Before the 9/11 Conspiracies, There Was the Oklahoma Bombing

By Matt Taibbi
Created Oct 26 2006 - 8:44am

Over a month after I first wrote a column slamming the 9/11 Truth movement
[1], I continue to get hate mail in massive quantities. A group of Truthers
even picketed my office, and I'm still picking food particles out of my
scarf after an incident in which the movement's house lunatic, a wild-eyed
German blogger named Nico Haupt, tried to goad me into slugging him in a
West Side diner.

"Go ahead, heet me, then I haf beeg story!" he roared, scream-spitting
half-digested detritus in my face.

Of course I didn't hit him -- nothing in the world is more ridiculous than
two writers fighting in a restaurant. If you're surprised that I would call
someone who spit food on my lap a fellow writer, don't be. As I subsequently
found out, Haupt is a literary juggernaut, one of the most voluble bloggers
on the planet earth. His internet entries read like a MySpace mixture of
MTV's Real World meets Che's Congo Diaries, only on meth and in a German
accent.

His 9/11 conspiracy rants are full of little tidbits from the peripatetic
revolutionary's hardscrabble life neatly gift-wrapped for his future
biographers, ranging from the personal ("My girlfriend denied to marry me...
I'm constantly broke.") to the heroic ("Maybe I'm scared that the Homeland
Security will arrest me as a 'terrorist'? Not at all."). Haupt also makes
sure to include regular doses of that other staple of pseudo-revolutionary
diaries, i.e. the defiant salutation to the secret agents who of course have
him under constant surveillance. "A personal note to the NSA, who's a
regular log-in guest on my sites," he writes. "You're still bastards for
me... Shame on you and go to hell!"

But my personal favorite was his theory about how the government's 9/11
conspirators tied up one particularly dangerous loose end:

I always was and always will be a big fan of Ed Asner's movies and TV
series, especially "rich man, poor man." Last week, i was a bit disappointed
that Asner "caved in" and basically made a u-turn, by writing that 9/11 was
based on negligence. I heard a different view a long while ago, even
personally from him on the phone. Someone else might speculate, why this has
happened now. Maybe someone threatened Asner with some infos of his past?

Now there's a subject someone should investigate. What does the government
have on Ed Asner? Photos of him shooting smack into Gavin McLeod's ankle?
The lost pilot of Gay Lou Grant? If anyone out there has any idea, please
don't hesitate to write.

Obviously, Nico Haupt does not represent the "mainstream" 9/11 Truth
Movement, whatever that is. Even in my own experience I know this to be
true. The colleagues of Haupt's from 911Truth.org [2] whom I met that day
were universally polite, respectful, and very sincere in their beliefs.
True, they had some slightly bent ideas (one woman insisted with a straight
face that the military was "behind all that Brad and Jennifer stuff"), but
as a group they were nice, earnest people.

Unfortunately, I get the sense that these same nice people have a tendency
to turn hostile, venomous and unrelentingly paranoid once they get logged
back into an email server, which is why most journalists I know won't go
near the 9/11 Truth issue more than once, if at all. On the one hand most
reporters don't think it's a serious enough issue to bother with twice, and
on the other hand nobody wants to deal with the torrent of abuse that comes
with trying -- it's like shoving your head into a beehive. "I'd rather be
poked in the eye with a sharp stick than write about that shit again," is
how one columnist put it to me.

I'm sure I'll reach that point soon. In the meantime, I feel a need to share
something I noticed while studying for a debate I'm supposedly having soon
with some of the movement leaders. I doubt it will convince anyone who
actually believes this stuff, but it's certainly worth pointing out that the
9/11 Truth movement is not only a cynical fiction, it's a recycled cynical
fiction.

Take the central "fact" of 9/11 Truth lore, the rhetorical anchor of the
entire movement -- the idea that the Twin Towers did not collapse as a
result of the gigantic plane/jet-fuel explosions we all saw on television,
but because of secondary explosions in other parts of the buildings that
were hidden from view. This idea was rocketing around the conspiracy world
in almost the exact same rhetorical format just six years before, after the
Oklahoma City Federal building bombing.

In that case, it was mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists who came up with
the idea that the McVeigh/Nichols fertilizer bomb could not possibly have
felled the Murrah building, and that the real cause of the building's
collapse was a much more powerful "second explosion" planned by the
government and executed using more powerful demolition explosives.

Here's the lede of a report from World Net Daily, which shortly thereafter
would become a major purveyor of 9/11 conspiracy theories, from May 18,
2001:

Multiple witnesses reported hearing more than one explosion the day the
Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, while other
explosives experts contend that the damage done to the building could not
have been caused by a single bomb placed outside in a truck.

