Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy theories

A variety of conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...

have been proposed regarding the Oklahoma City bombing
Oklahoma City bombing
The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19...

. These theories reject all or part of the official government report. Some of these theories focus on the possibility of additional, unindicted co-conspirators or additional explosives planted inside the Murrah Federal building

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was a United States Federal Government complex located at 200 N.W. 5th Street in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. The building was the target of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people, including 19 children...

. Other theories allege that government employees and officials, including US President Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

, knew of the impending bombing and intentionally failed to act on that knowledge. Government investigations have been opened at various times to look into the theories.

Oklahoma City Bombing

At 9:02 a.m. CST April 19, 1995, a Ryder

Ryder

Ryder System, Inc. , or Ryder, is an American-based provider of transportation and supply chain management products, and is especially known for its fleet of rental trucks. Ryder specializes in fleet management, supply chain management and dedicated contracted carriage. Ryder operates in North...

rental truck containing more than 6200 pounds (2,812.3 kg) of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane

Nitromethane

Nitromethane is an organic compound with the chemical formula . It is the simplest organic nitro compound. It is a slightly viscous, highly polar liquid commonly used as a solvent in a variety of industrial applications such as in extractions, as a reaction medium, and as a cleaning solvent...

, and diesel fuel mixture was detonated in front of the north side of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building

. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured.

Shortly after the explosion, Oklahoma State Trooper

Oklahoma Highway Patrol

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol is a major state law enforcement agency of the government of Oklahoma. It is a division of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol was legislatively created in 1937 due to the growing problem of motor vehicle accidents, the expansion of a...

Charlie Hanger stopped 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh

Timothy McVeigh

Timothy James McVeigh was a United States Army veteran and security guard who detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995...

for driving without a license plate, arresting him for that offense and for unlawfully carrying a weapon. Within days, McVeigh's old army friend Terry Nichols

Terry Nichols

Terry Lynn Nichols is a convicted bomber's accomplice. Prior to his incarceration, he held a variety of short-term jobs, working as a farmer, grain elevator manager, real estate salesman, ranch hand, and house husband. He met his future co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, during a brief stint in the...

was arrested and both men were charged with committing the bombing. Investigators determined that they were sympathizers of a militia

Militia (United States)

The role of militia, also known as military service and duty, in the United States is complex and has transformed over time.Spitzer, Robert J.: The Politics of Gun Control, Page 36. Chatham House Publishers, Inc., 1995. " The term militia can be used to describe any number of groups within the...

movement and that their motive

Motive (law)

A motive, in law, especially criminal law, is the cause that moves people to induce a certain action. Motive, in itself, is not an element of any given crime; however, the legal system typically allows motive to be proven in order to make plausible the accused's reasons for committing a crime, at...

was to retaliate against the government's handling of the Waco

Waco Siege

The Waco siege began on February 28, 1993, and ended violently 50 days later on April 19. The siege began when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located east-northeast of Waco,...

and Ruby Ridge

Ruby Ridge

Ruby Ridge was the site of a violent confrontation and siege in northern Idaho in 1992. It involved Randy Weaver, his family, Weaver's friend Kevin Harris, and agents of the United States Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation...

incidents (the bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the Waco incident). McVeigh was executed

Capital punishment

Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...

by lethal injection

Lethal injection

Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs for the express purpose of causing the immediate death of the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide...

on June 11, 2001 while Nichols was sentenced to life in prison

Life imprisonment

Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...

.

Although the indictment

Indictment

An indictment , in the common-law legal system, is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that maintain the concept of felonies, the serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that lack the concept of felonies often use that of an indictable offence—an...

against McVeigh and Nichols alleged that they conspired with "others unknown to the grand jury", prosecutors, and later McVeigh himself, portrayed the bombing as solely the work of McVeigh and Nichols. In this scenario, the two obtained fertilizer and other explosive materials over a period of months, and then assembled the bomb in Kansas the day prior to its detonation. After assembly, McVeigh alone drove the truck to Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and fled in a getaway car he had parked in the area days prior.

Additional conspirators

Several witnesses reported seeing a second person around the time of the bombing; investigators would later call him "John Doe 2". In 1997, the FBI arrested Michael Brescia, a member of Aryan Republican Army who resembled an artist's rendering of John Doe 2 based on the eyewitness accounts. However, they later released him, reporting that their investigation had indicated he was not involved with the bombing. One reporter for The Washington Post reflected on the fact that a John Doe 2 has never been found: "Maybe he'll (John Doe 2) be captured and convicted someday. If not, he'll remain eternally at large, the one who got away, the mystery man at the center of countless conspiracy theories. It's possible that he never lived. It's likely that he'll never die."

