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 Thanks Atrios
4/20/05 08:16:32
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Via Eschaton, the latest bit of madness from the imbecilic John Gibson:
Ramzi Yousef, an Iraqi agent that was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his associates were allegedly talking to Terry Nichols in 1994 about how to build a fertilizer bomb.
So now the question: So if there is all this evidence, why has the U.S. government ignored it?
Well, for one thing, I submit George W. Bush didn’t ignore it after September 11, 2001. He realized then that Iraq was behind a lot of the attacks on the U.S. and it was time for it to stop.
But before September 11th, he did ignore it and so did the Clinton administration.
If McVeigh were just the grunt — mixing the chemicals, driving the truck, setting the timer, and running off — guilty though he might be, if the bombing was a plot by a foreign government, his lawyer would have had a chance at the sentencing hearing to argue that others were more responsible and McVeigh should not be executed.
The fear that the McVeigh execution might have been an error — and a mistaken execution — could put the federal death penalty itself in jeopardy. The fear of losing the federal death penalty could explain why the U.S. government does not appear to be anxious to act on evidence it has that Iraq may have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.
What the fuck is Gibson talking about? God forbid that this plot was solely the work of home-grown, right wing gun nuts, militia weirdos and "Turner Diaries" loving crazies (a.k.a. Fox’s core audience). More importantly, however, is Fox "News" Channel really suggesting that the U.S. government would cover up a foreign attack on American soil that left 168 people dead?
Dc Media Girl Permalink
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4 Comments>>
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| 1. | Odd that the right wing seems to want to ignore the fact that their own kind spawn numerous terror groups and lone nut terrorists.
People on the right like to ignore the names James Kopp, Matthew Hale, Eric Robert Rudolph, Terry Nichols, Tim McVeigh, etc.
Why? Because they’d alienate their base if they cracked down on homegrown terror. Also, I’m convinced at this point that nutcases like Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay support the actions of these individuals and their organizations, deep in their heart of hearts. DeLay’s language of late seems to back this up.
Why are these people still in power???
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| | Comment by Adam Bicsanszky--April 20, 2005 @ 17:28 pm
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| 2. | I’m familiar with the wingnut conspiracy theories about Ramzi Yousef.
Moreover, Mylroie’s broader contention that the first Trade Center attack was an Iraqi plot is, to put it mildly, not shared by the intelligence and law-enforcement officials familiar with the subsequent investigation. Vince Cannistraro, who headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center in the early 1990s, told me, "My view is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq and trying to link Saddam to global terrorism. Years of strenuous effort to prove the case have been unavailing." Ken Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst, scarcely to be described as "soft" on Saddam--his book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative argument for toppling the dictator--dismissed Mylroie’s theories to me: "The NSC [National Security Council] had the intelligence community look very hard at the allegations that the Iraqis were behind the 1993 Trade Center attack. Finding those links would have been very beneficial to the U.S. government at the time, but the intelligence community said that there were no such links."
Mary Jo White, the no-nonsense U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted both the Trade Center case and the al Qaeda bombers behind the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, told me that there was no evidence to support Mylroie’s claims: "We investigated the Trade Center attack thoroughly, and other than the evidence that Ramzi Yousef traveled on a phony Iraqi passport, that was the only connection to Iraq." Neil Herman, the F.B.I. official who headed the Trade Center probe, explained that following the attacks, one of the lower-level conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin, did flee New York to live with a family member in Baghdad: "The one glaring connection that can’t be overlooked is Yasin. We pursued that on every level, traced him to a relative and a location, and we made overtures to get him back." However, Herman says that Yasin’s presence in Baghdad does not mean Iraq sponsored the attack: "We looked at that rather extensively. There were no ties to the Iraqi government." In sum, by the mid-’90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack.
Some people just can’t give up the ghost.
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| | Comment by Michael Hussey--April 20, 2005 @ 17:48 pm
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| 3. | Sounds like Gibson’s having those black helicopter visions again. Must have fallen off his thorazine prescription.
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| | Comment by bling--April 20, 2005 @ 18:49 pm
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| 4. | The lengths to which the right will go to try to make connections between terrorism in the U.S. and the war in Iraq is mind boggling. This particular column reminds me of the conversations I’ve had with schizophrenics who were off their meds (I used to work in mental health). Their thought-connections, like Gibson’s, were so loose you could hear them rattling.
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| | Comment by Eric--April 21, 2005 @ 08:48 am
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