Just like the subsequent 9/11 conspiracy theories, the Oklahoma "second
bomb" champions applied intense focus to the initial news reports right
after the explosions (ignoring reports published later, by which time
various discrepancies were cleared up), during which time numerous reports
surfaced indicating that second and third explosive devices had been found,
and that secondary explosions had been heard. And just like the 9/11
Truthers, the Oklahoma conspiracists quoted TV anchormen and women who
opined offhandedly that the bombings seemed to be the work of sophisticated
demolitions experts. Remember the Dan Rather clip used in Loose Change [3]
in which the anchorman says the collapse of WTC-7 is "reminiscent" of a
controlled demolition? Here's how that worked in OKC:

"This is the work of a sophisticated group, this is a very sophisticated
device," says one Oklahoma newscaster, in a much-circulated video of early
Oklahoma news broadcasts, "and it has to have been done by an explosives
expert."

Remember, this is just newspeople guessing on live TV; they're not
reporting. But in both conspiracy theories, these comments were presented as
though they're evidence of something. But what is a collapsing building
supposed to remind an anchorman of -- an Aboriginal dance ceremony? An
auction of polo ponies?

In 9/11 lore we are often told that the fact that people could be seen
standing in the craters caused by the planes proved that the fires could not
have been hot enough to compromise the steel structure. In Oklahoma City,
conspiracists claimed that the fact that the YMCA building across the street
from the Murrah building was unaffected proved that the truck bomb could not
have caused the damage. "Window washers weren't even knocked off their
scaffolding!" screamed one site.

Conspiracy theories are always full of this kind of "it's just common sense"
rhetoric, i.e. you can't throw an ice cube through the side door of a Buick,
so clearly the Titanic was not sunk by an iceberg... Similar appeals can be
found throughout 9/11 literature. One of my favorites comes from David Ray
Griffin, who in his book The New Pearl Harbor [4] posited that if the
falling top-section of the second tower had paused just a half-section each
time it collapsed a floor beneath it, it would have taken 40 to 47 seconds
to fall, and not the "near-freefall" 11 seconds or so that it actually took.

Which is true. It's also true that if the top-section had paused for three
seconds on each floor, it would have taken, not 11 seconds, but three
minutes to fall! And if it had paused five minutes on each floor, you could
have watched the whole first half of Ghost Dad on the fifteenth floor before
you died! And so on. Griffin never explains why he thinks the building
should have paused a half-second on each floor, but that's why he teaches
theology, not engineering.

Murrah conspiracists also used the inevitable scientific mumbo-jumbo genus
of argument. Here's a typical entry by J. Orlin Grabbe, a ubiquitous
conspiracy barnacle who can be found sticking to the cyber-hull of almost
every right-wing conspiracy theory from the last two decades, from Vince
Foster to Whitewater:

The concrete in the columns had a compressible yield strength of at least
(and probably higher than) 3,500 pounds per square inch. Since this value is
almost ten times the strength of the blast wave hitting the columns from the
truck bomb, the blast wave is insufficient to produce a wave of deformation
in the concrete (and thus to turn it back into its sand, gravel, and clay
components).

In these accounts structures like the Murrah building and the World Trade
Center suddenly become architectural Bismarcks, unsinkable engineering
wonders seemingly impervious to damage. Just as writers like Griffin went
out of their way to quote engineers who said "nowadays, they just don't
build them as tough as the World Trade Center," Oklahoma conspiracists
focused intently on the remarkably tough core of the federal building.
Here's an excerpt from a post-Murrah report by William F. Jasper, who not
surprisingly would surface years later as a leading voice of the relatively
small right-wing contingent of 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

Critics have argued compellingly that the blast wave from the ANFO truck
bomb was totally inadequate to cause the collapse of the massive,
steel-reinforced concrete columns of the federal building in Oklahoma
City...

One need hardly mention that "steel-reinforced" would a few years later
become one of the most-widely circulated phrases on the internet (third
place, after "rock hard penis" and "buy vicodin online"), in connection with
both the Pentagon and the WTC, which were variously supposed to be
impenetrable or unshakeable. "For that hole to have been caused by Flight
77," barks Loose Change about the Pentagon crash, "the Boeing would have had
to smash through nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete, traveling 310
feet." Says wanttoknow.info of WTC: "First Steel-Reinforced Skyscraper To
Ever Collapse in Fire!"

"Steel-reinforced" made great waves with the Murrah revisionists, but the
likes of Jasper and Grabbe were not quite reputable enough. For the
conspiracy theory to really take off, a true authority was needed to put his
stamp on the case. So along came Ted Gunderson, who carried the impressive
title of a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI. Gunderson's analysis
of Oklahoma City was a staple of conspiracy websites. Here's what he wrote
of the Murrah blast:

"A very high tech and top secret barometric bomb was the cause ... could
not have been built ... without the knowledge of research classified at the
very highest level of top secret by the U.S. government."

