Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com.
Our next guest is Jesse Trinidou, and he was somewhat of a peripheral player who ended up at the center of quite a controversy surrounding what was, at the time it happened, considered to be among the greatest crimes, the biggest crimes, in American history, the Oklahoma City bombing.
Well, I guess I'll just go ahead and introduce him and bring him on.
It's Jesse Trinidou.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you for having me on, sir.
Well, this is a very interesting case, and it's one that's always interested me since the time that it happened.
I always blamed O.J.
Simpson for diverting the American people from what was an important story, and there were clues from the very beginning that there was somewhat less than the whole truth being told about the Oklahoma bombing case, in the sense that it was decided John Doe II didn't exist at all, and apparently some ATF agents had admitted to the public on the scene that they had been warned not to go to work that day, and things like that that tend to indicate a larger story behind the scene.
And then, I guess my first question for you is, when did you become involved in, or how did your case eventually merge with the Oklahoma City bombing case, and at what point did you realize that the story of your brother's death was tied to the Oklahoma City bombing story?
Well, it kind of took a while.
I didn't come to that conclusion right away.
My brother was tortured and murdered in Oklahoma City in August of 1995.
He was extensively tortured and strangled with a pair of plastic handcuffs.
The FBI said it was a suicide by hanging.
He was in federal custody at the time, and it occurred, I guess, four or five months after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I had no reason to suspect that my brother's murder was linked to the bombing at that time.
Six months later, I think it was in January of 1996, I received an anonymous call, and the caller said that my brother had been killed by the FBI, that it was an interrogation that had gone terribly wrong, that it was a case of mistaken identity, he had fit the profile of a group of individuals who were robbing banks and armored cars and using the money to attack the federal government.
I dismissed that call as a crank call, and I have gotten a lot of those over the years.
Well then, later on in July, I think it was in 1996, I read an L.A.
Times story about Richard Lee Guthrie, who was a member of a gang called the Midwest Bank Robbery Gang.
He had been found hanging in his cell, and he was in federal custody, and he supposedly committed suicide the day before he was going to give an interview to the Los Angeles Times that he said would blow the lid off the Oklahoma City bombing.
And again, I didn't make a connection between that and my brother's murder.
But shortly before, years later, shortly before he was executed, I received a message from Tim McVeigh, who said that when I saw your brother's picture and heard what happened to him, I knew they had, they being the FBI, had killed him because they thought it was Richard Lee Guthrie.
Now, at some point in there, you had made a connection with a reporter from the McCurtain County Gazette by the name of J.D.
Cash, right?
I did, and J.D.'s dead now, and it's a terrible loss, both as a personal friend and what he brought.
He was a very decent man.
I interviewed him a number of times and talked to him on the phone a number of times off the air as well, and I was pretty shocked to find out that he had died.
So, when did he contact you, and how was it that he helped you put some puzzle pieces together there?
I think it was in the spring of 2004 when J.D. called.
And J.D., for your listeners' information, probably knows more about the Oklahoma City bombing, or did, than anybody other than the people who carried it out.
And he had family and friends who were hurt and killed in that bombing.
I received a call from J.D.
I'd never met him or spoke to him before, and he asked me if I was Jesse Trinidou, and I said, yes.
And he said, oh, you're Kenneth Trinidou's brother?
And I said, yes.
And he said, well, I'd like to talk to you about your brother a minute.
And I said, sure.
He said, what was your brother's, give me a description of your brother.
And I said, oh, he was about 5'9", muscular.
J.D. said, well, what was he driving when he was picked up by the federal government?
And I said he was driving a 1986 Chevrolet pickup truck.
And J.D. said, does your brother have any tattoos?
And I said, yes.
And he said, what kind and where?
And I said he had a dragon tattoo on his left forearm.
And J.D. said, well, you better sit down, because I've got something to tell you.
And I said, well, I am sitting down.
And he said, well, let me tell you this.
When your brother was picked up and killed, or at least when he was picked up, the largest manhunt in American history was taking place for John Doe II.
And this is the description.
White male, 5'9", powerful upper body build, dark complected, driving mid-1980s Chevrolet pickup truck, dragon tattoo, left forearm.
At that point in time, that is when I really focused on the fact that the FBI had apparently picked my brother up thinking that he was a John Doe II.
And I say a John Doe II because it's now clear that there were many, many John Doe IIs.
There were about 10 or 12 people involved in the plot to bomb the Merrill Building.
And so every time McVeigh was seen with one of these individuals, that person was described.
And the description, of course, would differ from individual to individual.