There are several theories that McVeigh and Nichols had a possible foreign connection or coconspirators. This was due to the fact that Terry Nichols traveled through the Philippines while terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef was one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot. In 1995, he was arrested at a guest house in Islamabad, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and United States Diplomatic Security Service, then extradited to the...

of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

1993 World Trade Center bombing

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower , bringing...

was planning his Project Bojinka plot in Manila Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef

also placed the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing inside a rented Ryder

Ryder

van, the same rental company used by McVeigh, indicating a possible foreign link to Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

. Other theories link McVeigh with Islamic terrorists, the Japanese government and German neo-Nazis.

There has also been speculation that an unmatched leg found at the bombing site may have belonged to an unidentified, additional bomber. It was claimed that this bomber was either in the building when the bombing occurred, or had previously been murdered, and McVeigh had left his body in the back of the Ryder truck to hide the body in the explosion.

Additional explosives

One theory focuses on a cover-up of the existence of additional explosives planted within the Murrah building. The theory focuses on the local news channels reporting the existence of a second and third bomb within the first few hours of the explosion. Conspiracy theorists say that there are several discrepancies, such as an inconsistency between the observed destruction and the bomb used by McVeigh. Theorists point to nearby seismographs that recorded two tremors from the bombing, believing it to indicate two bombs had been used. Experts disputed this, stating that the first tremor was a result of the bomb, while the second was due to the collapse of the building. Many critics of the official explanation point to a blast effects study published in 1997, utilizing test results from the Eglin Air Force Base. It concluded that "it is impossible to ascribe the damage that occurred on April 19, 1995 to a single truck bomb containing 4,800 lbs. of ANFO" so that the damage to the Murrah building was "not the result of the truck bomb itself, but rather due to other factors such as locally placed charges within the building itself". Some experts ascribe the unusually large blast pattern to a thermobaric weapon, utilizing highly flammable metal particles (such as aluminium

Aluminium

Aluminium or aluminum is a silvery white member of the boron group of chemical elements. It has the symbol Al, and its atomic number is 13. It is not soluble in water under normal circumstances....

) mixed with a liquid high explosive (such as nitromethane

Nitromethane

). When ignited in a two-stage process, the device creates a super-high heat and pressure blast capable of flattening buildings.

US federal government involvement

Another theory alleged that President Bill Clinton had either known about the bombing in advance or had approved the bombing. It is also believed that the bombing was done by the government to frame the militia movement or enact antiterrorism legislation while using McVeigh as a scapegoat. Still other theories claim that McVeigh conspired with the US CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

in plotting the bombing.

Investigations

In 2006, US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher

Dana Rohrabacher

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for , and previously the 45th and 42nd, serving since 1989. He is a member of the Republican Party...

, (Republican, California), said that the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the U.S. House Committee on International Relations, which he chaired, would investigate whether the Oklahoma City bombers had assistance from foreign sources. On December 28, 2006, when asked about fueling conspiracy theories with his questions and criticism, Rohrabacher told CNN: "There's nothing wrong with adding to a conspiracy theory when there might be a conspiracy, in fact." In March 2007, Danny Coulson, who served as deputy assistant director of FBI at the time of attacks, voiced his concerns and called for reopening of investigation.

On September 28, 2009, Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, released security tapes that he obtained from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act that show the Murrah building before and after the blast from four security cameras. The tapes are blank at points before 9:02 am, the time of detonation. Trentadue said that the government's explanation for the missing footage is that the tape was being replaced at the time. Said Trentadue, "Four cameras in four different locations going blank at the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence." Trentadue became interested in the case when his brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue

Kenneth Michael Trentadue

Kenneth Michael Trentadue was an Oklahoma man who died while in federal custody during the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing.-Early life:...

, died in federal custody during what Trentadue believes was an interrogation because Kenneth was mistaken for a possible conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing.

External links

The Opinions of General Partin and Other Bomb Experts
The Oklahoma City Bombing at What Really Happened
The Oklahoma City Bombing: A Morass of Unanswered Questions
Coverup in Oklahoma - A documentary that explores credible witness testimony that was videotaped during the day of the bombing as well as evidence that contradicts the government's official story surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing.
- 9/11 Practice
Voices of Oklahoma interview with Stephen Jones. First person interview conducted with Stephen Jones, Public Defender for Timothy McVeigh and author of Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Bombing Case and Conspiracy on January 27, 2010. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma oral history project.

Photographs

grahamphoto5ca.jpg - Taken shortly after the blast.
Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6, Photo 7, Photo 8, Photo 9, and Photo 10 - Series of photos from Oklahoma State University showing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building before and during its demolition.

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