We've heard plenty about intelligence failures and manipulations in the run-up to the Iraq war. We've also heard plenty about the missed warnings and bureaucratic self-justifications surrounding 9/11. But we've heard a whole lot less about the screw-ups and cover-ups surrounding an earlier American calamity, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
That may be about to change.
According to the FBI, the bombing was the brainchild of Timothy McVeigh - now executed - and his only significant accomplice was Terry Nichols - now serving a life sentence. But a slew of official documents now surfacing thanks to the dogged efforts of a handful of campaigners, including one particularly tenacious lawyer from Salt Lake City, tell a very different story. The FBI was in fact hot on the trial of many more suspected accomplices, and has spent the past 11 years working very hard to cover up the extent of their possible involvement.
A federal judge in Salt Lake City is considering whether to release unredacted versions of more than 100 pages of FBI documents establishing links between McVeigh and a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang long suspected of having financed the bombing. Another federal judge, also in Salt Lake City, ordered the FBI just today to turn over another 55 pages of unredacted documents related to the bombing.
The lid may be about to be blown off the official version of what happened in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. For the full story, see this piece just posted at TruthDig.