But Richard Lee Guthrie matched my brother's description, matched John Doe II's description.
Guthrie was 5'9", powerful upper body build, dark complected, dragon tattoo, left forearm.
And he, of course, was found hanging in his cell.
All right, now, so basically they picked up your brother, wrong place, wrong time, wrong truck, wrong tattoo.
They assume that he's Richard Lee Guthrie.
And then, so, is this early enough in the investigation that they were still even looking for a John Doe II or they were already pretending there was no such thing?
Were they trying to get your brother to admit that he was John Doe II, do you think?
I don't know.
All I know is shortly after he was picked up, they suddenly announced there was no John Doe II.
And they tried to get as far away from the John Doe II story as they possibly could.
And now I understand why.
For your listeners' information, I was leaked, and these came from, the original source was the FBI, an FBI person.
Two teletypes written by FBI Director Louis Free talking about a sting operation that was in place at a white supremacist paramilitary training camp in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City.
According to the documents, it was a joint operation being run by the FBI and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center denies any involvement, but the documents say what they say.
Well, and do they say who exactly were the informants connected to the SPLC?
They do, but they've been blacked out.
So I've been leaked two of them.
And so I file a request under the Freedom of Information Act with the FBI saying, I want all your documents involving a sting operation at Elohim City with the Southern Poverty Law Center that led to the bombing of the Merrill Building in Oklahoma City.
I knew the FBI would come back and say they didn't have any, and that's what they did.
So I sued in federal court to get the documents.
They represent to the judge that there are no documents responsive to my request, so I filed those documents that I had, the two of them, with the court.
I knew the FBI would come back and say those were fake.
I had ready an affidavit from a retired FBI agent who said, no, they're real.
The federal judge goes ballistic on the FBI at that point in time, orders them to do a manual search.
They come back with 155 pages of documents involving the sting operation.
But the earliest document is dated the afternoon of April 19, 1995, which is the day of the bombing, about four hours after the bombing.
So I go back to the court and I say to the judge, I said, there's no way this sting operation sprang to life four hours after the bombing.
It had to have been in place before.
And meanwhile, I'd been able to get in to see Terry Lynn Nichols.
I spent a day and a half with him.
And Nichols, after he had been convicted, he was convicted by the federal jury, but was not given a death penalty because the jurors said that they believed it was clear to them that there were other people involved.
And it wasn't right to give Nichols the death penalty if the government wasn't going after the others.
And so Nichols was retried in state court.
And the result was the same.
The jury convicted him, but refused to give him the death penalty because they said there were others involved.
And it wasn't right to send him to death when the government would not go after these other people.
So after he'd been convicted in the state trial...
Well, if I can stop you right there and just add to that, the forewoman of the Nichols federal jury, Nikki Deutschman, publicly complained that they didn't do a very good job of proving that Terry Nichols had anything to do with this.
And I remember the coverage of the Rocky Mountain News at the time, and I believe the Associated Press as well, quoted one of the other jurors.
And I guess all of them, or at least a few more of them, corroborated this story, basically.
But one of the jurors bragged that, I made them cry, that the original vote was 10-2 to actually acquit Nichols.
And the two sort of just berated the others into compromising and going ahead and convicting him of, I think, involuntary manslaughter, to which the judge then turned around and gave him life.
But again, it's my understanding that this was because there were others involved.
It's clear to the jurors...
Right.
It's not because he was innocent.
It was because the federal prosecutors didn't want to really prove their case, because there was too much to it that they didn't want to get into.
I think you're absolutely right.
And what they didn't want to get into were the others.
And so what happens after Nichols is convicted in a state trial and doesn't receive the death penalty, he writes Attorney General Ashcroft and says, Please come and see me and I will tell you all about the bombing.
I will tell you who was involved.
I will even tell you about the FBI informants who were involved in the plot, one of whom, according to Nichols, provided the explosives that were used to detonate the bomb.
Well, Ashcroft doesn't go see Nichols.
He doesn't send anyone to see Nichols.
He issues an order that Nichols is to have no contact with the media.
And so I take a sworn statement from Terry Lynn Nichols and I go back to court and I say, Your Honor, I'd like to take the deposition of Terry Nichols.
And I'd like to take the deposition of David Paul Hammer.
Now, Hammer spent almost two years on death row with Tim McVeigh, and McVeigh told him all about the plot and all the others involved, including the FBI informants.
And the court agreed with me and said, You go take those depositions.
And that was in the fall of 2007.
The FBI immediately moved to reconsider.
