the people in the federal government that had some idea of a threat, and I'm not talking about a vague threat, but knew with varying degrees of specificity that Oklahoma City was a target and failed to take whatever actions were necessary to preclude, to prevent the bombing from taking place.
And that's really what's driving the cover-up for these 20 years.
And that's what has driven the use of the victims and the survivors' families, the victims and their families, their survivors and families.
What has really driven the cover-up, the success, has been using the grief of these people as the cement to kind of hold the stone wall together.
And it's just incredible.
Yeah, you're right about that.
From the very beginning, it's sort of like 9-11, where, yeah, they might as well have done it.
Hell, it makes no difference whether they did it, because they exploited it so cynically that you might as well conclude that absolutely they sent Strassmeier to do this just so they could exploit it was how bad they exploited it.
Whether that's exactly how it happened or not, I think, as you seem to imply there, that's still a bit debatable.
But, boy, did they ever exploit it.
If people go back and remember all the spinning and all the PR, where even Rush Limbaugh, who is, to me, the very center-right in American politics, anyone to the right of him and maybe even including him were all responsible for the Oklahoma bombing, what with all their anti-government rhetoric and this kind of thing.
And, yeah, never even mind the story.
For the story, they switched to O.J. Simpson as far as what actually happened.
Let's talk about O.J.
But as far as who you're supposed to hate out of it, how about every gun owner in America?
Yep, they did it.
And, meanwhile, even when they executed McVeigh, they were all surprised.
Wow, he came in with his head shaved all the way to the skin like some kind of Nazi.
Yeah, you sort of missed the whole Nazi angle.
They were busy blaming every militia and every patriot and every right-wing populist in America, and they missed the actual Nazis that did it.
And why again?
Because some of them were provocateurs, and through others of them, the government had prior knowledge the attack was going to happen but then didn't stop it?
Yeah, well, you know, it's just kind of a pathetic chapter in the history of American journalism because the evidence in bits and pieces is out there.
And, you know, I've been fortunate to work with some great people.
John D. Cash, a mutual friend of ours, God rest his soul, did some amazing work along with his editor-publisher, the McCurtain County Gazette, Bruce Willingham.
Their work will stand when the New York Times and a lot of the other mainstream media, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, their work will be an embarrassment at some point in the future in schools of journalism for its shoddiness and its superficiality and the willingness of these supposedly first-rate journalists to question in any serious way the government's spinmeisters and liars.
It's just, you know, as much as I've watched it, I shake my head.
It's still just kind of hard to believe.
And let me just bring up one other point that you raised, Scott.
In a great book by Ambrose Evans Bridget called The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Ambrose gets into – and this came out of a Washington Post article that I pointed out to Ambrose – the day that Clinton flew back from Arkansas to D.C., the day after the 1996 election, he's been re-elected.
So it's the day after.
He's in Air Force One flying back to Washington.
He's feeling great.
He's just got four more years.
And he kind of saunters back to the press room on Air Force One.
And guess what?
He commits a little bit of truth, one of the rare times in his life.
And he credits the Oklahoma City bombing as the reason for his re-election because they were able to exploit it.
Yeah, that is a true story.
The Oklahoma City bombing saved my presidency, he said.
As though Bob Dole was ever really a threat anyway.
But still, it certainly did change him from, you know, on the defensive to on the offensive.
That's for sure, politically speaking.
Yeah.
So anyhow, I think of J.D. particularly as we come up to the 20th anniversary and miss him greatly.
And I just consider myself fortunate to have been with him and worked with him as we did.
Yeah, me too.
Absolutely.
And let me just say that I feel badly in the book that you so kindly referenced that Andrew Gumbel and I published, gosh, 2012, three years ago now.
Gumbel had written twice that referring and characterizing John Cash as an amateur reporter.
And I caught one and had it corrected.
I did not catch the second instance where he used that kind of cheap shot against John.
And I greatly regret that I missed the second instance and hope that John will forgive me.
I think he will.
All right.
Hold it right there, Roger.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right.
I'm back.
It's my show.
I'm here.
Yeah.
Scott Horton's show.
Talking with Roger Charles.
And, yeah, you know, Roger, it is too bad the way the editor and or your co-author got to J.D. Cash's legacy in that book.
And so I'm glad that you were able to take the time.
