>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.