We fought for a year.
Here in September of 2008, the court denied the motion to reconsider and ordered the depositions to proceed, at which point the FBI has now appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to have the order overturned.
Well, now, I've read Paul Hammer's book, and I have to say, I think he even admits at the beginning that he's a lifelong fraudster.
And it seems to me that he almost incorporates every conspiracy theory he's ever heard of into his story.
How credible do you think he really is?
Well, let me put it this way.
More credible than the FBI?
More credible than the FBI.
More credible than the FBI.
And I'll give you three things that tell me that both Hammer and both Nichols are credible.
Four things, I guess, with Nichols.
First of all, Nichols, it is an amazing story of sin, redemption, and forgiveness.
He has reached out to several of the victims and basically asked for forgiveness, the families of the victims, two in particular who both lost grandchildren.
And they have.
And he's promised them that he will tell everything.
It's sort of a soul-cleansing moment that he wants to do this for them, to bring this thing to a close, because they know there were others involved, the victims do and the families, that there were others involved who were not being prosecuted.
The second reason I think that these men are credible is because they have nothing to gain.
In fact, they put themselves at great risk by doing this.
Now, Hammer admittedly is on death row, so they plan to kill Hammer anyway.
But Nichols, they'll come at him through his family, they'll come at him in any number of ways, but they will not let him go forward without trying to stop him.
The third reason I think that these men have something worth hearing and will testify truthfully is how hard the FBI has fought to keep them from testifying.
Now, if they in fact have nothing to say and they're liars and they're not credible, why do you spend so many tens of thousands of dollars and years fighting these depositions?
And it's important for your audience also to know that not once did the FBI deny the allegations.
The allegations I made were horrific.
That you set up this sting operation, that you funded it, you had informants there who robbed banks and armored cars with McVeigh to get the money to build a bomb, you had informants who helped build the bomb, you had at least four months prior knowledge of the attack, and you didn't stop it.
Now, not once did the FBI come forward and say that's not true.
All they did was plead with the court not to turn over the documents and not to let me take the depositions.
And the last reason, and perhaps it's the strongest reason, is I took the evidence I'd gotten from Hammer, the evidence I'd gotten from Terry Nichols, I presented it to the court.
A federal judge, a United States federal judge, looked at that evidence and said, you go take those depositions.
Now, it's not me, it's not Nichols, it's not the FBI, discard all of that.
You had a federal judge look at that evidence and say these depositions are going forward.
Well, you know, right before they executed Timothy McVeigh, there was a kind of minor storm when some FBI agents went on CBS News and talked about evidence that they knew was withheld from the defense, Brady material it's called, because of the court case where, well, you're a lawyer, you know, the court case, Brady, where it's mandated that the prosecutors have to turn over everything they have to the defense.
And I interviewed Rick Ojeda, one of those FBI agents, on my old radio show, and he talked about how he, in fact, hadn't been investigating Elohim City and had turned over quite a large amount of material one way or another to his superiors and how he knew for a fact that even after Ashcroft made a show of delaying the execution and turning over the last few boxes of information and whatever, that his work still had not been turned over to the defense.
Apparently anything that made any sort of credible reference to the white supremacists at Elohim City was still being excluded up until the point where they executed McVeigh.
And I can verify that because when the FBI, when they were ordered by the judge to go search for those records, and they come back with 155 pages, they plead with the judge not to turn them over because they had four or five informants whose names appeared in those documents who had been promised anonymity, and if their names were released, it would expose them to potential harm.
So they're basically just confirming every single thing, every one of your suspicions about this case in their court pleadings, it sounds like.
They are.
And instead of allowing them to withhold the documents, the court said, you can black out the names and turn those copies over to Jesse Trinidou.
You turn over to me copies with the names in them and nothing blacked out.
And those documents were before the court and were a big reason the court ordered those depositions because the court had 155 pages of FBI reports dealing with this sting operation.
Now, interestingly, the name of the operation, I think, and I've come across this operation the FBI was running called PATCON, and it was short, it was P-A-T-C-O-N.
It was short for an acronym for Patriot Conspiracy, that they had for some reason were just terrified of the reemergence of the neo-Nazi movement or the emergence of the neo-Nazi movement in the United States.
And they formed this operation to infiltrate militia and neo-Nazi groups around the country, one of which was Ellingham City.
Well, now, you know, a lot of the reason we know about this is because the ATF had an undercover informant inside the FBI's ring of undercover informants, right?
And this lady, Carol Howe, had told the ATF, on the record, all kinds of things about what these men were up to, not knowing that many of them, at least, were working for the FBI.
That's true, and she told them four months before the bombing in October of 1994 and that she had even scouted the target with some of the plotters.
Right, and in fact, her handler, Angela Finley, the ATF agent, not the informant, but the actual ATF agent, admitted in, I forget whose deposition, but under oath, that, in fact, Carol Howe came and got her and drove her on the route and said, this is the building we cased, and everything.
And, incredibly, that testimony was sealed by the Department of Justice.
That's really one of the most incredible things about this story, is the fact that McVeigh was tried and Nichols was tried twice, and yet they got away with what amounts to comic book trials of these men, excluding all sorts of important evidence.
Well, what they excluded was the evidence that would lead back to the others involved, at least four or five of whom were working for the FBI.
Can you name those men, the four or five?
I can't, because they were all blacked out.
The FBI, in their own sworn statement, said there were, I think they said there were four, and if you take Carol Howe, that would have been five informants at Elohim City.
But they had the names blacked out of the four.
Well, now, you made reference to FBI informants actually helping to make the bomb.
What do you know about that?
All I know is what Nichols has told me.
And what he's told you is that that took place at Gary State Lake in Kansas?
He described making the bomb at Gary State Lake in Kansas, but I think there was another.
.
.
I don't have the whole story from Terry Nichols.
I only had a limited amount of time, and he was very careful not to put down or tell me on paper, put down on paper and tell me everything, and we couldn't in that short a period of time, nor could you in four or five pages of paper.
But he just gave me the high points and enough to go back and present to the court that this man knew everything, or between him.
Between him and David Paul Hammer, they will know everything about the bombing.
Well, you know, J.D.
Cash told me that he thought that the actual truck bomb, in fact, I believe he said he knew that the truck bomb was made in Oklahoma City, was put together in Oklahoma City in a garage that morning, and that it was two Arizona gold miners who had the experience with the ammonium nitrate, and at least one of them was an FBI informant.
Do you know anything about that?
No, but I have heard that from Hammer, that the bomb was actually put together in a garage on the morning of the bombing, the real bomb.
Right, because it always seems strange, because there were two Ryder trucks.
In fact, I have a clip.
I'll finish up the interview with a couple of clips, including a, I believe, CBS News reporter talking about testimony at the trial that basically, best I can tell, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were two different Ryder trucks, one tailing the other, and who knows really who was in charge of that.
But I would like to add for your audience that we went to trial when my brother's murder was actually three appeals, and sent back and repealed and back and appealed, and eventually we were awarded about a million dollars against the Department of Justice.
Really, for the wrongful death of your brother?
No, we couldn't prove that because we didn't have a motive at the time.
And the FBI destroyed so much evidence.
I mean, the cell was cleaned.
My brother was undressed and his bloodstained clothing was thrown away.
The crime scene photographs disappear.
The video camera malfunctions.
The logbooks disappear.
The award was for the intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The award was for what the FBI had done to my family.
Harassment.
They tried to make two attempts to indict me.
But anyway, we have to...
But that doesn't preclude you from seeking remedy on any of these other issues, does it?
No.
And what we've done then is we've taken care of my brother's wife and my nephew, his son, paid our debts, and we have a quarter million dollars left over that we put up as a reward for the FBI agents who did this.
The website with the information on the reward is KMT Reward, and KMT is Kenneth Michael Trinidad, my brother's initials.
KMtreward.com.
And you even took out an ad in the Washington Times recently.
A quarter-page ad.
And did you get much response from that at all?
It's too early.
That was only last week.
This will be a long grind.
And we're in it.
It's been over 13 years now, and if it takes another 13 years...
Well, now, President-elect Obama has announced that his choice for attorney general is this man Eric Holder, a leftover from the Clinton administration, or I guess a rerun from the Clinton administration.
And you've sent me a couple of PDF files of some memos going back and forth from inside the Justice Department that have to do with your case and have to do with this new attorney general nominee, Eric Holder.
What's the story there?
Well, first I'd let your audience know that I actually voted for President Obama, so I'm not an Obama basher.
But Eric Holder was the deputy attorney general in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department.
Holder was assigned to cover up my brother's murder.
It was his job to diffuse any inquiry by Congress.
And he was running what they call the Trinidou Mission.
And these e-mails are back and forth at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, including Holder, talking about the Trinidou Mission, talking about it being as difficult to coordinate as an invasion of Normandy, using childish, silly-ass comments like Trinidous and Trinidones, but it clearly shows that Eric Holder ran the cover-up.
And he was in charge of what, getting the House Government Oversight Committee to not investigate?
Yes.
And do you have in the files his communications with Dan Burton, anything like that?
No.
That would have been done orally.
They're smart enough when they deal with senators and congressmen is to do it orally, not on paper.
Right.
So that neither one of them has a record that can be traced back to them.
Yeah, well, and you're getting to the heart, besides the murder of your brother and the murder of 169 others, the next biggest part of this in terms of scandal is the absolute silence on Capitol Hill.
And here was the biggest crime since the second wounded knee or something had gone down, and no hearings anywhere in any subcommittee, no FBI agent or ATF agent or anyone questioned about any of this in Congress, ever.
And that's true.
Bear in mind that this all came down, my brother's murder, before the re-election of Bill Clinton.
And had any of this gotten out, there's no way that President Clinton would have been re-elected.
Well, he in fact bragged that the Oklahoma City bombing had saved his presidency and caused the American people to rally around him shortly after his re-election in 1996.
Well, I'm afraid the outcome would have been different if they had known.
And I don't think that the President and Attorney General Reno intended this to happen.
They may not have even known about the operation until after the bomb went off.
But it's clear to me that once the bomb went off, then you full well what happened.
And they did everything they could to steer investigators away from the city and away from the people who did it.
Well, now, I mean, I guess it could just be a standard assumption that Reno must have been briefed about this from people below her.
Do you have any actual evidence that Bill Clinton knew the larger story, at least after the fact?
I don't, but it would be as much as if President Clinton was in control of the Justice Department and his administration.
I cannot believe that he would not have known.
Yeah, well, I agree with that.
I just want to be able to prove it myself.
No, I'm afraid the proof of that, there will be very little documentation to show that.
I'm sure they would have cleared that out.
And I'm surprised.
I think when these emails were given to me back in part of the lawsuit, probably 1997, 1998, it never occurred to them it would come back and bite them this way.
Right.
Well, now, over the years there have been different times where it seemed hopeful that the story was going to get a little bit larger press.
I know there were times where I was astounded to see just how much detail the AP would write about some of the Carroll Howe and the Elohim City aspects of the case, and yet it never seems to have broken through to mainstream consciousness.
Do you think that, well, even the coverage of your case could finally break through?
Scott, I have thought that so many times and so many times been disappointed.
And let me share with you a true story.
When the court ordered those blacked-out documents, the names blacked-out documents, 150, 155 pages, I can't remember the exact number, documents related to this fail-sting operation turned over to me.
I was contacted by CBS, ABC, all the major networks, and the BBC asking for copies.
I gave them all copies.
And I say, are you going to do the story?
And what I had been essentially told, or what I understood from what the reactions were, that this story was so ugly that no one wanted to go first.
And the only media outlet that did the story was the BBC.
They came over and spent three days with me.
They go to Oklahoma and spend a month filming.
They go back and run a one-hour special on primetime Sunday night, much like our 60 Minutes.
And that story has never aired in the United States.
Right, and in fact, in that story, is it Danny Deffenbaugh?
One of the FBI agents comes forward and says he wants a new grand jury.
And as I recall from that story, one of the agents in charge, Mr. Coulson of the investigation.
Danny Coulson.
I'm sorry, I always get those two confused.
Help me out.
And Coulson was told, at least he stated in that interview with the BBC, he was told not to go after the people at Ellingham City.
He said that was the first time in his 30-plus year career with the FBI he'd ever been told not to pursue suspects.
Wow, yeah, and this gets back to the must-have-been role of Bill Clinton.
The idea that on the two-year anniversary of Waco, that this would happen and that it would all be the FBI's fault again.
The kind of thing that I guess they were willing to break their spines bending over backwards to prevent.
I think that's probably true.
And while we don't have that paper trail to President Clinton, you do have that paper trail to Eric Holder and my brother's murder.
Right.
Well, do you have any friends in Congress whatsoever?
Does your own congressman express any interest in this case?
Well, my senator is Orrin Hatch.
Oh, great.
Orrin Hatch has publicly called this a murder, publicly promised my family hearings, and as you can see from the emails with Eric Holder, Holder shut him down.
The only one who tried to help was Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was my mother and father's congressman.
He's followed the FBI over 13 years on this.
He even tried to investigate it, issued subpoenas to the FBI to produce the documents and records, and they told him no.
Right.
I remember that.
It was announced publicly that he was going to hold some hearings, and then they never happened.
They never happened.
And, of course, he buys into all this.
You know, Terry Nichols was trained by Ramzi Youssef, who was really an Iraqi, and all this Judy Miller, Lori Milroy garbage, though.
Well, but I have seen nothing to indicate that this was anything other than homegrown terrorism.
And all I've seen are FBI documents, and all the FBI documents talk about this being done by Americans.
Not Middle Easterners, not Filipinos, not Muslim extremists from another country, but Americans.
Yeah, well, I guess we can put Lori Milroy and Judy Miller's reporting on the Oklahoma bombing right in the same category with the rest of their reporting about everything they've ever reported about, I suppose.
I'm not familiar with them.
Okay, well, they're basically Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby's favorite conspiracy theorists and spent the whole later half of the 1990s trying to pin the Oklahoma City bombing on Saddam Hussein by quite a few ridiculous degrees of assumption and conclusion leaping and speculation that turned out not to be true.
In fact, you might remember the story, sorry to take over your interview here, you might remember the story right after September 11th that James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, went to Britain to compare some fingerprints.
He was going to try to prove that Ramzi Youssef was really a secret agent of Saddam Hussein, and of course his mission failed, because that's not true.
I wasn't aware of that either.
I never started out to solve the Oklahoma City bombing.
I started out to determine why my brother was murdered and to get the men who did it.
And my quest has taken me to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Right.
Now, I know at Mother Jones Magazine, was it James Ridgway that I interviewed all about this?
Mr. Ridgway, yes.
And I know that they've put up a sidebar that has the PDF files and access to a great many of the court documents that you've gotten released.
Now, I also know that you continue to produce PDFs that arrive in my e-mail box about new and updated court documents.
Are those all being added at Mother Jones, or is there another place where people can go and find all of the documents you've had released?
No, there isn't.
And the reason I'm not that sophisticated to be able to maintain and run a site where that would happen, but the reason I send you the materials and send it to everyone else is I decided early on that for my own safety, it was best once I got something that was very incriminating and very hurtful to the FBI, to make sure that it was disseminated as widely as possible so that there would be nothing to be gained by doing harm to me.
Maybe it sounds like a coward, but I think it's just good sense that if I have the information and nobody else does, it makes it more likely that something bad will happen to me.
And as I said, they made two attempts to indict me.
I told you that Richard Lee Guthrie they found hanging in his cell.
Well, we had an eyewitness, a man named Alden Gillis Baker, and a month before the trial was to start, he was found hanging in his cell in federal custody.
There was another witness, a videographer who looked at the videotapes that were in the institution the night my brother was killed and said they had been erased.
And he did that at the request of the Department of Justice, investigated it and examined it.
They immediately come back, the Department of Justice does, tell him not to write a report, seize the camera and the tapes and take them away.
He calls me and tells me about it and then he dies before the trial starts.
My God, well, yeah, these fears are clearly justified and it just goes to show, maybe that's not ironclad or whatever, but especially all these men dying in prison, it goes to show what lengths they will go to keep the truth of this buried.
Although I wonder why at this point it doesn't seem like anybody else cares anyway.
I had a friend once tell me that America is a three-party system.
There are Democrats, there are Republicans, and then there's the third party, and that's the party that never leaves office, and that is the head of these various agencies, such as the FBI and AATF.
They have an interest in preserving and protecting their agencies, and they're always here.
Presidents come and presidents go, but they stay, and they're not going to release anything that harms them.
Can you imagine the harm it would do to the FBI and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms people if it came out that they had actually known about it and perhaps even helped perpetrate this attack?
Yeah, well, I guess really one of the reasons, obviously you have an extreme personal interest in this story, but one of the reasons I've taken such an interest in this story for, what, 13 years now, is it seems like the perfect story to beat everybody over the head with and show them that, listen, they can get away with covering up the biggest crime ever.
They can get away with not holding hearings.
They can get away with having Dan Rather repeat to us that, turns out there was no John Doe, too, so go back to your O.J.
Simpson trial, and they can get away with that.
Well, they have.
They have.
Well, so tell us exactly where you are in your court process now.
Where's your case?
What level of appeal?
What more are you trying to get out of them?
And what level of success do you expect to have in the short term?
Well, our civil trial is over.
As I said, they paid the judgment, and we used part of that money to put up the reward.
The depositions of Terry Nichols and David Paul Hammer, the FBI has appealed.
It will take several years to resolve that one.
Meanwhile, I have another lawsuit against the FBI and the CIA, and I know your audience must think I'm litigious as hell, but these are not shot-in-the-dark lawsuits.