I'm sorry if a little bit of it got cut off by the break there for the live audience.
But anyway, he was a good man and he did good journalism.
And I don't remember him being caught being wrong on what happened here really at all.
And and so anyway, yeah, God rest his soul and all that kind of thing.
But so I want to go back to what you were saying, though, about the media here.
I saw AP reporter this morning tweeted out about, you know, be very careful with breaking news because.
And the story didn't really get much wrong, but it was, you know, maybe some Muslims did it or something like that was in there.
But it wasn't it was very vague and not very accusatory.
But anyway, he was saying this is a warning for for reporting things on breaking news.
And I replied back that, you know, this whole story is, you know, very illustrative of the problems of access journalism altogether.
And in fact, the Associated Press is the best example that I can think of, because especially right around the time of the federal trials in Colorado.
I didn't say all this in the tweet, but you understand right around the time of the federal trials.
The AP would actually do some pretty good reporting on some of the other John Doe's and some of the other things that were known that were being left out of the prosecution story.
Like, for example, the ATF informant Carol Howe.
But they never would pick it up and run with it.
Hey, everybody, here's a 3000 word story about Carol Howe.
We'll never talk about this again.
You know, like that was to me, the biggest outrage was where, you know, you have newspaper, you know, so that that means the editor of the Austin American Statesman.
He saw that story come over the wire, but didn't run it right.
You had you could only read it in the Rocky Mountain News or in the Denver Post or something like that.
Well, you know, going back to John Cash and Bruce Willingham and the McCurtain Daily Gazette, they could never get the AP office in Oklahoma City to pick up a single one of the groundbreaking, incredible stories that John did for that paper.
They had orders from somebody, and I'll tell you one.
I know this for a fact because the guy involved told me.
A former deputy bureau chief of the AP here in Washington, D.C., had a story about a candidate for Senate who he had the goods on.
And I had helped in this a little bit.
Using his office to enrich himself by getting a designation for a certain federal status that would benefit this senator's sitting senator running for reelection would benefit his real estate holdings.
OK.
The guy was going to run the story, but his boss, the bureau chief for AP here in Washington, D.C., refused to do it because the candidate that was running against the sitting senator was Jim Webb.
And Jim Webb had written an article critical of women in the military years ago.
And this bureau chief was a woman, and she told the deputy, we're not going to run your story.
I don't want to do anything that's going to help that misogynist.
Now, excuse me, the story either stands or doesn't on its own merits.
You've either got it sourced, you've either got the evidence, or you don't.
In this case, there's no question about it.
The evidence was there.
All right.
So give us the rundown about – name some names for us.
Tell us the story of who was John Doe 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in this thing.
Well, you know, there are several John Doe 2s, and that's a good point, Scott, because it's hard to say, depending on where you place the individual, which one you're talking about.
Was it one of the Ward brothers?
Was it Mike Brescia?
Was it Richard Lee Guthrie?
Was it – you know, there's some people who say even Andy Strassmayer was John Doe 2.
I don't believe that, but, I mean, you've got to be very specific because these guys were similar enough, and personal identification by witness is weak enough, well-known now, that you just can't say that John Doe 2 was this one individual.
You can say, who was the guy at Eldon Elliott's Ryder rental truck franchise in Junction City, Kansas, when John Doe 1, who I do not believe was Timothy McVeigh, by the way, when John Doe 1 rented the Ryder rental truck?
Who was that?
Well, you've got to, you know, really get into some specifics there, and so was it A, B, or C?
I don't know, but it was not – the key point there is that I do not believe that John Doe 1 was Tim McVeigh.
You look at the height and weight.
You look at where he was on the – it doesn't even come close to matching what the people said in terms of the height and weight of the guy that rented the truck.
If you look at the McDonald's security camera at the McDonald's about a mile and a quarter away, there's no way that McVeigh could have gotten walking from there to the Ryder rental truck office in the amount of time in the light rain.
Well, and I think – And so on.
Roger, in your book, Better Than Anywhere Else, you guys show that there were two Ryder trucks, and the most obvious reason why was that, hey, obviously the FBI is on to us, so we're going to get another truck, and they can chase the red herring while we go ahead and blow up the building with this thing.
You know – And it sure took more than McVeigh to arrange all that.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, well, I – from fairly early on in this thing in late July of 1996 when I first got involved, it became apparent to me that when you started looking at all these issues, there was somebody, and I just call him the evil genius.
It may have been a person.
It may have been a small group of people.
It may have been a man.
It may have been a woman.
I have no idea.
But the guiding intellect for this attack was what I call the evil genius.
And the evil genius knew with certainty a couple things.
One, that if you had more than two people in a conspiracy, one of them was going to be a government informant, and maybe with just two of them, one of them might be.
But he certainly knew as many people as were involved, there would be at least a government informant and maybe a couple.
Especially when they're all neo-Nazi bank robbers and white supremacists who are all guilty of felonies and have all been flipped to be witnesses or informants at one point or another.
And then secondly, he said, you know, I'm going to turn that and use that disadvantage, that liability, I'm going to flip it and use it to my benefit.
And how am I going to do that?
I'm going to identify who this informant or these informants are.
I'm going to feed them this information, and that will protect our plan.
And so part of it was the decoy rider truck.
I don't want to get into all of it now with the time we have left, but believe me, there's ample evidence.
There's compelling evidence.
Absolutely there is.
Decoy truck being used, and it lulled the federal law enforcement into a false sense of complacency and security that they had things under control.
McVeigh comes in the back door, so to speak, with the bomb truck, blows up the daycare center, which was his target, I am convinced.
Hey, Roger, let me keep you one more segment, can I?
How long will that be, Scott?
Ten minutes after the break.
So 15, really?
Yeah, 10 or 15, okay.
Okay, great.
I'll let you go right after that.
It's Roger Charles, author of Oklahoma City.
Read that.
Alright, guys, welcome back.
And thanks to Roger Charles for staying a little bit extra with us here today to talk about Oklahoma City.
It's 20 years now.
God, I can hardly believe it.
It's 20 years.
He's the author of the book, Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why it Matters.
His co-author has a piece at The Guardian today where, like in the book, the prosecutors themselves are quoted admitting that they knew that they let guilty Oklahoma City bombers escape.
And their measly excuse is they had to make sure to be able to get a death penalty verdict against McVeigh.
Not to shut him up or anything, but just to make an example out of him for the rest of you.
But then that's their excuse for letting others get away with it.
And, of course, there's a BBC documentary where the lead FBI investigator says the same thing, too, that there's this broader network of neo-Nazis that did this.
And remember the narrative if you remember back then 20 years ago.
The narrative was, again, the militia did it, the patriots did it, but not the Nazis did it, when actually the Nazis did it.
And that's what we're talking about here is the small handful of guys that are known to have been McVeigh's associates.
And, by the way, it's worth mentioning that they didn't put anyone on the stand in McVeigh's federal trial to testify that they saw him there that morning in the yellow Ryder truck.
That he got out of it, that they saw him run toward the alley where the Mercury was parked or anything like this.
And it's not because they had no eyewitnesses.
There were all kinds of eyewitnesses.
I believe 20 to 24 different eyeball witnesses put him in Oklahoma City that morning, but nobody saw him alone.
And so the FBI and the federal prosecutors just didn't bother putting anyone on the stand.
Instead, they interviewed little kids about how sad they were that they lost their family.
And that was the prosecution testimony against McVeigh.
And sorry, I'm going on one more point, Roger, which is I have somewhere the clip of a juror from that case on 60 Minutes saying, you know, I kept waiting around for the defense to bring in an alibi witness to say there's no way McVeigh did it because he was with me that day.
And that never happened.
And so that was how desperate she was to figure out a way to convict that she flipped the standard of evidence entirely on him.
That he had to prove himself innocent in the face of the fact that she had gone through all this and hadn't seen a shred of evidence that he did it.
Even though you and I both know he's guilty as hell.
It's just they couldn't provide any evidence that wouldn't show on cross-examination that they had major problems with the rest of their story.
Yeah, well, you know, it's taken a while, Scott, for me to come to this realization.
And this is a fairly recent one.
I don't know why it took so long.
But, you know, and I worked for Stephen Jones, as you may recall, on the defense team for about four months during the trial in Denver and shortly thereafter.
But there were four parties to the trial.
You had the accused, McVeigh.
You had his defense team, Stephen Jones.
Then you had the prosecution representing the federal government, the FBI, the ATF, and so on.
Then you had the judge, Judge Richard Meech, representing the independent judicial branch of our government.
Well, here's how the team stacked up.
You had Stephen Jones against his own client, Tim McVeigh, in the sense that McVeigh did not want Jones to be successful in raising the issue of the others involved.
McVeigh was the designated patsy.
That was his willing role.
He eagerly accepted it.
And as a martyr, he was going to go to his death protecting his fellow bomb conspiracy guys.
So you had Jones against his own client who was working to keep the broader conspiracy out of the trial.
The government did not want – the Justice Department part of the government did not want that introduced.
And the judge did not.
Now, he says at the end in the book, our book, we quote him as saying, I hope the FBI and the Justice Department will continue investigating.
Well, at that point, it's too late.
He's already given them all they needed to build the brick wall.
Now, you may remember the name John Sirica.
He was the judge.
He was the federal judge in Washington, DC.
When the Watergate burglars were brought before him, there had been a deal cut, and the Justice Department was part of it.
They were going to plead guilty.
They did plead guilty.
They were going to take kind of one or two years in jail.
Their families were going to be taken care of by money from the Nixon slush funds, and everything would just go on without a ripple.
Well, Judge Sirica knew a BS – I almost said something else – a BS deal when he saw one.
He refused to accept their guilty pleas and said, this court will not be party to this fraud.
Well, Judge Richard Mache in Denver had exactly the same opportunity.
He saw a fraud being perpetrated on his court, and for whatever reason, his personal animus against maybe not McVeigh, but against what McVeigh had done that so wounded Mache, a believer in law and order and the rule of law and all that.
But Mache refused to support Stephen Jones' attempts to raise the issue of the broader conspiracy.
So you had Mache, you had the Justice Department, and you had Tim McVeigh all fighting to keep the lid on this thing.
And it's no wonder that Stephen Jones had to wait and write a book about Others Unknown because his client and the other parties I just mentioned didn't want to let it in court.
Right.
Yeah, and again, back to what you said at the beginning here.
This was all obvious at the time for anyone with a critical eye who wanted to look.
In real time you could see this slow-motion train wreck going on in terms of the kangaroo court atmosphere really in Denver there where they held the trial.
Where even the proof that it was ammonium nitrate and that McVeigh did it was they said they found a receipt at Nichols' house with McVeigh's thumbprint on it for ammonium nitrate.
And then that's how much they knew was in it, everything else.
It all was based on this one receipt, they said.
Well, and I'll tell you, I'm convinced, having studied it in some detail, that Tim McVeigh planted that receipt in Terry Nichols' kitchen drawer.
Yeah, it seemed likely even at the time.
But then you also had Frederick Whitehurst from the FBI crime lab who debunked their phony science and said they basically pretended that they had some ammonium nitrate crystals on a piece of plywood and they never even tested right, etc.
No, you could not today, and this was true probably just right after the trials, they could not go and find ammonium nitrate crystals sufficient to definitively determine in a lab test that there was any anywhere around.
Whether it had been used in fertilizing the shrubs and grass on the lawn of the Murrah building or it was there because of the bomb.
I mean, the whole thing, the science was so weak, so flawed, the whole thing was just pathetic.
And yet the gullible mainstream media, which I shouldn't say gullible in this case, serving basically as a hand puppet for the establishment that wanted this thing to be soft quickly and, you know, slick Willy to go unencumbered into his second four years.
A lot of that was at play here, Scott, believe me.
And I don't say that as a partisan.
I'm a libertarian independent.
I don't really have anything to do with either party anymore, but it's a sad commentary.
And we're watching it play out in other stories the same thing.
You can see the whole thing that gets us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly Iraq, you know.
Where was the skepticism?
Where was the professional journalism that was going to say prove your accusations, your allegations?
Let's see the evidence.
And that pathetic performance by Colin Powell in front of the United Nations will embarrass him and will basically be what he's remembered for, not the other things that he did.
And it's only fair because he knew when he got up there that this was not sufficient to go to war.
But he went ahead and used his prestige to support the lie.
Anyhow, I don't want to get off on that, but it's all part and parcel of the same problems that we have today.
Yeah, you're right.
It is.
The point being, it's just out of control.
Where's the control?
Where's the accountability?
It's Roger Charles, author of the book Oklahoma City.
Thanks very much, Roger.
I appreciate it.
Good to be with you, my friend.
Take care.
Hey, y'all.
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