The Murrah conspiracy sites that referred to Gunderson's conclusions
generally failed to point out that Gunderson had devoted much of his
post-FBI career to the exposure of a plot called "The Finders," which he
alleged was a vast CIA enterprise to kidnap thousands of American children
for sex slavery in Satanic cults. Not surprisingly, Gunderson would
resurface after 9/11 with a DVD called 9/11 Failure: The True Colors of the
New F.B.I., which argued that the F.B.I. had foreknowledge of the attacks.

As if that weren't enough, Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists also pointed
to seismic evidence proving the existence of secondary explosions. Raise
your hands, kids, if you've seen anything like this graph before. It's a
chart put together by the Oklahoma Geological Survey purportedly "proving"
that there was more than one explosion in Oklahoma City that day:

Compare that to the seismic graph from the Columbia University's
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.J., frequently cited as
"proof" that there were secondary explosions in the Towers.

In both cases the seismologists who actually compiled the data rejected
conspiracy explanations, but the non-scientists peddling the conspiracy
theories overrode them, apparently knowing better how to interpret their
data.

Both Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists and 9/11 revisionists circulated
"eyewitness accounts" of strange men in suits confiscating evidence -- the
last link in the coverup. Regarding the Oklahoma City bombing, here's an
account from www.whatreallyhappened.com [5]:

The minister who married my wife and I was in OK City right after the
Murrah Building bomb(s) exploded, and he volunteered to help dig for
survivors. He told of three very odd occurrences. In the first, he was
required to show his ID six times before being allowed to help look for
survivors. In the second, he confirmed the stories told by others that men
in suits and ties were literally stepping over the wounded in their haste to
gather up files and certain other items in the debris.

Compare that to this account (complete with photo) from 9-1-1Research.com of
the cleanup at the Pentagon after 9/11:

Photographs taken immediately following the attack show a number of pieces
of apparent aircraft debris. One of the larger pieces was documented by a
photograph by passery-by Mark Faram. It shows the piece on the lawn
northwest of the heliport, a few hundred feet from the impact center,
suggesting it may have been moved before Faram arrived. Other photographs
show people, some in dress attire, moving pieces of debris.

How about the suspects, the patsies? Well, in both the OKC bombing and in
9/11, the supposed fall guys are reportedly seen on American military bases
before the attacks. Here's how one conspiracy site described the OKC
evidence:

Prior to the attack, a pilot flying over a small military base outside of
Oklahoma City photographed a Ryder Truck [6] similar, if not entirely
identical, to the truck used by Timothy McVeigh, inside the compound.

Here's how this trick surfaced in 9/11 lore, according to one site (and
repeated similarly in thousands of others):

Four of the hijackers trained at Pensacola Naval Air Station, a base that
trains many foreign nationals.

The Pensacola story continues to circulate today, even though it was long
ago established that these accounts of hijackers like Saeed Alghamdi living
on U.S. military bases resulted from the same error -- confusing the
hijackers with men with similar Arab names -- that initially led some
journalists to think that some of the 9/11 hijackers were still alive (more
on that nonsense in a future column -- I've almost finished chasing down the
last of those reports, work that people like the Loose Change documentarians
should have done long ago).

How about faked evidence? In the Murrah case, there was much suspicion about
one crucial discovery. "The truck axle found at the site is alleged to have
been moved or planted, or to have its vehicle identification number doctored
to implicate McVeigh," recounts the Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories.
Numerous Murrah conspiracy sites complain that the axle should have been
destroyed in the blast, that the government must have known about McVeigh in
advance and planted the truck-part at the scene (I love the idea of the
government blowing up a normal truck axle, carving McVeigh's VIN number on
it, surreptitiously leaving it at the scene -- probably dropping it through
a pantleg a la The Great Escape -- and then finding it themselves a few
hours later).

In 9/11 Truth, it's the fragment of hijacker Ziad Jarrah's passport that
too-mysteriously survives, making it famous as the "crash-proof passport"
which one source says strains "the credulity of the staunchest supporter of
the FBI's War on Terrorism." Popular Mechanics, in its 9/11 Truth debunking,
also recalled one site that listed all the evidence found implicating the
hijackers, including Mohammed Atta's suitcase and the rental car, and wrote
after each notation: "HOW CONVENIENT!"

How about the "the attacks were too sophisticated for such hicks to pull
off" argument? It, too was present in both OKC and 9/11. In the Oklahoma
City bombing we were told time and again that the bombing was beyond the
capabilities of a pair of dolts like Nichols and McVeigh, while the line
about "19 boxcutter-wielding Arabs led by a guy in a cave outwitting the
U.S. military" is one of the most commonly repeated lines of the 9/11
movement.