These are rifle-shot suits at specific evidence, and from the CIA, I've been told that there is a report that says that this operation at Elohim City was run not only by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I don't know about that.
The FBI documents say Southern Poverty Law Center.
I've been told the CIA report says German government-FBI joint operation, and it makes sense because the German government was alarmed at the emergence of the neo-Nazi movement, which came back, which sprang to life in the United States, has since been exported back to Europe and apparently is thriving in Germany and France.
Well, that brings up the question of Andre Karl Strassmeier and his role in all this.
Do you think that he's one of these blacked-out informants who was involved in making the bomb?
I know that his name is in the documents.
In what context do you know exactly?
It says that McVeigh was calling at Elohim City asking for him, and at least one of the FBI documents says the purpose was to recruit help on carrying out the bombing, and that's what the FBI says.
The other document I've sued for, and it's not a document, it's a videotape, and I've seen reference in government manuals, I mean government reports, that the FBI apparently has a videotape taken off the Murrow building that shows the truck arriving in front of the building, and it says, and I quote, suspects exiting the truck and the detonation occurring three minutes and six seconds later.
Now, here you're the FBI, you're prosecuting McVeigh and Nichols.
You have a videotape of the actual bomb being delivered, the people who delivered it, and it going off.
What better evidence is there?
Yet that tape has never been shown in a trial.
No one's seen the tape except the FBI.
Well, the Los Angeles Times and NBC Channel 4 in Oklahoma City got to see it, right?
I don't know that.
It's my understanding that nobody's seen it, or at least nobody has it.
It wasn't used at the trials, which brings me back to the point you made about the documents they had found when McVeigh was soon to be executed and they had to delay the execution.
These 155 pages I showed to Terry Nichols' attorneys of Elohim City documents, and they had not seen them.
They weren't given to them.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry to keep you over time here, but I'm just going to ask you one more thing.
You said that J.D.
Cash had a partner that he was writing a book with, and I like to believe that this partner of his that he was writing this book with got all of J.D.
Cash's files, is still working on it, or has already published it or something, and that J.D.
Cash's work on this story has not been lost to history.
That person will be Roger Charles.
Roger Charles, that's the name.
I could never remember.
Thank you.
Roger and J.D. were great friends.
Roger is a very bright man.
It's my understanding that he's going to do that book.
Okay, yeah, I need to get in contact with him.
All right, well, listen, best of luck to you.
Please stay in touch, and we'll try to continue covering this story until you finally get all the answers that you demand, which you obviously deserve.
Thank you very much.
All right, everybody, and thank you again.
Everybody, that's Jesse Trinidou, brother of Kenny Trinidou, murdered by federal agents in custody.
I'm going to leave you here with a few soundbites, a few of my favorite soundbites from the Oklahoma bombing story and some dropkick Murphys to round out the week, and we'll be back here next Monday and every weekday, 11 to 1, Texas time, here on Chaos Radio in Austin for Anti-War Radio.
You can find all your archives at antiwar.com.
Based on a sketch of two men believed to be the bombers, one sketch showed a dead ringer for Timothy McVeigh, but John Doe No.
2, according to the FBI, turned out not to exist.
So authorities focused their attention on Timothy McVeigh, who was charged with the crime just two days after the bombing.
And the details are chilling.
They also focused 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 19 may someday be played before a jury.
Officials won't say who or what exactly is on the tape.
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 rider trucks from the Regent 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.
Now, you're looking at a computer recreation of the final movements of the rider truck according to the people who crossed its path at 5th and Harvey, moments before the explosion.
Tonight at 10, the witnesses will detail their memories of how they believe the suspects carried out the crime and made their getaway.
Now, all these accounts share a common and unsettling similarity.
The witnesses say they saw several accomplices, including the infamous John Doe No.
2.
ATF officials tell us the elusive John Doe is still part of this case, but will not comment any further.
However, they did tell us that there's a lot about this case we don't know yet, information you can't find in the indictments against Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier.
It was just hours after the bombing when the news channel first told you about the possibility that surveillance cameras may have captured the explosion and the killers on tape.
Our sources and sources for the LA Times describe what's actually on those tapes.
The information shows some huge surprises, the biggest that it may have been John Doe No.
2, not Timothy McVeigh who detonated the bomb.
Brad Edwards has the latest on the investigation in this exclusive news channel report.
Our new information comes directly from a source that has seen parts of those surveillance tapes.
It also comes from reports now in the Los Angeles Times, but perhaps the biggest surprise is contained in the news channel's own information.
Timothy McVeigh was not the last person to leave the Ryder truck.
In fact, another man sat inside the cab of the truck after McVeigh got out.
We believe that man is John Doe No.
2, a man who, for all we know, is still on the loose, leaving open a vital question.
Was it John Doe No.
2 who actually set off the bomb, not Timothy McVeigh, as we've all been led to believe?
News Channel 4 has for weeks been demanding copies of the surveillance tapes from the FBI.
The federal government so far is dragging its feet, but many people in the investigation have seen the tapes and now so has a source willing to describe to the news channel what the tapes show.
The L.A.
Times report shows there was a surveillance camera near the corner of 5th and Harvey and another near the corner of 5th and Robinson.
Federal investigators recreated the time sequence leading up to the bombing by matching the video and still photos from the surveillance cameras.
Since we can't show you the tape ourselves, we're reenacting what our source says he saw on those tapes.
As witnesses told the news channel before, the tapes show the Ryder truck parked in front of the Murrah building where we now know the blast went off.
As witnesses also told us, the tapes show two men sitting inside the Ryder truck.
A man strongly resembling Timothy McVeigh gets out of the driver's side, steps down.
He then appears to have dropped something on the step up into the truck.
He bends down and appears to pick something up off the step.
Then he turns and walks directly across 5th Street toward the Journal Record building.
All this time, John Doe No.
2 is still inside the Ryder truck's cab sitting on the passenger's side.
Time passes.
The surveillance tape is time-lapse photography.
Without knowing exactly the time interval between shots, our source can't be sure how long John Doe No.
2 sat in that cab.
What was he doing all that time?
Then the tape shows John Doe No.
2 getting out of the passenger's side of the Ryder truck.
Again, the tape shows that a bombing witness accurately described what happened next to News Channel 4.
I was standing in the building and I looked out the window and I seen the Ryder truck and I seen the man get out of the Ryder truck.
The tape shows John Doe No.
2 getting out, shutting the passenger's side door.
He steps toward the front of the truck and is momentarily out of the frame of the surveillance camera.
But shortly, he appears back in frame, walking toward the rear of the truck, still on the sidewalk in front of the Murrah building.
Again, he turns east toward the front of the truck, looking toward the street.
John Doe No.
2 then walks diagonally across this street toward the east, as if heading toward the YMCA or the intersection of 5th and Robinson.
He again leaves the frame of the camera.
Another camera shooting from another angle clearly shows the actual explosion that destroyed the Federal Building and killed 169 people.
So what does the mysterious John Doe No.
2 look like in the tapes?
The man who stayed inside the Ryder truck, possibly triggering the bomb?
Well, his features are obscured by a baseball cap and the portion of tape seen by our source.
The same kind of cap shown in the composite drawing first released of John Doe No.
2.
The cap was a sports cap, flame style.
The man himself was taller than the man resembling McVeigh and much thicker in build.
He appears to have a dark or olive complexion.
Our source saw only a few minutes of tape.
He didn't see all of the almost 20 minutes of surveillance tapes that reportedly were distributed to FBI agents around the country to help in their investigation.
But they do show enough to raise some crucial questions.
Who actually set off the bomb?
What was John Doe No.
2 doing in the cab of the truck after the McVeigh look-alike got out?
And how did John Doe No.
2 get away from the Murrah Building?
My understanding is there was a video of McVeigh getting out of the Ryder truck, jumping into this other pickup with John Doe No.
2.
Now, where's that video?
Are we ever going to get to see it?
I seen McVeigh 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 No.
2, there was a $2 million price put on his head and now they're saying there's no John Doe No.
2.
And our witnesses picked out a photo line-up.
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.
In the building.
And I looked out the window and I seen the Ryder truck and I seen the man get out of the Ryder truck.
She was just 10 feet away from the man depicted in this sketch when he stepped out of the Ryder truck.
He was all over the complexion and he was, he had black curly hair.
He was wearing a baseball cap but his curls were sticking out of his head.
He was short in the back but you could still see the curls in his hair.
He was not American.
He was white.
You can tell by his skin, his face, the way his face was.
We asked Dan Vogel if John Doe No.
2 is still part of the investigation.
Does he exist?
The answer, yes.
The FBI is still trying to locate and identify John Doe No.
2.
The man in our reports is Iraqi.
Today the FBI says they are not pursuing a Middle Eastern connection.
This doesn't mean it has been ruled out.
That could change tomorrow.
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.
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 the 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 ask them 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 and agents 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 the two-way radio.
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 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.
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.
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.