One could go on in this way forever. What good conspiracy theory, for
instance, would lack an allegation of some highly-placed insider who is
warned ahead of time to stay away from the crime scene? This one you can
find in almost any popular scandal dating back a hundred years. J.P. Morgan,
it is said, was warned off the Titanic. Remember those rumors about Richard
Nixon being warned off Korean Air Lines Flight 007? How about Lockerbie?
Conspiracy theorists back then insisted that state department employees were
"tipped off" in advance of the fateful crash.

In Oklahoma City, there were repeated whispers that government employees
were warned in advance to stay away from the Murrah building. Some
conspiracists were even more specific: "The first appointed trial judge in
the OKC case, Judge Wayne Alley, was removed after it was learned that he
was warned to stay away from the Murrah Federal Building in the days before
the bombing," wrote William F. Jasper, who of course would surface years
later with nearly identical allegations of government foreknowledge in 9/11.
As for insiders serendipitously warned away from the bomb site, there are
plenty of those stories in 9/11 lore, too -- I even got a letter from one
Truther pointing to the fact that Bush nephew Jim Pierce had a meeting in
the Towers rescheduled as evidence of foreknowledge. (The source saying
Pierce's meeting was rescheduled was Barbara Bush, which would mean that the
Bushes were intentionally informing the public about their dastardly efforts
to warn off their relatives).

That the motive for the bombings would be the same in both cases is no
surprise, I guess. OKC conspiracists believed the Murrah bombing was a
smokescreen for the "introduction of laws cracking down on 'patriot'
militias," while the usual 9/11 explanation, ironically, involves an excuse
to pass the Patriot Act. "Can you imagine the Patriot Act passing without
9/11 having taken place?" screams one site.

No surprise, again, because the motive of most all secret government
conspiracies is usually supposed to be some kind of aggrandizement of power.
But it's certainly an interesting coincidence that both the Murrah and the
WTC bombings were also imagined to have been committed to destroy actual
physical evidence of the plot inside the respective buildings.

"There has been a U.S. government (primarily BATF and FBI) cover-up
motivated by the desire to destroy evidence of a 'government sting gone
bad,'" writes Grabbe about the OKC bombings.

This dovetails nicely with the usual explanation for the "pulling" of WTC-7:
"WTC 7 was allowed to be taken down so it would destroy evidence of the
greatest crime in American history," insists one of many 9/11 Truth sites.

I think this last contention has to be the absolute funniest detail in all
9/11 lore -- the contention that the CIA or whoever destroyed a whole
building to get rid of the "evidence" of the 9/11 plot, which many alleged
was masterminded from the CIA offices in WTC-7. The same people who complain
endlessly that they can't get the evidence they need without subpoena power
imagine that the Central Intelligence Agency somehow needs to destroy its
own buildings in order to keep its "secret plans" (contained in a Mission
Impossible-style folder, no doubt!) from leaking to... the 9/11 Truth
Movement! Why would the CIA need to do that, if they don't even need a
shredder -- shit, not even a four-dollar Master Lock -- to keep their 9/11
secrets hidden now?

And what evidence could possibly exist that would be so unwieldy that it
would require the destruction of an entire building to be rid of? What, did
the CIA carve its 9/11 plans in a 7,000-pound slab of New Hampshire granite
in the WTC-7 basement? Were they doodled on the CIA bathroom stalls? Here I
sit, broken-hearted. Came to shit, but only... planned controlled demolition
of the World Trade Center! Seriously, what "evidence" had to go? And why
wouldn't they just remove it surreptitiously, rather than blowing up a
gazillion-dollar building on live international television, leaving the
rubble to the mercy of firemen and whoever else was down there?

The obvious answer to this entire essay, of course, is that both
conspiracies are absolutely true. The government committed both crimes, in
both cases leaving no evidence except that which can be deduced by
engineers, amateur seismological readings, mysterious forewarnings, pictures
of men in suits concealing evidence, rumors about patsies seen on military
bases, and, of course, the always-reliable Cui bono? If that's the case, one
really has to give it to the government -- those guys are good. They can't
keep sex scandals or fundraising corruption or classified Pentagon war
assessments or clandestine wiretap programs a secret, but they can commit
two humongous mass murders and get away with them, being arrogant and
devious enough to leave exactly the same maddeningly incomplete
circumstantial evidence behind for us to stew over in both cases. Almost
like they did it on purpose that way, to fuck with us.

Which is kind of funny, when you think about it. In fact, if they did pull
that off, they fucking deserve to get away with it. Anyone that clever must
know what they're doing.

p.s. Truthers are going to complain that I still haven't addressed the
science claims. That's coming next.

--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson